by David Kirby
Even when they were not challenging each other through the restraints of the gates, some whales passed the time fighting boredom by simply chewing on the bars, or on the corners of the concrete pools. Several times Jeff and John discovered teeth or fragments of teeth on the bottom of the tanks, especially near the gates.
All that breakage left a lot of exposed tooth pulp. If left untreated, decaying pulp can form a large cavity that becomes plugged with food. Impacted food can cause infection and inflammation and possibly harm an animal’s immune and cardiovascular systems. Most orcas at SeaWorld were relatively young; the roots of many of their teeth were still too immature to accommodate a root canal, as it was explained to John and Jeff.
John sometimes assisted in drilling Gudrun’s teeth. She was trained to submit to the awful procedure just like any other behavior—with a lot of positive reinforcement. First she was asked to put her chin on the deck. Then the trainers would show Gudrun the high-speed drill—a handheld Dremel like those used around the house—then reinforce her by rubbing her fins or giving her some fish. They would touch the drill bit to her tooth, without turning the machine on, reinforcing Gudrun once again. Next they touched the bit to her tooth and turned it on at the lowest speed, so she would feel it and hear it just slightly, followed by more reinforcement. Finally they started to drill.
They then made a hole through the pulp and into the jaw in what is known in dentistry as a pulpotomy. The whales hated it and often refused to submit to the drill by sinking down beneath the surface, shaking their heads violently, or breaking from control and swimming away. The staff knew it was a successful drill when blood started to bubble out from the bore hole. Once drilled out, the hollow teeth needed to be flushed—or “irrigated”—with a solution of iodine and saline water three times a day. Otherwise, abscesses, bacterial infections, and systemic sepsis might set in, and possibly much worse. In humans, poor dental health can lead to heart disease, pneumonia, stroke, or heart attack. SeaWorld called it “superior dental care.”
Most whales did not seem to mind the regular tooth irrigation, probably because they were heavily rewarded (fed) for participating. Food and other materials in the cavity might have been irritating them as well. Each time John flushed out an orca’s teeth, all matter of detritus came spilling out. Sometimes he extracted strips of killer whale skin from the borehole—curled up like black string—possibly from Tilikum or another subdominant whale subjected to frequent raking.
Jeff and John were slowly coming to accept that life at SeaWorld was just too stressful for killer whales, though some animals seemed to handle confinement better than others. Katina, for example, was always businesslike and ready to follow signals consistently and predictably. But other animals were not so reliable.
Taima was the least predictable water-work whale in Orlando. Strong-willed and independent, she would break from control during sessions far more often than the others, then go off and do her own thing. The impetuous Taima had many “fuck-you” moments, Jeff liked to joke, as in “Fuck you, I’m not going to do the bow you just asked for, I’m going to swim circles on my back instead.”
Taima had always been different. As an infant, she had grabbed the ponytails of female trainers, who were subsequently told to keep their hair in a bun. Taima also “mouthed” the arms and legs of trainers, meaning that she gently bit down on them but caused no harm. Nobody was terribly alarmed by it—the calf wasn’t being aggressive, just playful and experimental. It was “exploring” behavior, in SeaWorld’s perpetually cheerful argot. But it still needed to go. Senior trainers worked intensively with Taima to stop the mouthing. It was not a complete success. She still pulled the outer layer of socks from Jeff’s feet while he was working with her in the water. She was also known to bump trainers and other whales in the pool. Taima was still the most likely whale at Shamu to go “off behavior.”
Losing control of a killer whale was not always as serious as it sounded—usually it meant the animal swam off by herself, ignored calls to return to stage, mouthed trainers or their clothing, or something of that order. But loss of control could also potentially lead to danger. Trainers worked diligently to reduce the number of unpredictable interactions. SeaWorld was able to maintain control over the killer whales in the vast majority of interactions conducted each year in the various parks.
