Then, in October 2009, Takara hit me after I lost my footing on a stand-on spy hop. I’ve described how tender she was in helping to bring me out of the pool. But I had been battered again.
My control spotter had seen everything and, when I emerged from the pool, he kept asking if I needed medical help. I tried to dust myself off but I knew I was hurt and the pain was increasingly intense. My body was tightening up. At SeaWorld’s Health Services and then at a hospital emergency room I was subjected to a series of tests—X-rays and a CT scan—to make sure I wasn’t bleeding internally. For about a month, it was impossible to get comfortable or even lie down without intense pain. Everything hurt—walking, breathing, bending. Lying down to rest was excruciating. Because of that, I was prescribed high-dose painkillers so that I could actually stay prone to fall asleep.
After about a month, my ribs healed. It was the worst pain I had ever had to deal with in my career. But even after it had subsided, I didn’t stop taking the painkillers. I had unfortunately discovered the relief they provided. I had been miserable in Texas for a long time. I felt trapped: I wanted to leave Texas but couldn’t abandon Takara. I learned to use the painkillers as a way to cope with and mask my unhappiness. It got to the point where I would look forward to the moment I could leave work and go home to take the drugs. It made Texas bearable.
I knew that the painkillers were a trap. There were truly times when I needed them to manage the pain: they had been prescribed as part of my pain management program for my chronic knee injury. But I also took them for nonmedical reasons. I had always thought addiction involved cocaine, meth, heroin, marijuana or alcohol. I had known people in my life, friends and relatives, who were caught up with those substances. I never thought it could happen with painkillers—and to me.
One day, when I ran out of pills, I decided I didn’t want to take the drugs anymore and chose not to get the prescription refilled. Within 24 hours I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable, then in pain, and then physically sick. It was withdrawal. I had become addicted to painkillers and the drugs wouldn’t let me go.
I would try to stop. I was foolish enough to think I could do it cold turkey, that it was just a matter of strength or toughness. Friends told me the same thing: look at everything you’ve done, they would say, you’re stronger than this addiction. But they didn’t know—and I didn’t know—what opiates do to your body. You can’t imagine the level of pain and sickness your body goes through as you withdraw from what is essentially heroin. The pain and the sickness got so bad that I quickly filled the prescription to stop the ferocious sickness and pain. It became a vicious cycle and completely overtook me.
Every time I went through withdrawal, pain shot straight to the bone. Every nerve in my body was so sensitive that even a breeze from an air conditioner or fan would be intolerable. I’d turn them off, even if it were 100 degrees outside. The most luxurious sheets felt like sandpaper against my skin. I couldn’t hold down food or water.
I attempted to outsmart the addiction by trying different methods of weaning myself off the painkillers. In the end, after failing multiple times to beat my addiction, I sought professional help from doctors who specialized in painkiller opiate addiction. The injuries I suffered at SeaWorld made painkillers necessary: that makes my situation complicated and I am always at a higher risk for relapse. But I have excellent doctors and I follow strict guidelines that allow me to manage my pain and prevent relapse.
The litany of physical breakdown goes on. Since beginning at SeaWorld in my 20s and after performing with the whales at the bottom of the pool, I—like other trainers—would sometimes emerge with nosebleeds. If you didn’t drain your sinuses, you also risked infection because of all the water trapped in there. Due to this ritual of clogging and draining, our sinuses would hemorrhage or rupture. As the salt water drained from the sinus cavities, so would chunks of bloody tissue. We were young and laughed it off. But long term damage was being done.
