by David Kirby
Positive reinforcement for desired behavior, in addition to food, included “back scratches, rub downs, grooming, toys, favorite activities, squirts with a water hose, ice cubes, puzzle games and one-on-one time,” the manual said. All behaviors were variably reinforced, meaning rewards came at different times, so the animals never knew exactly when the next reinforcement was coming. “Experience has shown that a random schedule of reinforcement is more effective than a fixed one.”
Training of animals at SeaWorld took place in six types of interactive “sessions.” Husbandry sessions were for weighing animals, taking urine and blood, and other procedures; exercise sessions were for stimulation and recreation; learning sessions were how trainers conditioned the animals to perform specific behaviors; play sessions were downtimes for trainers and animals to interact with games such as ring-around-the-rosy and such toys as balls, cones, and floats (even though staff were told to avoid use of the word play when talking about the animals); relationship sessions were intimate moments between animal and trainer to develop and build mutual trust; and show sessions were the live performances, in which show components and positive reinforcements were constantly switched around to make them more stimulating for the animals.
SeaWorld called it the HELPRS system, for husbandry, exercise, learning, play, relationships, and shows.
Of all the terms to know, and methods to master, the most fundamental concept was target recognition. Each behavior was divided into a series of discrete steps, so animals needed to be presented with a “target” that they could recognize and physically touch. Trainers “use their hands as a focal point,” the book explained. “Animals are trained to come to the trainer’s hand, hold on it, and await the next signal. This behavior is called ‘targeting.’”
If a behavior required the whale to be out of reach of the trainer, another “target” was used instead of the hand. “Just as a flagstick is a target that directs a golfer toward a golf hole, a target directs an animal toward a position or direction,” the handbook said. Targets were fashioned from long fiberglass poles with a foam float at the end. Others included slapping the water to call a whale to stage, tapping the poolside glass to call a whale to the edge, or lobbing a chunk of ice into the water. Whatever tool was used, “trainers teach an animal to ‘target’ by touching the target gently to the animal,” the manual explained. “The bridge signal is sounded, and the animal is reinforced. This is repeated several times.”
Once a whale learned to target the object, it was moved a few inches away. The trainer waited. It didn’t take long for the orca to figure out she was supposed to move over and touch the target, and she was reinforced for doing so. This was repeated several times until the whale successfully targeted the focal point on each round. Next, the target was positioned even farther away, perhaps a foot or two. When the animal touched it, the trainer again reinforced her. Before long, the orca knew she was supposed to follow the target wherever it moved.
“The target may then be used to lead the animal through a series of steps to gradually perform complex behaviors,” the book said. “Eventually, the target is replaced by a hand signal. As with other stimuli in animal training, the hand signal stimulus is learned by introducing it along with the target.”
Hand signals were used to send whales on any number of behaviors in their large repertoires, including bows, triple bows, “fast swims” around the perimeter, fluke splashes, back dives, spy-hops, “hula” spins, head shakes to “say” yes and no, rollovers, side breaches, pectoral-fin waves, “double-pec waves,” water squirts, slide-out poses, tongue kisses, and the wildly popular “raspberries”—when whales make farting noises from their blowhole.
The book explained other terms that were key to animal training, including the least reinforcing scenario (LRS). The LRS, often referred to as a “neutral response,” was divided into two parts. “The first part is a consequence for incorrect behavior,” the handbook said. “The second part is a stimulus providing an opportunity for reward—for two or three seconds the trainer is relaxed and attempts no change in environment. This brief time period is a stimulus to the animal to remain calm and attentive.” After the LRS, the animal is rewarded for remaining calm and attentive. The trainer might then offer the animal a chance to execute another behavior, one that if completed will produce a reward.
By reinforcing an animal after the LRS, it will “learn from its mistakes,” the book said. But a neutral response must be given properly: “An animal is never forced to respond to a situation, nor is it ever punished.” Over time, the consistent application of LRS “decreases undesired behavior and increases calm and attentive behavior.” It can help lower animal frustration that might come about from a lack of reinforcement (even a “neutral” response is still a response). The LRS “teaches the animal to respond without aggression.”
