I’ve reviewed the video of the incident again and again as a learning tool for what to avoid. It is indeed dramatic, with Ky slamming into Steve repeatedly and with the trainer holding on to the orca’s rostrum as if his life depended on it. But one important set of factors cannot be gleaned from the incident itself.
For the shows, the rocket-hop had consistently been the last behavior Ky was asked to do before he was sent back to the back pools to be penned up with Kayla, a dominant female. Ky was terrified of Kayla, who had been raking him up quite badly. From past association, Ky recognized that the rocket-hop meant that he was about to end up with Kayla again. And so he refused to perform it and caused an incident that, at the very least, kept him from immediately joining Kayla. That was, among several other factors, a big underlying cause for his behavior. If hormones had been involved, Ky would have been in a hurry to rejoin Kayla in order to breed.
How do you explain that to the public? Ladies and gentlemen, Ky was terrified by a female whale because in SeaWorld we keep our whales so enclosed that they cannot swim away to protect themselves from other whales who might hurt them with their teeth.
The internal consequences, however, belied SeaWorld’s light-hearted attempt to use hormones to explain the matter to the media. After this incident, SeaWorld changed corporate protocol: nets were placed at the ready at the front show pool of every park. Furthermore, it transformed Ky’s life forever. To be consistent with the story of a teen whale with raging hormones, he was pulled from waterwork—something he might actually have needed to keep him stimulated because he really was on the cusp of sexual maturity.
Sometimes, when something went wrong, the whale’s role in the incident was never mentioned in press releases. One day, my friend Wendy was performing an ultrasound on Orkid in the San Diego park. During the ultrasound, Wendy had Orkid line up on her side and keep the entire length of her body at the surface, straight down to her tail flukes, so that the vets could reach her lateral peduncle area, near her genital area, to place the equipment on her skin for the transabdominal ultrasound. Standing inside the pool area on a ledge covered with a few inches of water, Wendy maintained control of Orkid at the whale’s head. At one point, Wendy could feel Orkid becoming “tight” and uncomfortable with what was happening. She quickly told the vets to stop the procedure and step behind the wall, placing themselves safely behind a barrier. Orkid then sat head up in front of Wendy, who delivered an LRS before asking Orkid for a behavior that would have her slide away from Wendy toward another part of the pool. Instead of sliding away from Wendy, however, Orkid struck Wendy with a closed mouth in the middle of her chest, knocking her backward and off her feet. She fell behind the wall, landing on her face on the concrete below the elevated pool ledge. She was briefly unconscious. SeaWorld paramedics called 911—which, of course, attracted the media. Internally, the official incident report would describe what happened as clearly aggressive behavior by Orkid. However, in his statement to the press, Mike Scarpuzzi simply said, “The trainer lost her balance, fell over the side of the pool wall and made contact on the ground with her head.” No mention was made of Orkid or the aggression.
SeaWorld would spin a similar story around a painful incident that involved me.
I was swimming with Corky during a show and she was excited about performing. Once she has confidence in the trainer she’s working with, Corky, all 8,200 pounds of her, only knows high gear. We would actually have to focus on getting her to slow down on a lot of waterwork behaviors so that we could handle her power. At one point in the segment, I was doing a fast foot-push with my left foot on her rostrum, at the surface of the water along the perimeter of the pool. As we approached the stage, I pushed off just as she launched me forward at the same time. Timing and the angle of launch were critical if I was to slide safely and dramatically across the stage. If I pushed off too soon or if I didn’t push off before she launched me, it would spell disaster. What complicated the act this time was that I was supposed to tackle another trainer as I slid across the stage. Sometimes we would do this and play it off to the audience as an accident even though it was scripted. It always got huge laughs and applause.
This time, though, the other trainer saw that Corky was going exceptionally fast along the perimeter. He decided he didn’t want to be at the end of what was likely to be a truly hard tackle after Corky launched me forward. He backed out of position; but I was already launched. I slid across the concrete stage with such momentum—perhaps 25 to 30 miles per hour—that my head hit the bottom of the shallow area of the pool on re-entry in the slide-over area. I knew I wasn’t going to have an ordinary bump on the head. It sounded bad. Corky was also worried. She began to echolocate on me and became vocal. I asked her for a hand target—to make sure she came to me and my hand. My control spotter, Petey, was still playing the behavior off to the public as an amusing accident. I got his attention and asked if I was bleeding. He looked shocked as he repeatedly told me to get off stage. When SeaWorld issued their public relations statement, it read, “A trainer was injured today when he accidentally dived into a shallow area of the pool.” They made me sound stupid. Again, no mention of a whale. I certainly didn’t throw myself across the stage at 30 miles an hour.
How much were trainers paid? In 2001, as a senior trainer at San Diego SeaWorld with eight years of experience, I was making $15.45 an hour swimming with the most dangerous whales in the corporation, including Kasatka. That would be about $30,000 a year or, once you adjust for inflation, about $40,000 in 2014 dollars. The adulation of the crowd is one thing but there was nothing glamorous about an orca trainer’s pay. When I was rehired by SeaWorld in 2008 after France, trainer pay, even for those of us who swam with the whales, was very low.