This impressive and reassuring record didn’t hold true for Taima. She was too crafty, too self-absorbed to be that predictable. She was a handful and broke from control more freely than her tankmates. Despite that, or perhaps even because of it, Jeff secretly considered Taima his favorite whale—a freethinker, she was; a personality with whom he could relate.
The best way to maintain control over trained animals is to remain hyperobservant of everything in the environment that might interfere—other trainers, other animals, distractions in the crowd, even the weather in an outdoor stadium. The trainer must also constantly monitor the animal for any “precursor” of going off behavior, especially if it could lead to aggression. Aggressive precursors might include visual cues such as a widening of the eyes, an open mouth, or jaw-popping; or precursors might be spitting food at a trainer or ignoring hand signals, water slaps, or calls to return to stage.
Recognizing a precursor in time did not guarantee that the trainer could defuse aggressive behavior. Sometimes, social stress or changes in the environment produced completely unpredictable behavior—some of it potentially aggressive. Some whales were more prone to such stress-induced loss of control, such as Tilikum. When frustrated by stimuli around him, Tilly could suddenly display a host of aggressive and dangerous behaviors, such as mouthing the concrete stage, vocalizing in threatening tones, banging on gates with his head, even lunging up from the water at his control trainer during practice or exercise sessions. Tilikum was also inconsistent with “separations”—it was difficult to make him leave a pool when he did not want to go.
Tilikum also became stressed after spending too much time with the females. Ironically, he became agitated after prolonged separation from them, especially if visual access to his tankmates was blocked. He was highly averse to change in his environment, but he also disliked repetition during learning sessions. When bored during a session, he would repeatedly give incorrect responses, to express his displeasure, much as Hyak had done with Paul Spong in Vancouver when he refused to respond to the same piece of music twice.
Tilikum reacted better to some trainers than others, and his bond with John Jett was evident. John loved and trusted the huge whale. He put his hands on the big bull daily. He actually grew to feel sorry for the guy. “He’s just a big, misunderstood puppy dog,” John once remarked to Jeff. “He’s very subdominant. He gets picked on all the time, and he has nowhere to run.”
Mostly, John thought, Tilikum was bored in the extreme. John felt this killer whale needed him, needed his companionship. John thought he had made a difference in Tilly’s life.
Even Katina had her bad moments. She had once mouthed a trainer’s waist and on other occasions bumped her head into a hip, a torso, or a hand. Once, she pushed a trainer around the pool inappropriately.
Katina had other issues. She was highly protective of new calves, especially while doing water work, and would often try to separate a youngster from a trainer by swimming between them. Katina at times also “displaced” (rammed from the side like a pushing foul in basketball) other whales to demonstrate her dominance. She routinely displaced Tilikum when she was left with him for extended periods.
Sometimes Katina showed outright chutzpah, especially around newcomers, engaging in fuck-you moments of her own. Instead of working with someone, she might refuse to make eye contact, slink beneath the surface, play with her food, or refuse to open her mouth for fish. Katina was so bossy that, when she decided she didn’t want to cooperate, she could actually force the other whales into disobedience, as well. Those who still followed their trainers’ signals, despite her lead, received a harsh displacement fr
om the queen.
But even Katina had to defend her status at times. In 1994, her daughter Kalina, the original Baby Shamu, returned to the pools of Orlando after spending four and a half years on tour in Ohio, San Diego, and then Texas. Kalina was nine years old. She had left one calf behind in Texas and was pregnant for a second time.
When Kalina returned to Florida, she began fighting with her own mother for dominance.6 Katina put down the rebellion, but the insubordination was unheard of in whale society—at least in the wild. Jeff located a copy of Kalina’s official Animal Profile and discovered that Baby Shamu had developed an entire repertoire of behavioral issues while on tour across the country.
Among the things that might upset the young star, according to her profile, were “major environmental and social changes, unclear/confusing situations, divided attention,” and (rather ironically given her travels and many truncated relationships) “long term separation.”
