by David Kirby
Established in1954 as the National Humane Society by the journalist Fred Myers and others, the group’s mission is to fight abuse and cruelty and promote the welfare and protection of all animals, wild or domestic, around the world. While far more mainstream than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other “animal liberation” groups, HSUS has still managed to attract its share of controversy. Many leaders in the fields of agribusiness, animal testing, and the zoo and aquarium industries loathe the organization for its combative opposition to their less humane practices. Though unaffiliated with local humane society animal shelters, HSUS is the world’s largest animal advocacy group.
Given Naomi’s extensive experience with killer whales and seals, and her gradual conversion from aquatic theme park fan to opponent, this did seem like the perfect job. And she was the perfect candidate. She mailed in her résumé and waited.
The phone call came from John Grandy (the HSUS vice president who testified at the NMFS meeting on captive killer whales). “I’m going to be in LA for a meeting,” he told her. “Can you meet me at the airport?” Naomi was almost unnerved by her own excitement. On the appointed day, she drove out to LAX to have lunch with John in the dining room of the airport Hilton on Century Boulevard.
John told her about the recent HSUS efforts against SeaWorld and how the group had tried to halt the import permits for Tilikum, Haida, Nootka, and other killer whales. He said the group’s president, Paul Irwin, wanted to intensify HSUS’s campaign against captive marine mammals. “Paul wants to do more. Much more,” John said.
He also talked about a movie that Warner Bros. was releasing in the summer of 1993 called Free Willy, about a troubled teenaged boy who bonds with a captive killer whale and helps return him to the sea. Irwin wanted to piggyback onto the Free Willy publicity to launch a public campaign against whales and dolphins in captivity, John explained. The president wanted somebody who could be a marine expert, someone with a PhD who could do media “and actually talk with authority on the subject.” Naomi, a recent graduate, a doctor in biology, and an expert in killer whales, could not have come along at a more opportune time. John was impressed with her knowledge—and demeanor.
It was a good lunch.
Naomi drove back to her dad’s house almost certain she had got the job. A few days later, the formal offer arrived by mail. The pay was abysmal, but a great deal more than she had ever made before. Besides, it was a good job in her chosen field, and it was definitely time to move out on her own. Naomi accepted. Only later would she realize that Grandy mistook Naomi’s unfailing politeness at lunch to be a sign of agreeability. “It’s not what he got,” Naomi told friends, “because I talk back to people all the time, as you know.”
Naomi had a couple of weeks to prepare for the big move. She arranged to have her belongings shipped East, while she, her Newfoundland/border-collie, Huey, and her cat, Jeb, drove to Maryland together in her car. Once there, she would stay with an aunt and uncle while looking for an apartment. Naomi planned a leisurely ten-day trip across country, stopping at the major attractions, but also poking along lesser-traveled byways and exploring the roadside oddities that dot the American landscape. She wanted to see the world’s biggest ball of yarn.
A couple of days before taking off, Naomi’s father announced, “I’m coming with you.”
“No, Dad. You’re not.”
“Yes, I am. I’m too uncomfortable with the idea of you driving all that way by yourself.”
Naomi lost the argument. Making matters worse, her father had a meeting back in California within the week. They were going to have to drive fast—the trip would take three days. An hour outside LA, Naomi’s dad complained about the U2 music on the stereo. It was unmitigated hell: three eighteen-hour days of straight driving. No music, no byways, no big ball of yarn. Maryland was more of a relief than a final destination.
In late May, after finding a small apartment in Gaithersburg within walking distance of the office, Naomi reported to work at HSUS headquarters—a squat, 1980s, brick-and-glass two-story building, hidden behind shade trees in an anonymous corporate office park. She had no idea about the amount of work that was about to be thrown at her.