* * *
Though she enjoyed learning these techniques, Carol Ray only lasted a little more than two years at Shamu. She grew disillusioned with SeaWorld after being transferred to the stadium. No single event made her say, “I want out of here.” But a series of smaller incidents niggled at the back of her mind. She didn’t discuss it much with coworkers, but the doubts and questions mounted.
First there were the dangers. Carol was still unsettled by what had happened to John Sillick in San Diego, in November 1987, when Orky II crashed on top of him as he rode on Nootka. It happened a few months after she started working as a tour guide. Sillick had sustained a broken pelvis, femur, and ribs among other injuries.2 He was permanently disabled. Carol was told it had been an accident, chalked up to “trainer error.” In other words, as long as trainers didn’t make mistakes, they had no fear of being injured in the killer whale pool. That didn’t sit well.
When Carol was first transferred over to Shamu, she began nosing around for more details on the Sillick affair. She figured people there could offer more of an inside scoop on what had happened. She was dismayed to get the same response as she had in the Education Department. “Trainer error. Nothing more” was the mantra repeated at Shamu Stadium.
Carol had experienced her own frightening killer whale moment, with Kalina, though she blamed herself for the scare. One day in a side tank, B Pool, Carol was playing with Baby Shamu, keeping her engaged with a variety of small behaviors until it was their turn in the show in A Pool. Carol had leaned down close to the whale, alternating between asking for an “open mouth,” a “tongue out,” a “jaw pop” (snapping her teeth together), and so forth. She reached into Kalina’s mouth to give her tongue a pat.
“I was moving her quickly between behaviors,” she told Jeff after work that day. “After asking for an open mouth with tongue out, I reached in her mouth to give her a tongue pat. I think she anticipated I was going to ask for another jaw pop, and as I reached in to pet her tongue, her jaw popped right down on my hand.”
Carol sustained a gash between the first and second knuckle on top of her right hand, and on the same location of her palm. Her whole hand was swollen and throbbing. Fortunately no more skin was broken. Carol pretended nothing had happened. Despite the pain, she smiled at the audience and proceeded to work Kalina from the stage. She periodically dipped her hand in the water to wash off the blood, before giving Baby Shamu another signal.
Carol realized this was more than a love nip. She could not grip anything with her right hand, not even a small fish, nor could she open her palm completely. The other trainers spotted blood on her hand. They knew something had happened, but they put on their game faces and ignored it. The show had to go on.
Immediately after the performance, Carol’s colleagues called for the medics, who bandaged her wounds. “It was my fault. Really,” Carol told them. “Don’t blame Kalina. It was a stupid novice-trainer’s mistake. I should’ve been more clear with her, especially with my hand in her mouth! I shouldn’t have been moving her so quickly between those specific behaviors.” It took Carol’s hand two weeks to fully heal.
&
nbsp; In other incidents, Kanduke took a swipe at someone, either trying to grab the person’s hand or else rising from the water, jaws agape, in a threatening posture. Carol noticed that these incidents, though not injurious, were seldom reported in the Animal Profiles or incident reports. She had seen Duke’s chart. It didn’t mention any of the close calls she had witnessed or heard about.
Two babies were born at Shamu Stadium during Carol’s tenure—Katina’s calf Katerina and Gudrun’s daughter Taima, half-Transients sired by Kanduke. Both of them—but especially Taima—had also aggressively tried to jump on top of people in the water. At other times they mouthed the hair, arms, or shoulders of trainers. Most staff shrugged off the acts as roughhousing by rowdy juveniles. No one thought they were cause for alarm. They told each other that such incidents were something to be aware of when in the pool, but little more.
Trainer safety was not the only thing tugging at Carol in those moments of doubt. She was troubled about the whales themselves. Why did they require so many vitamins, antacids, and fish shot up with water? Something was fundamentally wrong with that. Something was lacking in the daily life of these whales.
