For killer whales in captivity, change often provokes aggressive behavior as they try to assimilate what is happening around them. The French whales were used to working with their trainers stationed at the sidelines of the pool. I was joining another American, Lindsay Rubincam, a former SeaWorld trainer at Texas and Florida whom I admired, to work in the water. But by the time I arrived in May 2001, there was already evidence that the French assignment was going to be difficult. While in the water, Lindsay had been struck so hard by the female whale Shouka that she was hospitalized with internal bleeding. Before that, Val, Freya’s son, had swum directly at her while thrashing with his mouth open, a well-recognized precursor for aggression. There was a lot of work to be done to make sure the whales learned the new rules being imposed on them.
In terms of behaviorist psychology, this is called a context shift. We had one advantage: the best time for a context shift was when the whales are discovering a new environment. The Marineland stadium in Antibes was newly built (the whales and the trainers who cared for them had been in another, much smaller facility for years). Lindsay and I knew the orcas were going to test the boundaries. The whales always did when novelty was introduced in SeaWorld; the orcas in France would not be any different. It was going to be tough and dangerous. Lindsay and I expected episodes of aggression from the Antibes orcas both in and out of the water.
When I first called Lindsay about working in France, she was so enthusiastic she ran the request up the chain of command in Antibes and got them interested in hiring me right away. Like me, she had started in SeaWorld of Texas but had left for Florida before I got there. We had met a couple of times in Texas when she visited. She had been trying to get the French program off the ground by herself for a year. She had a staff of French trainers, who didn’t have the experience required to get into the water with the whales. The French had a slightly mystical philosophy about training orcas, describing the trainer as a “whale healer.” Lindsay and I were going to have to work hard to get them on the behavioral science program.
In France I would be swimming with killer whales during the day in a beautiful new stadium right on the Cote d’Azur and living in an apartment with views of the Mediterranean from my living room and bedroom windows. I was just 27 and earning double my salary as a senior trainer at SeaWorld. I even fell in love with a famous French singer of Algerian descent, with whom I would have the most significant relationship of my life.
As beautiful as France was, the Antibes facility had severe shortcomings. The pools had no chilling system. In the winter, the water temperature was fine, but in the summer, the warmth made the whales lethargic. The heat also increased the bacteria levels—and the chances for infection. There were no scales to weigh the whales. Lindsay, the trainers and I had to eyeball the whales to guess whether or not they were putting on or losing too much weight.
At SeaWorld, we would have problems with eye burns from an excessive amount of chlorine in the pools. The chlorine solution used was many times stronger than household bleach. The water at Shamu Stadium was also treated with two types of caustic substances: ozone, meant to control bacteria that might contaminate the pool but which has a destructive effect on all living organisms and tissue, including lungs and eyes; and aluminum sulfate, which helps make sure the water is clear but is extremely acidic and, in the wrong proportions, can burn skin and corrode metal. The trainers who swam with the whales would on occasion get eye burns serious enough to require medical attention. Sometimes, they were so severe we could not open our eyes at all. It could take anywhere from two days to two weeks for our eyes to heal sufficiently to allow us back into the water with the whales. Management of the Animal Training Department as well as the Water Quality Department would explain that the whales had foot-pushed us underwater through a “pocket of chlorine” that had not yet dispersed or been properly diluted.
Water quality, however, was far worse in France. One trainer’s eyes were so badly burned by excessive chlorine that he had to wear patches over them for more than a week or risk blindness if he exposed them to light. One morning, we came in to work to find sheets of skin peeling off the whales. The system had malfunctioned and had sent chlorine in a continuous stream into the pools throughout the night. Even the mucus membrane that protected their eyes couldn’t stand the intensity of the chemical burn. Their eyes were shut in pain and when we fed them, we had to touch the side of their faces with fish so they would know it was time to eat. The biggest shortcoming of the French marine park, however, was the veterinary staff. SeaWorld had a team of veterinarians in each park to safeguard their multimillion-dollar whales. Marineland in Antibes had only one vet and he wasn’t on site or even in France. He lived in the United Kingdom.
As for the French trainers, they looked at Lindsay and me with a mixture of gratitude and envy. They were happy to learn about waterwork with orcas. But they realized that it wasn’t going to happen right away, that for the first two years it would be just Lindsay and I in the water with the whales. That was hard on some of them because they had known these whales longer than us, in spite of the devotion to the whales that we all shared. Lindsay and I approached the entire process carefully and diplomatically. As soon as we got the whales to accept the new rules of engagement and they began to stabilize in terms of behavior, we slowly introduced the most experienced French trainers to waterwork. There was always a level of animosity underlying the French trainers’ relationship with us, in spite of the devotion to the whales that we all shared. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Lindsay and I found images of people jumping from the World Trade Center pinned to the walls in the trainer offices. The French trainers had annotated them as if they were judging a diving competition. Lindsay and I were furious but we could never find out which individual trainers did this. No one admitted responsibility. Despite this, I formed great friendships with many beautiful and genuinely wonderful French people, who had nothing to do with Marineland. I miss them and France to this day.