I had the advantage of years of experience at SeaWorld—and a willingness to make a lot of noise about things like salary. I can only imagine what other trainers less headstrong than I was could wrangle out of the corporation.
Even the company’s moments of apparent generosity were tainted. After Petey’s serious encounter with Kasatka in November 2006, August Busch, whose family owned SeaWorld at the time, met with the San Diego trainers. According to friends who were there, one young trainer had the courage to speak up and told him that she had to work two jobs to make enough to cover her living expenses—and do the SeaWorld job she loved. He appeared surprised and asked her how much she made. When she told him, he said he was shocked, adding that he had no idea how underpaid trainers were. He vowed to change it. The result, in early 2007, was a $5 an hour increase for trainers at Shamu Stadium who were approved for waterwork with the whales—a kind of hazard allowance. There was no distinction for experience. Brand-new waterwork trainers who worked with the least dangerous animals and performed only very basic routines only in training sessions were getting the same increase as the most experienced trainers swimming with the most dangerous whales and performing all the difficult acts during shows.
After the deaths of Alexis and Dawn in 2009 and 2010, SeaWorld took the $5 an hour increase away. Since waterwork was now proscribed by OSHA, the company explained, trainers weren’t swimming with the whales anymore and shouldn’t be paid the extra (at first known as “hazard pay,” then, for legal reasons, changed to a “premium”). They seemed to overlook the fact that Dawn was not performing waterwork when she was grabbed, pulled in and dismembered. Meanwhile, the trainers were still expected to drill the whales’ teeth and carry out other close-up duties with the orcas. It isn’t as if “dry” work is that much less risky. Any time you are over the pool wall with a killer whale, you are at risk of being grabbed and killed.
There was enough of a backlash to that decision that a year and half later, SeaWorld gave that $5 an hour back to us—but only to trainers who had waterwork approval as of February 1, 2011. They had the audacity to call it a raise.
There were so many other things wrong with the way SeaWorld approached
compensation. It may seem petty to complain about money when the quality of life of the whales is so dire and appalling. But compensation reflects the way a corporation values its employees and its assets. And if the company didn’t care enough for their trainers to pay them well, SeaWorld was unlikely to have moral qualms about exploiting their whales.
I’ve seen how SeaWorld treated trainers who fell out of the company’s favor. One case that still rankles me goes back to the beginnings of my career. When I started out in California, one of the trainers I idolized was Sharon Veitz. She was a pioneer, having succeeded at the male-dominated stadium by being able to do every waterwork behavior with the whales that the best of the male trainers could do. (There are more women now even though there are vestiges of macho behavior in some stadiums.) She had the level of expertise and rank to work with and swim with all the whales, even the most dangerous.
With so much experience came waterwork aggression—and Sharon was a victim of several. In one incident, during a night show, Kasatka grabbed Sharon by the knee to yank her underwater and then, as Sharon surfaced, the orca took her by the foot and pulled her down a second time before swimming off to be with her daughter Takara, who was in a back pool with the gate closed. Sharon could barely pull herself out of the pool because of the injury. During another orca performance, Sharon’s knee was severely damaged, with multiple torn ligaments and a fracture requiring months of rehab. As was her right, she hired a workman’s comp lawyer—which did not sit well with management when she returned to duty at Shamu Stadium.
Then she had an incident with Ulises. The huge male orca had just rolled her off a perimeter ride and refused to do the follow-through we had taught all whales for that scenario—to swim away from the trainer. Instead, he turned and faced Sharon in the water and ignored the emergency recall tone from the spotter on the stage. Sharon sensed that her window of opportunity to get out was shrinking and decided to climb out of the pool while she could. She was able to hook first her right then her left leg over the glass to allow her to fall over the six-foot-high glass in the front show pool onto the pathway and to safety. Ulises then began to vocalize loudly. Sharon was right to move quickly. Ulises had become aggressive.
Management, however, criticized Sharon’s decision. In a memo posted for all trainers to read and initial to show that they had seen it, Mike Scarpuzzi announced her move to Dolphin Stadium: “I feel Sharon has now developed an unhealthy fear of the killer whales. This fear is now affecting her behavioral judgment.” The memo continued condescendingly: “Sharon must re-develop her confidence, re-develop her waterwork training skills, re-develop her behavioral attention to details and her behavioral judgments with marine mammals . . . It is also best for our waterwork program with killer whales to have confident trainers who have a respectful fear of the whales and have shown that they are making consistent correct behavioral judgments.”
I thought it was a disgraceful way to treat an elite trainer with 11 years of experience who had made a timely decision to get out of the way of a potentially devastating situation. Sharon filed a disability and defamation lawsuit in 1997. It was settled out of court; and, as part of the agreement, she is not allowed to speak of the case.
