by David Kirby
One Associated Press photo ran on the wire. It showed a docile killer whale floating on his stomach, pectoral fins calmly extended from each side, as a male trainer in a wet suit stood by in waist-deep water, gently stroking the animal’s back. It was a touching portrait of man and beast in a bonding moment of mutual trust.
Opponents of the transfer were quick to point out that Tilikum’s permit was only temporary—his fate had not been fully sealed. To them, Orlando was a mere way station to more appropriate destinations, preferably one in the waters off Iceland. Members of the Canadian House of Commons, for example, began a letter-writing campaign to the US and Canadian governments, urging a ban on putting whales up for sale and advocating for some captive orcas, including Tilikum, to be released back into the wild.
Erich Hoyt, the author of the seminal book Orca: The Whale Called Killer, who was now working with the UK-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, also warned the US fisheries agency that allowing any of the Victoria whales into the United States “poses a thorny problem to NMFS as well as SeaWorld.”1
Although Keltie’s was the first death at an aquatic theme park, there had been “dozens of well documented injuries, many of them serious and many of them at SeaWorld,” he wrote. “It is amazing that many more orca trainers have not been killed. Certainly, now that there has been a death, it calls into serious question the suitability of exhibiting orcas in captivity.”
Hoyt said that SeaWorld should provide a “full review” of the death at SeaLand, charging that SeaWorld’s brief explanation of the account had been “simply not acceptable—it’s difficult to believe that SeaWorld has not investigated this matter, but if it hasn’t, it should be required to.”
Hoyt had spoken, off the record, with killer whale trainers in Orlando. “Some are very concerned about the SeaLand orcas coming to SeaWorld,” he wrote. “They say that there simply is not enough room for them, and that their previous behavior makes them dangerous.” SeaWorld itself had told NMFS that the three whales were “basically untrained,” he said. If true, it was incumbent on the agency to “find out what they’ve been doing for the past nearly 10 years in captivity, and the implications to all concerned for making the transition to SeaWorld.”
Sadly for SeaWorld, the protests arrived in more than written form. On January 19, about twenty demonstrators, including several children, appeared at the main gate of the Orlando park, picketing the entrance with homemade signs that read: ANOTHER DAY, DOLLAR, DOLPHIN; CAPTIVITY KILLS; SEAWORLD IS A WHALE JAIL; and FREE ME! across the image of Shamu.
The Sentinel ran a photo of the protesters with a caption saying only that they were demonstrating “against SeaWorld’s recent acquisition of Tilikum, a killer whale from Canada.” Again, no mention that this killer whale had actually killed somebody. The activists were pictured outside the facility on a busy Orlando roadway, “after troopers, hired by SeaWorld, shooed protestors off park property,” the caption said.
Inside the park, trainers at Shamu Stadium were only vaguely aware of the controversy; even less so of the danger warnings from Erich Hoyt, NMFS, and others. New Yorker Samantha Berg was working at Shamu Stadium the day Tilikum arrived. (Jeff Ventre was on a tour of duty at Whale and Dolphin, but would return to Shamu in 1994; Carol Ray had left SeaWorld one year before.)
Tilly settled into one of the back pools, where he would be kept alone for the time being, until senior trainers felt he was ready to meet the girls: the queen, Katina; the lower-caste Icelandic females, Winnie and Gudrun; and her headstrong, half-Transient daughter, Taima.
Sam did not think there was any reason to fear Tilikum. The way she heard it, Tilly had refused to give Keltie Byrne’s dead body back for hours because he was in possession of a “toy” and it was rare for the females to part with any toy and let him play with it. She was never told how the whales blocked Byrne’s exit from the water while she was still struggling for her life. Perhaps some of the senior trainers knew, but those who were lower on the totem pole did not. “It’s a very different scenario,” Sam said years later, “thinking of her passing out quickly from hypothermia and drowning and Tilikum carrying her around like a souvenir; versus the whales aggressively trying to keep her in the water, whether they knew they were killing her or not.”