Free Willy was scheduled for nationwide release that July. Buzz was growing about the picture, which was looking to become the feel-good family hit of the summer. Paul Irwin wanted to use the opportunity to slam SeaWorld and the public display industry for keeping whales and dolphins in captivity for the entertainment of paying guests. He wanted the new marine biologist to prepare a report for publication—a white paper of sorts—on the dark side of cetaceans in captivity. Naomi only had a few weeks to get up to speed on the industry: Irwin intended to stage a news conference to release the paper—at SeaWorld’s doorstep in Orlando—when the movie opened.
And that wasn’t all. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 was up for congressional reauthorization. SeaWorld and other aquatic theme parks were already working hard behind the scenes to gut the landmark law by softening or removing provisions regulating the export of animals, minimum standards on animal welfare, and requirements for education and conservation programs in order to display marine mammals. Naomi would need to hit the ground running to coordinate the counterattack and keep the MMPA intact. She knew little about the MMPA, having done her research in Canada, and had no clue how to go about protecting it.
One afternoon at work, Paula Jewell, who was handling marine issues up until that point, handed off her files to Naomi—not just about killer whales and captivity, but about all marine mammal species and the issues and challenges that each faced (live captures, hunting, pollution, entanglement in fishing gear, etc.). There were piles of files. The killer whale drawers alone brimmed with thousands upon thousands of pages of memos, letters, reports, scientific journals, news articles, printouts from recently established Internet forums, and copies of the federal Marine Mammal Inventory Report—which listed all the births, deaths, sales, loans, and transfers of every US marine mammal in captivity. There were also necropsy reports on several killer whales that had died at SeaWorld.
Naomi had a lot to learn in a short time. Captivity was more complicated than she had imagined.
As a methodical scientist, Naomi wanted to understand the context of the debate. She pulled the files on the history of the marine mammal display industry and got to reading.
Among the most shocking materials in the files was the history of killer whale captures. It was sickening. The hunting or live capture of marine mammals has never been pretty. Untold thousands of whales, dolphins, and seals perished in nets or at the end of a harpoon line when men came hunting for them—whether for meat, blubber, fur, or entertainment.1
In the early 1960s the undisputed leader of marine mammal captures was Marineland of the Pacific. Frank Brocato, the park’s chief animal collector and his assistant, Boots Calandrino, had grown famous for capturing a wide range of dolphins, porpoises, belugas, and pinnipeds. But they hadn’t given much thought to bagging an orca for Marineland’s burgeoning menagerie.
In November 1961, the collection crew were cruising around Newport Harbor in Orange County about an hour down the coast from Palos Verdes, when they came across a sick, disoriented female killer whale swimming alone among the schooners and yachts of the upscale inlet. They corralled the animal and lifted her onto a flatbed truck for the drive back to Marineland. She was the first killer whale ever taken into captivity. It did not go well.
“We’d suspected the animal was in trouble because of its erratic behavior in the harbor,” Brocato said in a PBS interview, years later. “But the next day, she went crazy. She started swimming at high speed around the tank, striking her body repeatedly.”
Finally, the orca shot straight for a concrete wall, smashed her snout, convulsed several times, and died. She had lasted only two days. The autopsy report found acute gastroenteritis and pneumonia, possibly acquired from pollution in Newport Harbor. Whether her illness was relat
ed to her suicidal behavior will never be known.
Now that Marineland officials had captured one orca, however temporarily, they wanted more. No member of the general public had ever before seen a captive killer whale up close. People would line up with open wallets to take in such a horrible beast.
Snagging killer whales out of the ocean was no easy task. Frank Brocato and his crew sailed up to Puget Sound in search of another orca for Marineland. A month later, scouring the waters off the San Juan Islands in Haro Strait, they spotted a pair of killer whales, a male and female, hunting porpoises.
The female chased a porpoise beneath the boat as the men waited for her on the other side with a lasso. They snagged her. But then “everything started to go wrong,” Brocato recalled later. The female made a sudden and unexpected turn. The nylon ropes of the lasso wrapped around the propeller shaft, killing the engine and stranding the vessel. The female took off at a frantic pace, only to be stopped short about 250 feet away when the lasso’s tether ran its length. The men could see the orca’s black silhouette rise above the surface through the distant mist.