To deal with the challenges in France, it helped that Lindsay and I got along on an almost intuitive level. We were able to read each other’s minds with just a look. Of course, we had our disagreements over how to approach the whales behaviorally. But one of the things I always appreciated about Lindsay was that she and I could have a huge argument over behavioral protocols, and then ten minutes later, if I needed something, she’d be there for me. She never held grudges.
I remember one day when I was resisting adopting whale behavior protocols that weren’t identical to the California system and Lindsay was insisting on doing things the way Florida did. She finally declared, “It doesn’t have to be the California system or the Florida system, this can be our system.” That kind of camaraderie helped both of us make the gigantic and dangerous enterprise in France work.
I began this book with my frightening encounter with Freya—Val’s mother. I like to think of her as the Kasatka of Antibes. Like Kasatka, she was captured as a young whale off the coast of Iceland and must remember what life in the open Atlantic Ocean was like. Getting her to work with the new waterwork program was one of the biggest challenges for me and Lindsay.
Lindsay and I would together have a scary incident with Freya during a waterwork session. I was working with Freya and Lindsay was working with Val. We were side by side, getting the orcas used to rides along the perimeter in tandem. After we both dived into the pool and had the whales pick us up straddled on their backs, Freya began to displace her son subtly in the water. She did not allow him to keep up with her as they moved through the pool. Not willing to overtake his mother, Val was no longer nose-to-nose with her, falling back a little bit at a time as she asserted her dominance. As the session went on, she began to clearly displace him. Straddling her, I could feel the muscles tighten on her back. She was upset. It was the beginning of a potential aggressive incident.
I began to calculate how to get out
of the situation safely. But I was at a disadvantage. Lindsay and Val were on the side closest to the perimeter while Freya and I were closer to the middle of the pool. It would get scarier. Freya began to pull away not just from Val but from the perimeter altogether. I watched helplessly as I got farther and farther from Lindsay and Val. I screamed to Lindsay to get out as fast as she could since I was afraid that Freya might go after Val at any moment. In the past, I’d also seen the dominant whale in a double waterwork scenario go after the other whale’s trainer.
Once Freya got me to the middle of the pool she rolled me off her back and then positioned herself in front of me as she emitted upset vocals. I placed both my hands on her rostrum and around her jaws—encouraging her to keep her mouth closed—as I worked to calm her down. At the same time, I saw that Lindsay had been able to step off Val’s back to safety in a far corner of the perimeter. Immediately, Freya’s vocalizations stopped and she became calm. I bridged her for calming down. She followed all signals and brought me to stage safely with a pec-push. She performed it perfectly. She had chosen not to go over to the dark side.
Eventually, Freya would learn to work with Val in shows. And I developed a strong relationship with her and, like all the dominant females I have worked with, she has a special place in my heart.
Freya was a challenge and the most dangerous of the orcas we worked with in France. But there were incidents of aggression with other whales. One such incident occurred with Shouka, who was born in captivity to Sharkane, a whale captured near Iceland. Once during a show, I dived into the water and gave Shouka the signal to swim beneath me to pick me up for a straddle ride around the perimeter of the pool. I turned around to look for her only to see her dorsal fin submerge underwater. She then drilled me in the middle of my back, the force of which pushed me under and smashed me up against the acrylic wall in front of the audience. She swam off, vanishing into the water, where visibility was poor because of inadequate filtration.
I knew I had to figure out where she was before trying to swim out, if only to make certain she would not come at me again. I couldn’t see her. I called out to the trainers on stage and around the pool, asking where she was. But no one could see her.
Even though I was along the perimeter of the pool, I didn’t dare move an arm toward the bar without knowing where she was. Petey’s minimal skulling motion, as I mentioned earlier, had infuriated Kasatka because it indicated he was possibly trying to get out of the pool before she would allow him to exit. I put my face in the water again. I looked straight down—and there she was, lying in wait at the bottom of the pool approximately 30 feet below with her mouth open, looking right at me.
It was the look all experienced trainers recognize and dread: a whale at the bottom of the pool that has decided to become predator with you as the orca’s prey.
The crucial thing was to see it coming. As soon as I caught her positioning herself against me that way, I pointed at her to let her know that I had seen her. Then what was almost a quantum shift took place: predation was superseded by cooperation, as if the intelligence of the target had somehow affected the intention of the attacker.
Shouka responded by closing her mouth, rising calmly toward me at the surface after I signaled for her to come to me. I blew my whistle to bridge her, to let her know she had done well to shut her jaws and cooperate. At my signal, I put a foot on each of her pectoral flippers and she pushed me toward the stage. When I got there, I gave her all that was left of the food, about 15 pounds of fish. She followed my signals for the rest of the session. But I have no doubt that she was stalking me in the murk. If I had made a move to get out of the water, she would have come at me. There is no beating a killer whale’s speed, no matter how close you think you are to safety.