Kalina had several “aggressive tendencies” as well. “When excited or confused, she may slide over, push or bow over her trainer in the water,” the document warned. “[She] will aggressively and physically displace less dominant whales when frustrated, confused or sees an imbalance in attention.” While playing with toys or trainers, Kalina had also “shown extreme excitement to borderline ‘aggression.’ Aggression involves anything from slight bumping or sliding over her trainer to a complete bow over her trainer.” She also “opened her mouth on trainers” on several occasions.
Despite these many incidents and reports, the trainers at Shamu Stadium still felt out of harm’s way. As long as they remained consistent, confident, and void of wishy-washy reinforcements, they were taught, as long as they kept a few strategic steps ahead of the animal, they would be successful—and safe. It had still not crossed their minds that working in the water with killer whales might be dangerous.
After all, whenever something did happen, and someone got hurt, most people at SeaWorld assumed that the trainer, not the animal, was to blame.
One day John was practicing a new behavior with Katina in preparation for a show. He had been approved for water work, though not the hotdogging aerial feats. Jeff and their mutual friend Mark Simmons did much of that around Shamu Stadium. Mark, strong, lean, and well built, and also a gifted artist, was probably the most talented and experienced orca hotdogger at SeaWorld and one of its biggest stars. Jeff loved doing combo sequences with his friend. Mark was expert at synchronizing the stand-ons and rocket hops the two would perform in unison. It always dazzled the crowd. John, meanwhile, was allowed to do some of the less intensive behaviors, such as a “foot push,” which ended in a spectacular “hydro-slide” across the main stage.
On this practice run, Katina began shunting John around the water by his feet with her rostrum. He rode the force of her flukes on his belly like the prow of a ski boat, a wake of white water dividing at his chest. The audiences loved this behavior. There was something exciting, but also comical about seeing a grown man being pushed around the water by fifty-five hundred pounds of deadly beast. It was part Texas rodeo, part Gilligan’s Island.
John and Katina did a full lap around the tank. When they approached the stage, Katina already knew what to do. She gave John an extra push and he sailed toward the smooth, wet platform—chest first, arms outstretched. The idea was to slide across the smooth, wet concrete on his belly as if gliding on ice, from one end of the stage to the other, fly off the far end, and slip back into the water like a penguin.
But something went wrong. It might have been the speed, the angle, or the distance from the stage when John launched from Katina’s nose, but he heard a loud whack as his hip smashed into the edge of the concrete stage. John had to hobble around in pain for the rest of the day. As he explained to Jeff later that evening, “I decided it was better to suck it up and not say anything, than risk being sidelined from the show and labeled a whiner.”
“No big deal,” he said to the other trainers, trying to laugh off the incident as a rookie’s mistake. Mark Simmons helped him limp offstage. “It was probably just my own miscalculation,” John told him. Fortunately it was a Friday: John could take the weekend to recuperate. But in the years to come, he would suffer from chronic back inflammation and undergo major surgery to fuse three vertebrae with titanium rods, screws, and spacers. He could never prove it, but John suspected the cause was that collision with the stage.
John was eventually able to shake off his pain—and his doubts about worker safety at SeaWorld. But his days of denial and rationalization about the welfare of the animals were coming to an end.
“You know, every day I go in to work, it becomes more painful for me to see these animals in this environment,” John confided in his buddy Jeff over beers at a local pub. “But I keep telling myself that maybe my presence is going to make their lives better. And I really do try to make their lives better, especially Tilikum. I work as hard as I can for that poor guy.”
17
Blood in the Water
The more that Naomi read through the files at HSUS, the angrier she became. Though she never regretted the hours she’d spent watching killer whale shows and going backstage to spend time with Hyak in Vancouver, she was shocked to learn how challenging life could be for captive orcas, and how risky—and in her mind stupid—it was for humans to get in the water with them.