Sam was told that Tilikum had not hurt anyone, but that message did not dovetail with what she was seeing around her. On Tilly’s first day at SeaWorld, one of the female trainers was standing on a gate between two pools, making cooing noises at the big whale and trying to get him to respond to her. Her hair was down, her wet suit unzipped and dangling around her waist. When Chuck Tompkins and chief animal trainer Thad Lacinak saw her in that position, “their heads almost exploded on the spot,” Sam told Jeff that afternoon. The two men screamed at the trainer to get away from the gate.
Shortly after that, Chuck and Thad announced a new set of rules that would pertain only to Tilikum. Sam listed them for Jeff: “Absolutely no unzipped wet suits around him; nothing hanging for him to grab, no hair or whistles hanging down; and no one is to lie down next to him—ever.” All sessions with Tilikum were to be conducted from a standing position only, and exclusively by senior trainers, and only then when another senior trainer was on-site to act as spotter. A perimeter line was established around Tilly’s pool, and only senior trainers authorized to work with him or spot those who did were allowed to cross that line.
Sam was a bit confused about the fuss. After all, what happened in Victoria was a tragic accident. Chuck and Thad, she assumed, were just being overly cautious in announcing the new rules for Tilikum. It didn’t occur to her they might know more about Tilly’s past than they were telling at least some trainers. Then again, many things were like that: You were told things on a need-to-know basis. Sam was never approved to work with him, so she didn’t need to know.
Sam also overheard other staff talking to management about whether they should desensitize Tilikum to being with humans in the water. Jeff’s friend Mark Simmons argued in favor of “desense” for Tilly, as did several other trainers. Sam felt conflicted about the debate. To begin with, who would volunteer to go in the water with him? She supposed they could have pulled it off if there was a gigantic pool, with Tilikum on the far side, and someone got in the water on the other side, so the person could slip out of the pool if anything went wrong. Even then, the trainers would have to make ever-closer “approximations” with the whale, until they were in an indisputably vulnerable position. In the end, Sam could see why management declined to take that risk.
Sam said nothing. She loved her job, and she had learned that the best way to keep it, and the quickest way to move up through the ranks, was to simply do as she was instructed and not ask questions. It could take six months to a year before a new trainer at Shamu was allowed in the water, depending on his or her previous experience. Sam had a vested interest in going along with what she was told, even if she suspected that something was wrong.
A few weeks after Tilikum was flown to Orlando, a new member of the training staff began his apprenticeship at Shamu Stadium—John Jett, a five-foot-eight-inch Midwestern boy with light blue eyes, buzzed head, and sturdy wrestler’s build. John had started at SeaWorld six months previously and had now been transferred to Shamu. Before long, John and Jeff Ventre became good friends.
John grew up on the Kansas side of Kansas City and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1989 with a degree in environmental science. He got hired at an environmental testing laboratory after college, where he did a lot of fieldwork taking samples from woods and streams, but also in buildings and other sites.
One summer John was sent do to water testing at a local amusement park called Worlds of Fun, which included a pitiful little dolphin show. The animals were kept in what looked like a big bathtub and made to perform tricks for the crowds. On his first day there, John arrived early, before the park opened, to begin collecting samples undisturbed. There was no sound, except for the squeaking of th
e dolphins. Nobody was around to stop him, so John walked up to the small tank and interacted with them, petting their flanks and laughing at their antics.
“It changed my life,” he told Jeff one night over beer and hot wings at a south-Orlando BBQ joint. “And I said to myself, ‘Man, I wouldn’t mind working with cetaceans.’ But I realized this was a really crappy situation for the dolphins. I knew there had to be a better way to do things.” John began researching job openings working with whales or dolphins. In 1991, he sent a résumé to SeaWorld. “I thought, if you want to work with cetaceans, then this was the place to do it.”