The abrupt removal of the young Kalina was also disquieting. When Baby Shamu was four, the trainers were told she would be moved out of Orlando to SeaWorld Ohio. Carol was shocked. She was no expert on killer whales, but she knew enough about their social structure and strong bonds to believe that ripping Kalina from her mother and siblings—the only family she knew—was wrong.
“I thought we had a responsibility to provide these whales with as much of a normal life as possible, despite being held in captivity,” she complained to friends on the outside. “Now I feel like we are letting them down by needlessly disrupting their social group.”
Carol raised her concerns with a supervisor in private. She was distraught by the reply. “Forget about it,” her boss told her. “Kalina is disrupting the shows. Won’t it be nice to have her gone and not distracting the other whales?” Any further efforts by Carol to complain to superiors about the pending removal of the calf were met with derision.
Carol was assigned to work the night of Baby Shamu’s departure, February 12, 1990. She labored to help separate the calf from her mother and the other females. They had been training for this moment for some time. But Kalina was still not used to being separated from her mom. It was difficult to compel her into the medical pool, and nets were often required to separate her. (While originally assigned to stay near and work with Gudrun during the removal of Kalina, Carol was ultimately pulled off that duty after raising questions about the appropriateness of the impending move. Instead she was told to take observations from the catwalk above the stadium.)
Carol was also told to stay on for night watch that evening, after Kalina was hoisted on a sling, lowered into a box of ice water, driven to the airport, and flown off to Ohio. Carol made observations regarding Katina throughout the night. What she heard and saw shattered her.
Katina was never a vocal whale, but that night Carol listened in sorrow as the distraught mother remained immobile in a corner of the pool, emitting wretched cries into the night. The harrowing din withered Carol. The gate to Katina’s pool was open to the other females, including her infant, Katerina, but no one entered her tank. Carol thought the girls were leaving Katina alone with her grief. The bitter moaning reminded her of when Gudrun had first been shipped to SeaWorld from an aquarium in the Netherlands, in November of 1987. Carol was still a tour guide back then, but Gudrun’s haunting distress calls could be heard emanating from Shamu Stadium for weeks.
Even the usually adoring press questioned the wisdom of removing such a young calf from her mother. Park officials conceded that some research on wild killer whales demonstrated “strong bonds” between mothers and their children. But they insisted that “many questions about the animals’ social structure remain unresolved,” the Orlando Sentinel reported when SeaWorld made provisions to send “the little celebrity” off to Ohio.
Ed Asper, SeaWorld’s zoological director, did not believe that all killer whale offspring stayed with their mothers throughout their lifetime. And, he told the Sentinel, the bonds between “Shamu and her mother” had weakened since Katina gave birth to her next calf, Katerina.
Not long after Kalina left, SeaWorld updated its trainer handbook, “Difficult and Unusual Questions and Answers,” with the following: “Q: Why did you take Baby Shamu away from her mother? A: Baby Shamu was no longer a baby. She was five years old and quite independent from her mother, who was socially pushing her away from her and was already raising a new baby.”
Of all the whales at SeaWorld during Carol’s tenure, the most morose and ornery was Kanduke. Duke spent much of his time alone in C Pool, floating motionlessly at the surface. He seemed to stay there by choice: The females would often gang up on him, picking fights with him and raking their teeth over his skin. The trainers did not spend a lot of time interacting with Kanduke because he was not a water-work animal—and he was unpredictable. From what Carol observed, he got a half hour, tops, of exercise during the day from doing the splash segment of the show, or from a training session now and then, before heading back to skulk in C Pool.
Other times, however, Kanduke swam free with the girls, out front in the main pool. They would circle the tank harmoniously and, for some reason, counterclockwise.
In September 1990, trainers reported that Duke had been acting “slow.” SeaWorld vets agreed that he seemed a bit sluggish and noted a mild drop-off in his eating habits. No one thought the symptoms were serious, and they certainly did not expect the ten-thousand-pound male’s health to worsen. But it did. On September 20, 1990, the great Transient died.