I had accumulated scar tissue in all four compartments of my sinuses from years of being in deep water, with the pressure compacting the nasal cavities as I ascended and descended in the pools, sometimes at immense speeds while attached to an orca. The bones in that part of my skull had thickened from the years of exposure to extremely cold water. In the spring of 2010, I had major surgery in New York City where doctors sawed away the excess bone and scar tissue accretions. I wasn’t allowed to board a plane to fly back to Texas for three weeks and, when I returned to SeaWorld San Antonio, I wasn’t allowed back in the water for six more weeks. After the surgery, when I had to go for the once-every-three-month swim test, I was worried about how I would hold up, scared it would interfere with my ability to equalize the pressure in my ears, fearful that something would rupture. The surgery proved successful: I had no trouble in the frigid deep waters during the swim tests and during training.
Work remained brutal on the joints. At SeaWorld, apart from swimming and diving, I was always running on cement and up and down stairs, most of the time in just socks with no foot protection as I carried a 30-pound bucket of fish in each hand. The specialists finally diagnosed my problem: I had extensive cartilage destruction in both knees, with my right one being worse. Bone was rubbing against bone in three compartments of that knee. Looking at my MRI and arthrogram results, a specialist for a top pro sports team said he didn’t understand how I could still function. His advice was to leave killer whale training immediately.
I was devastated. I wasn’t ready to hear or accept that verdict in early 2009. I shopped around for a second opinion, going to doctors throughout the country. After seeing six different top specialists, I found one who said he could buy me more time through therapy and injections of hyaluronic acid every six months to both knees. I also had to follow a pain management program. It bought me about three more years.
By May 2012, the knee pain had become too intense. The gig was up. I was exhausted by the continued battles with SeaWorld management over things I felt were not in the whales’ best interests, and directives that put us trainers and the orcas in dangerous positions. I was disgusted by corporate greed and the exploitation of the whales and trainers alike. All that had slowly destroyed my faith in SeaWorld. The disenchantment had increased after I saw how the corporation handled the tragedies of Alexis Martinez and Dawn Brancheau. It was time to go. I took medical leave in May 2012 and ultimately resigned three months later, on August 17, 2012.
I could no longer do my dream job.
11
Leap of Faith
I broke my face, my fingers and my toes. I broke my ribs—twice. I fractured my foot. I destroyed my knees. Scar tissue blocked up my sinuses. I got addicted to painkillers and suffered through excruciating withdrawal. The list of damage I’ve done to my body throughout my career is extensive.
I was devastated when I came to the decision to end my career. I cried. I cried the same kind of gut-wrenching, uncontrollable sobs I wept when I left SeaWorld for France in 2001, because I was leaving Kasatka and the other whales I loved more than anything else. Now, a dozen years later, I was weeping because I felt I was abandoning her daughter Takara, leaving her to be turned into a baby-making machine by SeaWorld, her calves taken away from her to populate marine parks across the world.
When I took medical leave in May 2012, no one knew I was about to end my career—though many of my colleagues were afraid I might. The SeaWorld Human Resources Department was trying to prevent my taking protected time-off under the Family Leave and Medical Act, which would give me insurance coverage to treat my injuries while I took unpaid leave. It provided the guarantee that my job would still be available for me if I could return. If they didn’t allow me to have that grace period, I wouldn’t be able to even begin to recover—and I would not have the chance to decide whether I could feasibly get back to work. Eventually, after I told the vice president of the Human Resources Department that
the company was violating federal law, SeaWorld relented and I went on leave.
It took me almost three weeks to realize that my career was over. Something I had read a year or so earlier helped push me forward. “Keto and Tilikum express the stress of orca captivity” was written by two former SeaWorld trainers, Dr. Jeff Ventre and Dr. John Jett—a physician and a research professor, respectively. Published on January 20, 2011 on the website of The Orca Project, it was very sharply critical of their former employer. When I first heard that the two were speaking out against SeaWorld, I was angry. Even though I was disenchanted with the corporation and was having almost daily battles with management over whales and safety, I still defended the company against outside detractors. Some of the staff at the Shamu Stadiums in the three parks knew about the paper but it circulated like subversive material. The most loyal employees refused to read it. I refused as well. But my friend Wendy Ramirez eventually convinced me to look at it.