Jeff sat and listened to his friend tell a similar tale to his own. John considered himself an aspiring scientist—he wanted to get a master’s degree. SeaWorld seemed like the ideal place to begin conducting original research on cetaceans. “And when I started work, I went to the PR training, and I remember going home that evening thinking, this is not right.”
The “training” session surprised John. Nothing in the talk was about the natural history of the animals at SeaWorld, nothing about dolphin biology or killer whale social behavior. Instead of learning cetacean science, John felt that he was being spoon-fed corporate sound bites. The new staff was taught to repeat certain approved phrases: “Our animals live longer in captivity than they do in the wild”; “The dorsal fins of male killer whales also bend in the wild, it’s perfectly natural”; “These whales receive the finest veterinary and dental care in the world”; and so on.
Most disturbing of all to John, the new hires were told to avoid contact with outside scientists who came to the park to observe the animals.
John left that first meeting with an unsettled feeling in his stomach and walked out into the thick, hot air. Was this really the right move for him? He decided to stick it out. After all, John was lucky to have landed a job at SeaWorld. His new bosses never let him forget that: Plenty more people were in line, just waiting to take his job if he didn’t want it.
In the coming weeks and months, John would hear tour guides and animal trainers tell visitors about “all the important scientific research” that went on behind the scenes at SeaWorld, but John was certainly not seeing any of it.
“That’s because there isn’t much going on here, scientifically speaking,” Jeff told John. The only “research” the trainers were aware of was the rudimentary data collection about diet, weight, length, dorsal fin bending, and respirations. Those last were taken day and night. “What are you going to do with that breathing data?” John said. “It will never be used by anybody. Putting all these respirations into a log is just a way to make sure that the whales are reasonably healthy. There’s no science here.”
After several months at Shamu, John Jett was assigned to Tilikum’s team. He helped prepare Tilly’s food and monitored his respirations; he assisted with training and exercise sessions, usually by holding the extended target—a ball on a pole—over the water or providing Tilikum with fish as a positive reinforcer.
Because John arrived at Shamu after Tilikum did, he was told even less about the whale’s past than Samantha had been told. John was not in the least bit fearful of the male. He knew this wasn’t a water-work animal: Tilly was being trained to come out at the big splash finale of the show, once his public display permit came through from NMFS. But that was all. John was only vaguely aware that being close to Tilly might pose any sort of danger. The whale always struck him as a gentle and sensitive giant—an overgrown, misunderstood guy.
Tilikum wasn’t getting much affection in the pools of Orlando. Much as Nootka and Haida had clobbered him at SeaLand, some of the Florida females—Katina in particular—often raked the newcomer with their teeth. One morning John came in early to find streams of blood running behind Tilikum as he moved through the water. John saw it happening fairly regularly, and not just to Tilly, but also the subdominant female Winnie. John frequently witnessed her being brutalized by the other females before she was moved to Ohio.
John called the deep red trails of blood streaming through the blue water “skywriting.” It quickly dissipated and people in the audience almost never noticed. But on two occasions while John was there, the killer whale show had to be canceled because the bleeding was discernible from the stands.
By the fall of 1992, John came to accept that he was working in show business, not science.