SeaWorld plunged into mourning. Despite his savage reputation, everyone loved the Duke. Upon his death, at 5:40 p.m., the final evening performance was canceled. Guests were not told why. The next morning, it was back to business as usual.
A few weeks before, Kanduke had scraped a pectoral fin and bled during a performance, but SeaWorld officials said that accident had been minor and was unrelated. “His death was sudden,” spokesman Nick Gollattscheck told the Orlando Sentinel, adding that Kanduke was in his “middle to late twenties.” But that was not possible. Kanduke had been captured as a young calf in Pedder Bay, British Columbia, on August 16, 1975. He was believed to be about eighteen-to-twenty years of age.
Gollattscheck also “cited three scientific studies showing killer whales generally live to be 25 to 35,” the Sentinel reported, even though “other scientists have estimated that male killer whales can live to be 60 while females can live to 80 or 90.”
The paper reported, “Kanduke’s death leaves SeaWorld of Orlando with four killer whales, all female. It leaves the company, which also has parks in California, Texas and Ohio, with 13 whales—12 of them female.” The Sentinel said the cause of death was undetermined pending a necropsy, adding, “The procedure will give officials an idea of why the animal died, but a full report that includes tissue analysis will take four to six weeks.”
Kanduke’s skeleton was to be featured as an educational tool, though a display site had not been chosen. Some of his remains would be buried on the Orlando property, the Sentinel said. The rest would be sent to a rendering plant, to be turned into fertilizer and pet food.
Meanwhile, the “lopsided sex ratio” left in Kanduke’s wake “may cause problems for SeaWorld’s killer whale captive breeding program,” the Sentinel reported. “To prevent inbreeding and ensure healthy calves, animal care specialists prefer having several mature males and females. Capturing wild killer whales is controversial, and many animal welfare groups protest such actions.” The company had no more permits to catch killer whales in the wild, according to the federal government, but that was not a problem. “It prefers to import whales from foreign marine parks, particularly parks that are ‘substandard,’” the paper said.
Animal activists were infuriated. A group called the Dolphin Project, led
by former marine mammal trainer Ric O’Barry, who once worked on the Flipper set, said Kanduke’s demise proved that killer whales cannot adapt well to life in a concrete tank. O’Barry announced that his group would stage a consumer boycott of all Anheuser-Busch products until it promised to stop capturing wild marine mammals and to close dolphin petting pools. “We’re not doing anything unrealistic, like saying, ‘Set all the dolphins free,’” O’Barry told the Sentinel.
Two months later, SeaWorld issued a necropsy report stating that Kanduke had most likely died of a viral infection, but tests would continue. Though Duke had been found with a collapsed buoy in his stomach’s first compartment, the report asserted that the float did not harm the whale. “While the presence of the object … was visually striking, it was not related to the cause of this animal’s death,” it said.3
In an extraordinary move, company officials met with staff members from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the federal Marine Mammal Commission to present the report in person. Necropsies were typically just mailed to Washington, DC, but SeaWorld took the measure because “we knew the government was getting a lot of calls for information,” park spokesman Gollattscheck said.
Earlier, in the summer, Carol had requested a transfer out of Shamu Stadium. When Kanduke died, she felt the move could not come fast enough. It was approved and she was sent back to Whale and Dolphin. But by then she knew she would be leaving SeaWorld altogether. Carol was ready to move on. And it was time for some soul-searching.
In December of 1990, Carol met with Chuck Tompkins to ask for a six-month leave of absence. As she expected, it was denied. She turned in her notice. “I’m really going to miss the animals! It’s so easy to become attached to them. But I won’t miss seeing the problems that are created by having them in captivity, like the stress of manipulating their ‘families’ into unnatural groups.” Carol could not imagine that the ensuing “struggle for dominance” would not lead to aggression and violence in some of the animals.
