Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish

by John Hargrove

  Alien abduction has been part of contemporary mythology for more than half a century. Some people believe it has happened. I used to sit around with fellow orca trainers and laugh about it. And then I’d riff and say, “Well, it has happened. Except we are the aliens and the whales are the abductees.”

  So you are an orca in SeaWorld captivity. As a highly intelligent, extremely emotional being, you immediately know who will keep you alive, if not make you happy. The trainers feed you—and they feed you more when you do what they want. But they also try to control your every action—from sleeping to playing to resting to what you do with the other whales who share the pools with you. You like some trainers more than others. You actually enjoy some of the acts they ask you to perform. You learn to recognize the signs they use; to a large degree, you can tell what they want you to do. But the humans watch your every move. And you know why. They are afraid of you. But they are the only ones who can keep you alive. You want to escape but have no way to do so. Beyond the walls of your pool is an expanse of air and concrete. And, again and again, sometimes seven times a day, screaming people.

  So you have to behave. Until you can’t. Perhaps the other whales are daring you to do something. Perhaps the memories you have accumulated as you have learned to survive are no longer viable. Your emotions shift. You move toward the dark side. And then, suddenly, an opportunity comes for revenge. Will you take it?

  Sometimes, even the most well-behaved of captive orcas have their moments when you feel they may be on the verge of crossing over to their dark side. One time, I had just finished swimming with Corky during a show in San Diego. She is one of the more easygoing of the orcas, despite her size and love of speed. She’s seen all kinds of trainers—good and mediocre—and knows how to deal with them. After I swam with Corky for the entire show, Petey asked me and another trainer, Amy, to hang out in one of the small areas of about waist- to chest-high water on either side of the main stage of the front show pool. Called a slide-over, it’s where the orcas slide up during shows to interact with trainers. They can even slip from the front to the back pools via the slide-over. Petey wanted to bring Corky and Splash into the front show pool after we had sent them to the back following the show. As part of the psychological conditioning that constantly went on in the California park, Petey wanted these two orcas to swim past us without turning around, desensitizing them to our presence so they wouldn’t be distracted from the desired behavior—swimming past us to meet up with Petey at stage. The uninitiated members of the public—at this point, the stadium was clearing out—may not even have suspected training was going on but everything in San Diego was part of a regimen, of getting the whales used to doing tasks with precision, being focused and not being distracted by extraneous stimuli.

  No sooner had Petey set control with Corky and Splash—getting them to chin up at stage—than Corky split off and swam at high speed toward the spot where Amy and I were standing, waist deep in water in the slide-over area. We didn’t have a chance to take a few steps back to get out of the way before she had slid up between us. She turned to her left and scooped me into the pool. I was no match for her 8,200 pounds. Using her rostrum, she began to gently push into my chest while vocalizing. I would have been alarmed but her vocals were not fast and tight. She did not seem to be upset. Still, she continued to push me along the perimeter of the front show pool. Corky ignored multiple hand slaps and an emergency recall tone by Petey. Finally, she responded to one of his hand slaps. She dropped away from my chest and dived straight down and underneath me as she swam back to the stage area. Once Petey felt he had tight control over her, he told me to swim out of the pool.

  What was going through Corky’s brain? She wasn’t upset enough to appear aggressive and yet what she was doing was out of her norm and definitely unacceptable. It is alarming any time a killer whale departs from the control of one trainer to pull another into the water—and then ignores emergency recalls and hand slaps. Management decided not to write up what had happened as a corporate incident report—a record of an aggressive act—because Corky did not seem agitated enough. But to this day, I wonder. She would later be part of a few more incidents, clearly closer to aggression, including turning on my friend Wendy who was in scuba gear in the pool in full view of Dine with Shamu guests watching from the underwater viewing area. Corky pushed Wendy with such speed and force she couldn’t turn to her left or right, fearful that the orca might crush her against the artificial rock formations in the pool. Again, this was not considered aggressive enough to be written up as a corporate incident report.