Then they heard the noise: an agonizing shriek that shattered the silence of the waterway. The trapped female was calling for the male, whose six-foot dorsal fin quickly appeared next to her. The animals turned toward the boat and charged at it at top speed, rushing the hull repeatedly and thwacking it hard with their powerful flukes. Brocato grabbed a. 375 Magnum he kept on board and fired into the gray water, slamming a single bullet into the male, who either died or fled. It took ten bullets to finish off the female. They towed her body to a dock in Bellingham, where she was weighed and measured for posterity. Brocato extracted her teeth for souvenirs, and the rest was reportedly ground into dog food.
Brocato had tried and twice failed to land a healthy killer whale that could be displayed to the public. That wouldn’t happen for three more years. The first orca to be put on live exhibit was at the Vancouver Aquarium in 1964. The aquarium’s director, Murray A. Newman, had commissioned a sculptor, thirty-eight-year-old Samuel Burich, to hunt down and kill an orca and stuff it, for use as a life-size model in a special display for the aquarium’s new British Columbia Hall.
Burich took a harpoon boat out to Saturna Island, on the Canadian side of the water, and waited. It took two months but it paid off. The crew spotted a pod of thirteen killer whales near the shore. Burich harpooned a young whale. It was wounded, but did not die. Suddenly, two pod members came to the rescue of the young whale, gently pushing it to the surface for air. The harpooned animal tried to free itself, thrashing in the water and issuing a high-pitched screech and shrill whistles that could be heard above the water, three hundred feet away. Burich steered over to the whale and fired several shots into its flank. Still it would not die.
Burich called the aquarium. Director Murray Newman took a float plane from Vancouver out to Saturna Island and, upon arrival, decided that the whale should be spared and towed to the aquarium for display. The crew attached a line to the harpoon in the animal’s back. It took sixteen hours through choppy seas to make the journey. The pain and terror inflicted on the whale during that time can only be imagined.
The captive animal was placed in a makeshift pen at the Burrard Drydock in North Vancouver, where she was identified as a female and named Moby Doll. She was an instantaneous sensation. Scientists from around the world flew in to see the specimen up close and record her unearthly sounds. What struck most people, scientists and the general public alike, was how tame and docile the whale seemed to be. She also appeared to be sick and was probably still in shock from the harpoon and bullet wounds.
It took Moby Doll two months to regain weight, but she continued to be weak and developed a severe skin rash due to the low salinity of the harbor water. After eighty-seven days in captivity, Moby Doll died. The Times of London noted the media coverage of the capture and display of the orca, calling it “some of the first positive press ever about killer whales.” An autopsy on Moby Doll later revealed the whale was, in fact, Moby Dick.
The next killer whale to be captured, in 1965, was a male calf accidentally caught in a fishing net near Namu, a remote coastal outpost in northern British Columbia. Ted Griffin, owner of the Seattle Marine Aquarium, caught word of the capture and immediately offered the fisherman $8,000 for the whale. A special cage was built to tow the calf—now christened Namu—four hundred miles down to Seattle. As the voyage began, the young whale emitted a string of distress calls, attracting a pod of thirty orcas who tried but failed to free him. A mature female and three calves continued to follow the boat and cage for another 150 miles before finally turning away. They were presumed to be Namu’s mother and siblings.
Once in Seattle, Namu was placed in an enclosed pen in Rich Cove, where he quickly took on rock star status. Tens of thousands of people lined up to see him eat his daily diet of 375 pounds of fish. Once again a small battery of scientists arrived on the scene to study the whale, measuring Namu’s blood pressure, heart rate, and even his brain waves.
Eventually, Griffin came to trust the whale enough to climb into the tank with Namu. That same day, he learned how to ride the animal. Soon after that, he was able to teach Namu a few performance routines for the public. The most popular tricks were Namu’s jumping from the water to retrieve a salmon that Griffin dangled from a tower and taking his owner for a ride around the pen. Namu performed five shows a day, alternating with a trained-seal act. “Ahab had his whale,” Griffin liked to say, “and I have mine.”