That October, NMFS granted SeaWorld a permit to import the remaining SeaLand whales into the United States and put them on public display. Haida and her calf, Kyuquot, would go to San Diego; Nootka would fly to Florida to join her old tankmate and torment victim, Tilikum. Nootka’s calf, a son sired by Tilikum, was born in February 1992, but for some reason would not nurse from his mother. He died a month later.2
In addition to granting a permit to import the three whales from Canada, NMFS also gave SeaWorld permission to keep Tilikum for permanent public display in Orlando. He had been flown to Florida as an invaluable breeder; now he would be part of the show as well. Conditions were attached to this permit as well. Most notably, SeaWorld was required to provide the complete “animal/human history” of each whale to all staff who would be handling, training, or in any way involved in the “direct interaction with or management of the animals.”3
On a freezing morning in January 1993 a screeching Haida and Nootka were hauled out of their sea pen of ten years, along with Haida’s calf, Ky, and placed into separate water-filled crates lashed onto flatbed trucks. The two females would never see each other again.4
Nootka’s arrival in Orlando was treated with even more nonchalance than the advent of Tilikum. There were no news accounts of the arrival, no protests; inside the park walls, most staff were told even less about this animal’s involvement in Keltie Byrne’s death than they had been about Tilikum’s. John had no idea that she was linked to the incident. He didn’t know she was involved in any aggressive acts at all. Still, as with Tilikum, SeaWorld management deemed Nootka unfit for water work.
John began working with Nootka almost every day in a support role (she was not one of his primary animals), in addition to his Tilikum duties and performance work. He helped to keep the new female busy with exercise and husbandry sessions in the back pools. Despite the requirement of her import permit that all staff interacting with her were to be informed of her “animal/human history,” that was not the case. Only years later would John come to believe that SeaWorld trainers—other than those at the top—were deliberately kept unenlightened about a wide variety of safety issues in killer whale work.
“A lack of detailed information was the norm whenever accidents happened at other parks,” he said. “I remember one incident when all of us were pulled from water work for a short time. To this day I don’t know what happened.”
John said it would have been “nice” to receive detailed incident reports from other parks “so we could have possibly prevented it from happening in our pools.” Senior management, he alleged, “purposely kept us in the dark for at least two reasons. First, they didn’t want trainers questioning the overall safety of their program; after all, the show had to go on. Second, they probably assumed that if we didn’t really know how dangerous the job was, then we wouldn’t be inclined to demand more than near-minimum-wage earnings.”
15
Humane Society
When Naomi first set out to get her doctorate from UCSC, she expected to remain within the secure confines of academia after completing grad school. She envisioned herself teaching marine mammalogy at one of the leading schools in the field—the University of Washington perhaps, or maybe Texas A&M or UC San Diego.
But a few years into the program, she began to change her mind. Naomi found the petty competition for grant money and tenure to be distasteful. She grew disillusioned with the political backstabbing so common in academic settings and was disturbed by the offbeat and unprofessional behavior she had witnessed from some of the male faculty at school. She was not patient with students and began to see she didn�
��t have the temperament to teach full-time. Naomi began to think that life on the tenure track at a big university would probably be more stressful than fulfilling.
By the time she got her PhD, she was thinking she would like to work in the environmental protection field, perhaps at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, or a government agency such as the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)—anything with an aquatic connection.
In early 1993, Naomi was back in LA living with her dad and getting desperate about finding a job. She took on some temp work—a lot of typing, mostly—but so far her PhD was getting her nowhere. Most of the career openings were in fields for which she had no training. None of the job descriptions said “marine biologist wanted” much less “specialist in killer whale social behavior sought.” Naomi went to just three job interviews in three months. Her mother was getting worried.
Then in April of 1993, she saw the ad. Someone was looking for a “marine mammal biologist.”
“Well, what do you know?” Naomi said, flabbergasted, as she circled the announcement. “What are the odds of that?” The position was with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), at their new headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a leafy suburb outside Washington, DC. The influential organization was looking for a trained biologist to head up its fledgling marine mammal program. The new hire would be expected to respond to government policy and other actions, educate the public on species protection and habitat conservation, write articles for the national newsletter, and conduct advocacy campaigns on behalf of all marine mammals—cetaceans, pinnipeds, sea otters, and even polar bears—including those in captivity.
Naomi didn’t even know there was a Humane Society of the United States. She only knew about the local shelters where people went to adopt a puppy. HSUS is not affiliated with those shelters, a point that critics—and there are many, mostly on the political right—often make, though HSUS does provide assistance to animal shelters and related programs.
