When I was sent to Florida for a business trip I spent an afternoon at Sea World. It was interesting and fascinating, and while I wasn’t able to get in for an orca show I was able to view the animals.
They’re freakin’ multi-ton predators. I don’t care how many blow up Shamu toys and plush animals they sell, they’re huge, they have lots of teeth, and in their natural environment they hunt for a living. An orca is an animal big enough to hurt you simply by accident, and if you piss one off it can easily kill you. I didn’t need this explained to me, it seemed pretty obvious.
The spouse and I watched Blackfish last night. Dawn Brancheau grew up in the area I currently live in, so we heard a lot about her death at the time.
I think I get a little peeved at the constant excusing that “the animal thought the human was a plaything” or “the animal doesn’t know people can’t hold their breath as long as whales” and so on. Orcas don’t have human intelligent but they are smart creatures. They also have very little to do all day other than observe the humans that hold them captive, provide food, and insist on interacting with them. I think the adult orcas are very aware of how long a human can stay under, or at least how long a human would normally stay under. I don’t think orcas “mistake” a live human for an inanimate plaything. I do think that orcas are capable of anger and frustration. I think something pissed off Tillikum and he took it out on Branchaeu. Her injuries weren’t a mistake, no more than an angry dog biting down on something and shaking it is a “mistake”. That doesn’t make it Brancheau’s fault - he might have already been annoyed by something else, or maybe it was something she did but it might have been unintentional. Fact is, if you work with big animals you risk getting hurt or killed. That’s true even of domestic animals like horses, it’s even more true of something wild.
The incident with Dukes: oh, right, he fell in and died of hypothermia… maybe. Or maybe Tillikum was alone in his pool when a human he didn’t know jumped in, maybe tried to touch him, and almost certainly acted in ways other than he was accustomed to humans acting in his pool. Is it inconceivable he might have attacked the intruder? It might seem odd to think of a six ton orca as threatened, but it’s not like Tillikum is able to flee from either danger or annoyance. Dukes basically jumped into a pen with a large, wild animal. If he had done that at the chimp enclosure at the zoo and gotten killed no one would have claimed the chimps were using him as a “toy”, ditto polar bears, regular bears, tigers, lions, leopards, wolves… I think Tillikum killed an intruder. I don’t blame Tillikum at all for that, it’s a perfectly normal reaction as far as I can see. Some one I don’t know busts into my bedroom at night I doubt I’m going to ask the intruder sit down for tea and cookies, I am liable to react pretty aggressively myself. It’s a damn shame a man who probably had no malicious intent died but hey, real life isn’t like Spock jumping into the whale tank in The Voyage Home.
It’s pretty clear that the pools they keep those orcas in aren’t big enough for the females, much less Tillikum. All you have to do is compare the size of the pool to the size of the animal. It’s like keeping a human in a small, bare jail cell.
It’s also a problem that the orcas can’t get away from each other. In the wild if two of them are in conflict they can physically separate themselves, but not in Sea World. This isn’t in any way natural, it can’t be healthy, and it’s lead to the death of orcas when attacked by other orcas.
Do the trainers and orcas have a “relationship”? Yeah, they do. There is clearly some crude communication between them. I have no doubt the trainers care deeply about these animals. I don’t think the orcas have any inherent animosity towards the humans - if they did no one could get in the water with them at all - and the orcas can probably distinguish their trainers from other humans, and might be able to tell the humans apart as individuals (personally, I think it’s extremely likely they do, but it’s not the easiest thing to prove).
25 or 30 years ago we didn’t know as much about these animals as we do today, we no longer have a good excuse. We can’t release Tillikum - he’s never learned to fend for himself, and he doesn’t know how to interact with normal, wild orcas. There was an effort to release Keiko, the orca featured in Free Willy, back into the wild which wasn’t terribly successful. Oh, he was eventually released but wound up in a fjord in Norway seeking human contact. If we tried the same for Tillkum we’d be putting humans at risk again with close human contact with him, and by all accounts Keiko was a lot more docile, not sure how well that would turn out with an orca with some history of aggression.
I think Tillikum is an extremely frustrated animal, frustrated physically by too little space, frustrated socially by the unnatural conditions he is kept in, and probably also sexually frustrated at least some of the time. The wonder is that he doesn’t lash out more often.
I don’t want to see any more captive orca breeding. I want to see captive orcas kept in larger pools. It would be grand if we could release them into the wild but I’m not sure that’s practical or feasible at this point.