Naomi had no idea that killer whales died so often, and so young, as they did in captivity. The carnage ran counter to everything that SeaWorld and other aquatic theme parks had been telling the public. At first blush, the industry’s contention that animals lived longer in captivity than in the wild made a certain degree of sense. Some animals did live longer in zoos than in their natural environments, including zebras, giraffes, and several species of bears, primates, snakes, and birds.
For top predators such as orcas, one might reasonably think that a controlled environment would increase their survivability. At SeaWorld, killer whales were shielded against pollution, boat propellers, and hunger caused by declining stocks of prey, while given world-class veterinary care, constant human attention, and all that restaurant-quality fish. Supposedly liberated from the threats of illness, famine, and physical injury, popular thinking expected them to live longer.
But as Naomi gradually combed through the papers at HSUS, she realized that SeaWorld’s gauzy prescription for contentment did not take into account the stress of captivity, which seemed to increase the risk of physical and mental disorders that can produce immune dysfunction, infections, reproductive problems, and potentially lethal aggression among the whales.
Since its passage in 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) required all public display facilities to keep a running log of every marine mammal it held, including date of birth or capture—and date and cause of death. Known as the Marine Mammal Inventory Report (MMIR), it remains a helpful tool for animal welfare advocates, even though it lists no details on the animal’s demise other than the cause of death. However, these details were in the necropsy reports submitted to NMFS and publicly accessible. Newspaper articles in the files fleshed out more details, though media accounts were sparse in earlier years.
Since the beginning of the orca display industry, dozens of captive killer whale deaths were reported at aquariums around the world, mostly in the United States, Canada, Iceland, and Japan. Twenty of the deaths were at SeaWorld, not counting stillbirths and miscarriages.1
The first killer whale death in the inventory was a female named Kandu, back in June 1971. Kandu was one of the Southern Resident K-pod members nabbed in Yukon Harbor, Washington, by Ted Griffin in 1967. She had been towed back to Seattle with four other young whales, including Kilroy, Ramu, and “Walter,” who would later be renamed Skana by the Vancouver Aquarium—the animal Paul Spong worked with.
There was little information on Kandu’s death in the federal inventory report, other than the cause—pneumonia and liver necrosis—and her approximate age, which was six. Kandu had
survived for just four years in captivity.2
Just two months later, also in San Diego, death claimed the world-famous Shamu.3 The original Shamu was initially captured as a mate for Griffin’s pet, Namu, but was determined to be too young for that role. She was then sold to SeaWorld. Shamu died of a condition known as pyometra, which usually afflicts unspayed cats and dogs, not whales. When the hormone progesterone comes in contact with the uterus during estrus (ovulation), it can cause rapid cell proliferation of the uterine lining. Bacteria from the vagina and/or vulva then rise into the uterus, leading to acute infection and, in this case, septicemia (blood poisoning).
The great Shamu—the iconic star whose trademarked name would live on forever—passed away on August 29, 1971, after six years in captivity. She was only about nine years old—as opposed to the fifty-to-eighty-year life expectancy of wild female orcas.
Shamu’s death was followed by that of Frankie, a male from L pod who succumbed in San Diego in January 1974, of influenza and pneumonia, after only five months in captivity (at about age twelve);4 and in December 1974 by that of Canuck, a J-pod male probably less than four years old. He died of a systemic fungal infection after just two and half years in captivity.5 Canuck had the dubious distinction of being the first killer whale to die in Orlando, Florida—some forty miles from the sea.
In 1975, Kandu III died of nephritis and uremia—swollen kidneys and kidney failure, causing urea and other waste products to remain in the blood, instead of being excreted through urine.6 The condition can be caused by toxins, infection, and autoimmune diseases. Kandu was approximately seven years old and had survived at SeaWorld for four years. She was a member of L pod in the Southern Resident community, captured with two other young whales, Kandu II and Kona, in 1971 near Penn Cove, Washington.