  It may seem that SeaWorld set the bar quite high for incidents to be classified as acts of aggression. But when OSHA, the federal agency that looks after worker safety, was investigating the company in the wake of Dawn Brancheau’s 2010 death, the company had to turn over 100 incident reports from 1988 to 2009, a dozen of which recorded injuries. If OSHA had gone back just a year more, to 1987—before the marine parks were sold by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich to a division of Anheuser-Busch—it might have seen three more major incidents in which trainers sued the company. On June 15, 1987, Joanne Webber had her neck broken after a 6,000-pound killer whale hit her during a difficult behavior called a “human hurdle” in which the orca has to perform a bow over a trainer. The force thrust Webber to the bottom of the 40-foot pool. There appeared to be more concern over SeaWorld property than over getting her immediate care. According to the lawsuit Webber would file, she was made to walk 50 feet to an enclosure and was told to remove her wetsuit so that emergency workers wouldn’t have to cut through it and damage it. Because she was unable to comply, SeaWorld personnel allegedly forcibly took the suit off Webber. According to the Los Angeles Times’ account, Webber was then told to dress in civilian clothes and walk 200 yards to the ambulance, rather than have the emergency vehicle come to the stadium. As a result, she lost 50 percent of the side-to-side motion of her neck, her lawyer said in the Los Angeles Times. Her injuries reportedly included fractures to the first cervical vertebrae and contusions to the skull and scalp, with bruises to her left arm and shoulder. Three months earlier, Jonathan Smith was hospitalized for nine days with internal bleeding and organ lacerations after being involved in a double waterwork aggression with the orcas Keanu and Kandu, who were nicknamed the “twisted sisters” and who took turns dragging him along the bottom of the pool in their jaws. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, he suffered internal bleeding and a six-inch cut to his liver. His lawsuit, the paper said, alleged that SeaWorld did not properly inform him of the “dangerous propensities of killer whales.” On November 21 of the same year, John Silick suffered internal injuries and a crushed pelvis after he was slammed by an adult male killer whale that had breached the water, landing on Silick while he was riding another whale. The three trainers settled out of court; and they all agreed to gag orders. Nevertheless, Webber’s lawsuit, as cited in the Los Angeles Times, had already raised the issue of SeaWorld whitewashing the dangers posed by captive orcas. It alleged that the whales were “likely to attack and injure human beings.”

  In any case, under cross-examination during the OSHA case, Chuck Tompkins, SeaWorld’s corporate vice president of Animal Training overseeing all parks, was asked about several events between 1988 and 2009 that did not appear to be part of the official incident reports turned over to the government. As the judge noted in his decision, “SeaWorld failed to document several known events of undesirable behavior by killer whales when working with trainers.” The judge quoted Tompkins as saying “We missed a few” to account for the lapses.

  No one really knows what goes on in an orca’s brain. But magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of a killer whale brain, extracted from a recently dead specimen in the wild, may provide us with clues about how their thoughts and emotions are wired. Dr. Lori Marino, a professor of cetacean neuroscience at Emory University who studied the orca MRI, points out that the killer whale neocortex is
more convoluted—that is, wrinkled—than the human brain. “The neocortex wrinkles because that is the way volume increases in a skull of fixed size,” she explains, “like wrinkling up a piece of paper to fit in a small space.” This increases the actual surface area of that part of the brain, meaning that there are more neurons and brain cells there. The neocortex is where problem solving and information processing occur. It is also linked to the limbic system—which in the human brain governs long-term memory, emotions, sense of smell and how you make decisions—by way of a distinctive paralimbic cortex. “All mammal brains have paralimbic systems,” says Dr. Marino, “however, the orca paralimbic region appears more developed and defined than the same region in other mammals, including primates.” The orca’s insular cortex too, she says, “is very wrinkled.” That indicates that the brain devotes “a lot of tissue to that area.” “All of these highly elaborated cortical and neocortical regions point to a very sophisticated brain.” Since those parts of the brain are “involved in consciousness and awareness in humans and probably all mammals then we can infer that this part of the brain is, at least, part of the foundation for a sophisticated level of self and social awareness in orcas.”

  That may help explain the hypersocial nature of the killer whales and how they can cooperate and coordinate so well in the wild, with the ability to plot out hunting and feeding strategies to snare schools of fish or seals or larger whales. It may also help explain how they organize themselves into families and pods and can recognize members of the same clan. It could well allow them to store all sorts of rules: whom to associate with, whom to mate with and at what point of their life cycles these events take place. Dr. Marino says that the killer whale’s highly elaborated neocortex “allows the orca to make conscious choices about who to eat and who to fight with. It’s not just a ‘flip the switch’ reflex.” It is how, she says, two different orca populations can share resources in the same area with a minimum of conflict. “It is by choice. And you need a big neocortex to control your instincts like that.”

  The idea that the orca neocortex gives it the capacity to make conscious choices is both poignant and sobering. In combination with the orca’s elaborated paralimbic system, the neocortex may be evidence of how integrated emotions and consciousness are for the killer whale—and how emotions dominate the orca’s life. Emotional pain for whales—because it is so much part of their social existence—might then be of a higher magnitude than for human beings. It makes it almost possible to apply the word “mourning” to the fact that male orcas can often waste away and perish after the death of their mothers—the dominant centers of their social existence. I was told by trainers in Florida that Tilikum exhibited what they described as mourning behavior after he killed Dawn.

  Conscious choice, says Marino, also means that aggressions in captivity are not predatory instincts “gone haywire.” The attacks on trainers or fighting between orcas in a marine park are deliberate acts of aggression—a matter of choice. If an orca goes after a trainer, it is not playing, says Marino. “Given that the neocortex is intimately linked with the limbic system,” she says, they probably “got angry enough” to act out. It is a conscious act, she explains, not a reflexive one.

  The aggressions that I and other trainers have had to deal with rarely occur among the wild adult orca populations from which SeaWorld’s killer whales trace their descent. From what Dr. Rose and other researchers observed, only young whales among the resident populations in the Pacific Northwest appear to rake each other in the wild. These young whales don’t know any better and have not yet been fully instructed in the way of orca behavior in the family unit or pod.