Dolphin Stadium had its share of accidents as well—and the manner they were handled was the same. My friend Stacy Connery was an orca trainer with 15 years’ experience who, after experiencing aggressions and suffering the wear and tear of Shamu Stadium, decided to move voluntarily to work with the smaller mammals. In 2000, she tried to help a dolphin who had swum into a net. In the process of being disentangled from the net, the dolphin swam into Stacy. Stacy was enmeshed for several minutes underwater as the dolphin spun her and the net around and around while it tried to break free. It took more than eight men to pull the net with Stacy and the dolphin out of the pool. She was not breathing when she was pulled from the pool but soon began to do so on her own. She also suffered a spiral fracture to her arm. She hired a workman’s comp lawyer—which led SeaWorld to order us not to speak to her or allow her into the back areas of show stadiums or areas where the animals were kept. She sued and settled. The corporation again got what it probably wanted most: a gag order in which she agreed not to talk about the case. In the 14 years since the accident, she has had a total of eight surgeries.
I was constantly battling management over policies involving the working conditions of trainers and the living conditions of the whales. The animosity increased toward the end of my career because I spent those years in SeaWorld’s San Antonio facility—where I had begun my life as a trainer but which I had little love for. Neither did the corporation, it seems. Of the three stadiums, Texas received the least financial support and the fewest resources. It did not subscribe to San Diego’s philosophies of carefully plotted and all-encompassing psychological conditioning. At the same time, the whales in Texas were out of shape because management had chosen not to expand their repertoire of behaviors or to vary their sessions with enough exercise to keep them stimulated and fit. The conservative mind-set also encouraged the trainers in Texas to consult among themselves rather than reach out to their colleagues in California and Florida if problems arose. Having come from San Diego and having seen what the California trainers were capable of doing, I thought it was a waste that San Antonio did not take advantage of the experience of SeaWorld’s California and Florida trainers. I found the lack of imagination in Texas deeply frustrating.
Sometimes, the lack of forethought in San Antonio resulted in ludicrous and potentially dangerous situations. In the immediate wake of Alexis’ death, a senior trainer chose to continue waterwork with Keet—the male orca who was performing the synchronized double stand-on spy-hop with Takara when she accidentally hit me—even though Keet had just emerged from an episode in which another whale had aggressively slammed into his gate. Social tension among whales should always be seen as a likely precursor of aggression against trainers. I went over to the supervisor and asked her to get the trainer out of the water—which she did. I thought that choosing to go forward was foolhardy.
Water visibility was extremely poor in Texas. More than once, I lost my place in the pool as the whales and I performed the most spectacular and dangerous waterwork behaviors. I wasn’t the only one to whom this happened. I should have refused to do waterwork until the problem was identified and fixed. I pressed on for the love of the whales. But I was increasingly unhappy with the attitude of the people I worked with and with the company that encouraged them to go on that way.
Physically, I was taking a beating from the job.
On the day that Corky launched me across the stage and I lacerated my head, Petey sent me off stage, ended the segment early and immediately joined me to stop the bleeding. Once we got enough blood off my face and out of my eyes, I could see better and managed to walk off, out of the view of the public. I had lacerated my face to the skull above my eye. It took a total of 17 internal and external stitches to close the wound. SeaWorld’s doctor in San Diego did an incredible job. I doubt any plastic surgeon could have done better; and I refused the option for one. He put me back together more than once, having treated me years earlier for thoracic strain. I credit him with extending my killer whale training career. If not, it could well have been over by my late 20s.
But the battering would continue. I wrote earlier in this book about how, during a summer 2009 night show, Keet slammed into the middle of my back, on my spine, with his rostrum. My back was not fractured but the doctors did see the damage it had taken from years of being hit by orcas—and also by the heavy lifting and running involved in the job. Getting hit off a hydro by a 7,500-pound, sexually mature male killer whale made me more conservative during performances in the following weeks.
But about two weeks later, Keet hit me again on a hydro reentry. This time, he struck me on the side of my head right in the temple area. I was nearly knocked unconscious. I remember feeling so peaceful I did
n’t think it was important to surface. But even in my daze, I managed to extend a hand target to Keet and he came to me. With my hand on him, I slowly floated to the surface. Doug Acton, a very experienced trainer I respected, happened to be watching my underwater run. He said he saw my body violently jerk forward as Keet’s rostrum hit my head. Doug said that if he didn’t see me move underwater a second later than I did, he was ready to signal the control spotter to sound the emergency alarms. The entire left side of my head where Keet’s rostrum struck me was so painful that I couldn’t tolerate touch for nearly two weeks. Although senior management—all the way up to the curatorial level—was aware of the incident, I was never sent to the doctor.
By the time I was 34, the injuries were beginning to overwhelm me. I had to deal with pain that I didn’t have in my 20s. I tried to adjust on my own, by changing the way I approached performing. I refined my waterwork with experience but also to adapt, adjust and compensate for the pain. By 2009, I had injured my knee jumping off a killer whale onto the concrete while performing a surf ride in a show. The knee just never really got better. I sought out multiple medical specialists, including the top orthopedic surgeons in the country. All the while, I never stopped working or swimming with the whales. I just dealt with the pain.
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish Page 20