I had expected to read some kind of biased treatise. Instead, the paper made plain everything I already knew—and convinced me that Jett and Ventre were as concerned about the whales as I was. I was also impressed by the fact that they could leave their jobs as trainers and contribute to our scientific understanding of the effects of captivity on orcas. Their paper played a role in the decisions I was going to make, helping to convert me from being angry at all critics to being their supporter because they were telling the truth.
Ventre and Jett have impressive academic credentials. They would publish a peer-reviewed article accepted by the Journal of Marine Animals and Their Ecology in 2013. Entitled “Orca (Orcinus) Captivity and Vulnerability to Mosquito-Transmitted Viruses,” it examined the deaths of Kanduke and Taku. While it focused on the bizarre causes of death of the two SeaWorld orcas from mosquito bites, the paper documented the problems faced by the whales in great detail, from the whales’ dental problems to the huge amounts of intense heat and radiation from the sun that the whales were exposed to in the SeaWorld parks, a situation that can have an “immunosuppressant” effect on the orcas. Jett and Ventre said they often observed sunburned dorsals—perhaps a factor in the collapsed fins afflicting SeaWorld’s captive male orcas. That paper validated what I saw when I did my work.
The science helped with intellectualizing my decision, with getting my head wrapped around it. But when it came to the heart, the decision was cathartic, an emotional, soul-changing upheaval. After taking medical leave from SeaWorld, I needed three weeks to have the calmness to realize I was closing this chapter for good. The process of leaving had been tumultuous. I had to retain an attorney to fight the VP of Human Resources to exercise my federally protected rights to protected leave. But once I had recovered presence of mind, I could not escape the fact that I was losing the whales, losing Takara.
When it hit me, I was alone in my apartment. I was lying in bed and immediately grabbed my cell phone to call my best friend, Wendy Ramirez, the only person who would truly understand the depth of my loss. As her phone rang, the tears streamed down my face as I repeated, “Please pick up, Wendy. Please pick up.” Her phone went to voicemail. All I could manage to say was, “I really need you right now. I lost her. I can’t believe I’ve really lost her. She’s gone.” I hung up and collapsed in the middle of my bed, burying my face in my hands. I cried the same gut-wrenching cry from 11 years earlier.
I tested the waters about speaking out about SeaWorld’s treatment of orcas. The Orca Network told Jeff Ventre and Tim Zimmermann of Outside magazine that an unnamed trainer wanted to speak to them. Eventually, I divulged my identity to Tim, who then put me in touch with Gabriela Cowperthwaite, who was directing a documentary about the orcas of SeaWorld. She and Tim told me they thought it would help the project tremendously for someone like me to be in it. I would be a source of information fresh from two decades as a trainer at the corporation. I was working for SeaWorld during the time Alexis and Dawn were killed. My experience was so recent I could testify to the ongoing protocols and procedures of SeaWorld’s killer whale program. Carol Ray, one of the former trainers who appeared in Blackfish told me after the documentary’s New York City premiere that “I wished so badly you were going to speak and say that it wasn’t like that anymore at SeaWorld. I wished more than anything you were going to say things had changed and their lives were better now. But you confirmed it’s actually worse.” She said she had hoped that the bad things she remembered from the 1980s and 1990s were things of the past and that I would say, “That doesn’t happen anymore.” There was such sadness in her eyes.
Still, it was hard to make the leap. I initially agreed to collaborate, but then got cold feet and backed out only days before we were going to shoot. I just wasn’t ready and was fearful of reprisal from SeaWorld. While I was in SeaWorld, I had been told time after time that, if I left and spoke out, I would be hurting the whales; that they would then cut back on my contact with the orcas, which I believed enriched the lives of the whales, thus diminishing the quality of their existence in SeaWorld. It was a vicious, cyclical argument that proved tremendously successful as emotional blackmail. That psychological conditioning was embedded deep in me like a thorn, and, despite the logic of doing so, it was difficult for me to pluck it out.