  Dr. Marino says she would love to be able to compare the brains of captive orcas to those of wild orcas. “But,” she says, SeaWorld and other marine parks “despite saying they are supportive of research, would never turn over a deceased dolphin or whale for that kind of examination.” She suspects that the differences would likely be seen in the areas of the brain that respond to chronic stress, such as the hippocampus. Like all mammals, killer whales’ Hippocampal-Pituitary axis helps them to regulate stress. Chronic stress can lead to an impairment of that axis in humans and other mammals, including whales. “When this happens, the hippocampus structure in the brain starts to shrink, affecting memory and emotional regulation,” says Marino. “The immune system starts to go.” For the orcas of SeaWorld, the sources of stress are everywhere—from boredom to the constant training for shows for which the whales have to perform behaviors precisely right to be properly rewarded. Many of SeaWorld’s whales had elevated and chronic stress levels reflected in their blood work; many were medicated for ulcers.

  The whales we train at SeaWorld and other marine parks do not have the familial structure to help them learn the rules of their original pods and clans and families. When the dominant females in the park resort to raking to impose their will on the rest of the pack, the comparison shouldn’t be to orca family units in the wild. In this case, they are acting more like prisoners thrown into the same cell, with all the dysfunctions that come with human incarceration—and with violence as the main way of establishing authority. The conditions in SeaWorld are vastly different from those the whales experience in freedom; and yet their brains are engineered the same way as their cousins in the wild and must wrap—or warp—around the realities of captive existence. That extends to rationalizing or socializing the true yet unnatural dominant presences in their lives—the trainers. I’ve always wondered how the orcas socialize us into the way they look at the world from their cramped, watery prisons. If we can anthropomorphize them, how do we look when they orca-ize us?

  Could it be that, in the process of trying to integrate trainers into their already dysfunctional social hierarchy, orcas in captivity may be more dangerous to humans than orcas in the wild, who have no reason to pursue people as prey? Howard Garrett of the Orca Network believes that may be true. “I think,” he says, “they do tend to try to socialize the humans to fit into their structures, which inevitably results in tensions because the humans have to maintain their control and dominance, which are totally foreign to the whales unless coming from their grandmothers or other matriarchs.”

  Sometimes, you get a sixth sense of that shift in emotion. I remember one particular night with the whale I love most, Takara. I had been swimming with her during the last show on a Saturday, and once it was over, I helped move her back out to the front show pool where the plan was to have her sleep alone. After the gate was secured, I signaled to my supervisor Steve Aibel that I was going to get back into the water with her to rub her down, which would reinforce and reward her for coming back out to the front pool. As I eased into the water with her, she was calm and relaxed but something seemed off. I had an ominous feeling. I looked to Steve and the expression on his face—and the nod of his head—let me know he was sensing exactly what I was thinking: “Get out while you can.” Steve and I both felt the energy shift and believed that Takara was beginning to show signs she might prevent me from leaving the pool. She knew the last show of the evening was over. There would be fewer trainers around to assist in a rescue. I did not give her a chance to act on what I feared was on her mind.

  When I left the United States for France to train orcas that had never worked with trainers in the water, Mike Scarpuzzi, the vice president of zoological operations at SeaWorld in California, warned me “to go slow with those whales. Those whales are a death waiting to happen.” If anyone knew about how quickly orcas can turn, Scarp would. I considered him a brilliant behavioral strategist and respected his work tremendously. I took every behavioral word and theory that came out of his mouth as gospel.

  He was not happy to see me leave SeaWorld. No one in San Diego was. But I needed to do it for the challenge. Few people at SeaWorld knew that, when I flew out to the south of France for five days in February 2001, it was to interview for the position of Supervisor of Killer Whale Training with M
arineland Antibes. But word got out as soon as I returned. The community of trainers is small and news travels fast.

  The French wanted me as quickly as they could get my work visa ready. But I told them I couldn’t start until after the summer for two important reasons. One: I was still loyal to SeaWorld and did not want to leave them short-staffed at Shamu Stadium during peak season. Two: I wanted to see the birth of Kasatka’s calf, the first progeny of the artificial insemination program and whose inception I attended as a trainer at Kasatka’s side.

  I thought management would appreciate that. But Scarpuzzi was angry. He told me, “Since you’ve decided to take all the years we’ve spent developing you to another park, we’ve decided to move you to Dolphin Stadium for the summer before you leave.” But I stood my ground. I told him it didn’t make sense. Why would he send me to a stadium where I did not know the animals? There was no one to replace me at Shamu.

  Of course, I realize now that I was making his very point. Trainers with my level of experience are rare and I would be difficult to replace. But I was so angry I told the French I was going to join them immediately. Scarpuzzi would eventually relent and say I could stay at Shamu for the summer. But it was too late. I had already notified France so I gave my two weeks’ notice anyway.

  Scarpuzzi nevertheless gave me a glowing exit review. He told me he believed that I had done a great job with the whales in California; he also said that because of my success with Kasatka, he believed I was ready for the massive responsibility of training the orcas in Antibes. And that’s when he told me to be cautious. I was going to get firsthand experience in how whales learn to deal with the intrusion of trainers into their waters for the first time ever.