Ticket sales to see Namu more than doubled. Marketing the orca became even more lucrative after he starred in the 1966 film Namu, the Killer Whale. The rather lame but endearing drama starred Lee Meriwether and Robert Lansing. The film’s tag line read, “Make room in your heart for a six-ton pet!!!”2 People would never look at orcas the same way again: The animals were being transformed from killer to cuddly in the public eye.
Namu and Griffin thrilled crowds for eleven months, but Namu never really adjusted to captivity. He could be heard making loud, strident screams from his pen, at times picking up returned calls from orcas passing by in Puget Sound.
In July of 1966, Namu started to act erratically, ramming his stainless steel nets at high speed, refusing to perform, and “acting mopey,” according to the Associated Press. Namu caught a bacterial infection, got caught in his stainless steel net, and drowned. Griffin told reporters that Namu was “lovesick” and may have been trying to escape to mate with females out in the sound. Griffin mourned his loss, but he had been bitten by the show business bug and the allure of ticket sales. A massive effort to trap more orcas began, and an industry was born.
But Griffin wanted more.
The second killer whale to be kept in captivity and put on display was a young female captured in 1965 by Griffin and his business partner Don Goldsberry. They named her Shamu—a combination of she and Namu—the original Shamu in a long line of Shamus. Griffin had initially intended for Shamu to be the cure for Namu’s lovesickness, but she was far too young for mating. Griffin sold her to the new SeaWorld park in San Diego, according to the AP. On December 20, 1965, the twenty-three-hundred-pound female was sent to California aboard a chartered cargo plane. The second orca to be kept in captivity was also the first orca to fly.
Shamu was released into her new tank in San Diego, completely ignoring the bottlenose dolphin, named George, put there to keep her company. “Shamu let out a squeal like a rusty gate when she plunged into the water,” the AP reported. SeaWorld refused to disclose what it had paid for the whale, but the AP said the price “was reported to be $75,000” (over half a million dollars at 2012 value). The New York Times called her “the ugly killer whale on public display.”
Goldsberry and Griffin perfected the purse-seining technique for capturing killer whales in Puget Sound. By the early 1970s, they had taken more than two hundred orcas from these waters. Most were released; the rest went to aquariums, including SeaWorld.
In 19
70, the two partners undertook the most notorious orca capture ever attempted: a hugely controversial whale roundup at Penn Cove, a tree-lined bay on crooked Whidbey Island, forty miles northwest of Seattle. The men snared eighty killer whales in a single net, comprising nearly every member of J, K, and L pods, or the entire Southern Resident community. Most were released during the ordeal. The men chose seven whales, all of them young, to ship off to anxiously awaiting aquariums around the world. One of them was Lolita—the only orca still alive from the Penn Cove capture. She lives and still performs at the Miami Seaquarium in the world’s smallest killer whale tank.
Many orcas did not survive the long and stressful ordeal at Penn Cove. Some of their carcasses were dragged up by a fishing trawler; their bellies had been slit and their bodies weighted down with steel chains and anchors. Goldsberry and Griffin later admitted to trying to prevent the dead whales from washing ashore.
Two years later Congress passed the historic Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, which banned the live capture of any marine mammals in US waters, except for the purpose of public display or scientific research. SeaWorld continued to qualify for the display exemption.
But live captures of killer whales in Washington State waters were about to come to a halt. The last straw was in March 1976, when Goldsberry, working for SeaWorld, overstepped the bounds of what the public would tolerate. Searching for whales off the shores of Olympia, the state capital, Goldsberry spotted a group of Resident whales. He used aircraft and exploded seal bombs to force six killer whales into a waiting net at Budd Inlet. The spring afternoon had drawn many boaters onto the water that day, including Ralph Munro, an aide to Governor Dan Evans, who witnessed the whole thing.
“It was gruesome as they closed the net. You could hear the whales screaming,” Munro said later. “Goldsberry kept dropping explosives to drive the whales back into the net.”3