Eventually, I made up my mind not to return to SeaWorld. The filmmakers approached me again. This time, I decided to go forward. A week after I resigned my position at SeaWorld, I was in Seattle sitting down to be interviewed for Blackfish.
I remember it being a gorgeous day. I hadn’t slept well the night before my interview. So many things were running through my mind. I did not want to be exploited by SeaWorld’s enemies the same way SeaWorld had exploited the whales. I knew it was important to choose the right medium and the right journalists to speak to. I wanted my views to be reflected accurately. I was taking a leap of faith. I was going to be out there, speaking my mind, to everyone. SeaWorld would be hearing it all too.
Gabriela and the camera and lighting crew made me feel relaxed and comfortable. I sat for four and a half hours of questions and answers. When I’m nervous I’ll drink a ton of water. I think I drank six to eight bottles of water by the end of the session. After we finished, I knew there was no turning back. As Jeff Ventre had told me, “Are you ready? It’s a one-way door.”
Gabriela and Tim decided to keep my participation in Blackfish a secret until the film was screened for reviewers. Even the other former SeaWorld trainers in the documentary knew only that there was an experienced trainer fresh out of the company who was interviewed in the film. No one in the industry suspected it was me. No one knew if the mystery trainer was male or female—or even which park I was from.
I was the last interview Gabriela filmed before Blackfish went into post-production. They had deadlines to meet, most importantly for submission to the Sundance Film Festival, the annual and legendary marketplace for independent films founded by the actor Robert Redford in 1978. It sounded like the holy grail to me and so I put it out of my mind. I had no way of knowing how big or small Blackfish would end up being. Would the film go straight to DVD? Would it even make it that far? My hope was that it would air on cable on either Animal Planet or National Geographic. Or, if things went really well, perhaps on HBO. Of course, I had one great fear: that SeaWorld would sweep in with all its lawyers to quash the film before anyone could see it.
In late November, I was thrown into a crash course in the movie business. Tim called to tell me that a press release was about to go out announcing that Blackfish had made the list of Sundance’s official selections. This was huge news but I tried not to get too excited. We still had no idea how the film would be received at Sundance. Would it generate buzz? Or would it flop? After qualifying for the festival, the goal was for your film to be seen by the right people, be bought and get a distribution deal. We crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.
At Sundance, Blackfish was originally scheduled for two scre
enings. But as word got out about the subject of the documentary, a third was added, then a fourth, a fifth and a sixth. An extra screening that wasn’t part of the schedule was thrown in because of demand. We had buzz.
The Sundance premiere on Saturday, January 19, 2013, was sold out; people stood on line in ten-degree weather for nearly three hours, hoping for wait-list tickets to become available. The film’s account of how Tilikum killed Dawn Brancheau—and the orca’s horrific life in captivity before that—clearly moved audiences. The section about orca calves being taken from their mothers to stock marine parks was particularly heartrending. Quickly, there was a battle over who would get to distribute it. HBO wanted it; so did IFC Films and a couple of others that would surprise us.
A couple of days later, I woke up to a text from one of my best friends, Joseph Kapsch, who works in entertainment news. He told me Blackfish had just been picked up by two companies, Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films. The documentary was going to have a summer theatrical release through Magnolia and then hit cable on CNN prime time in the fall.
SeaWorld would be heard from, of course. Gabriela had offered the company a chance to have its representatives appear in the film, to tell its side of the story. SeaWorld chose not to cooperate. However, as the premiere approached, they began to hear rumors that I was in the documentary. Friends of mine who were still working as orca trainers told me that on the day before the Sundance opening, senior management at SeaWorld called around asking employees if they knew whether I was in Blackfish. No one did because I had the foresight not to tell anyone. By the morning of the premiere, SeaWorld was certain I was in Blackfish and was frantically trying to find out what the film was going to say. They were not happy when they found out.
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish Page 21