On another occasion, Shouka was giving me a straddle pick-up when she became extremely vocal, her back muscles tightening. It was in the middle of a ride along the perimeter of the pool and so I stood up on her back in an attempt to jump off and onto land and safety inches away. But just as I was thinking of doing so—with only a split second to make the decision—she pulled away from the edge, giving me no chance to escape at all. Jumping into the water was not an option given how fast she could swim. If I had jumped and not succeeded in getting out of the pool, she would have grabbed me and pulled me underwater. So I went down to my knees on her back as she swam to the middle of the pool, all the time emitting short, tense staccato vocals, the muscles of her back so tense that her body was jerking. The moment she had me in the middle of the pool, she rolled over and dumped me off her back. At first, she slowly swam away from me. Then she turned back fast. With her mouth open, she swam right at me. I stuck my legs out straight underwater—a signal for her to give me a pec-push toward the stage. It was a gamble. Would she follow the signal?
She chose to give me the pec-push. I put one hand on her upper rostrum and one on her lower jaw and asked her to close her mouth. She did. I bridged her with whistles every time she did the right thing, motivating her to continue to make good decisions. Once she brought me to the stage and I stepped off, I immediately fed her.
Shouka was a tough whale to settle down. She was about eight years old at the time and weighed an estimated 4,000 pounds—small for a killer whale her age because she had not been properly fed when she was young and her growth was stunted. She had been the first orca born in the Antibes Marineland, before the expansion that led to the hiring of Lindsay and me. The French did not really know how to manage the weight of their orcas and how much to feed them, especially their first calf.
I had another encounter with Shouka that could have been catastrophic. A few trainers and I were in the front show pool, at the stage, feeding all seven Antibes whales together. As I crouched forward to feed Shouka, I looked to my right to see how the other whales and their trainers were doing, just to make sure that there was no evidence of the whales fighting or trying to displace each other. I also wanted to make sure the French team was making the right behavioral decisions with the orcas.
Shouka and I were on stage left, at the end of the line of whales. Just as I looked to my right, she rose out of the pool and grabbed my wetsuit where there was a fraction of slack at my chest. It was an amazing feat: to spot the only place where a body-tight wetsuit had a weakness and then to pinch it precisely with her enormous mouth in an attempt to pull me into the pool. I instinctively shifted my weight backwards, falling into a squat, just in time to pop the slack out of her mouth. If she had pulled me into the pool with the other whales, I probably wouldn’t have made it out. At that point waterwork was still a novelty to all of the whales. And among them was Kim, an adult male orca that Lindsay and I knew posed too much of a risk for us—or any trainer—to work with in the water. Given how opportunistic killer whales can be, the odds would not have been in my favor.
Even whales you love will have their moments. I adored Val. But he would rebel too, if in a more subtle way than Shouka or his mother, Freya. At one point, for about two weeks, Val thought it novel to pull me under the surface of the pool by my socks. It sounds funny but there is really nothing amusing about being dragged against your will into the depths by an orca.
It would happen when I was performing a foot-push on him or sometimes as we were face-to-face at the surface. He would sink and grab at my feet. With incredible precision, he would work my sock away from my toes until he had enough slack to grab it in his mouth. Once he had enough slack off the toe, he would grab it and jerk the sock, pulling me underwater. Once I was underwater, he would try to get the sock completely off. That would have been disastrous for me: a large part of the sock ran up my calf, beneath the suit, extending up to my knee. I would have drowned as he ripped my wetsuit apart. I tried to time my breaths so that every time he yanked me under I would have just taken one. But he never kept me under for too long. He always allowed me to redirect him after he experimented with my sock. This happened sever
al times until I taught him that this was not among the approved list of behaviors for orcas in Antibes. I was always grateful that he cared enough to work up the slack from the toes—instead of just grabbing my entire foot. After two weeks, I trained him out of his obsession with this novel behavior and he lost interest in my socks.
In the end, the work in France would prove too risky—not so much because of the whales but because the company that owned the marine park did next to nothing to improve conditions that I said were dangerous, including the murkiness of the water, which made it difficult to make out precursors to orca aggression. My contract was to be renewed annually and I signed on for a second year on the promise that the water quality would improve. When it didn’t, I decided that I would not put up with the risk any longer and returned to the United States in 2003.
I was still in France when I met Dawn Brancheau. She was already one of the stars of SeaWorld Orlando. But this was September 2001, and she had traveled to Antibes to visit Lindsay, one of her best friends. Lindsay had to work and I had time off so Dawn and I spent a day together in the old village in Antibes where I lived in a one-bedroom flat at 25 Rue Aubernon, just 75 steps from the beach. The village was lovely, with cobblestone streets and houses—such as the place I lived—that were hundreds of years old. We were on the sea wall looking out at the Mediterranean on September 11 when I got a cell phone call from my mother. She said, “You will never believe what is happening in the United States.” America was under attack. Dawn’s husband, Scott, had been planning to join her in France but couldn’t because all flights were grounded. Dawn spent nearly two weeks in France, with a lot of time at Marineland.
Although I was not a part of her close circle, Dawn was pals with two of my good friends, Lindsay and Wendy. And through them, we kept track of each other’s careers. She had a warm heart and was a great trainer, among the best at SeaWorld. She would, however, become a symbol of the marine park at its worst—and an example of what happens when a whale refuses to come back from the dark side.
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish Page 17