by David Kirby
Kona was the next to go, in September 1977. She died of septicemia at about twelve years of age after six years in captivity.7 (The other whale caught with Kandu III and Kona—Kandu II—died at Marineland Ontario in Canada in October 1979 after eight years in captivity, at about age eleven.)8 Kona was followed by the female Sandy, who passed away one month later of cerebral hemorrhage (bleeding of the brain), at about age eleven. Sandy had been stranded and rescued on the Washington coast in 1973 and taken to Seattle Aquarium, where she almost died when three boys shoved a metal rod into her blowhole.9
The list went on. This was beginning to look like a massacre: SeaWorld was a slow-motion death machine for killer whales. Kilroy, a male from K pod, died in San Diego in 1978 of gangrenous pneumonia, at about thirteen years of age, eleven and a half of them in captivity.10 In 1981, also in San Diego, SeaWorld lost its first Icelandic killer whale, Canuck II, who died from chronic kidney disease at about age six, after four years in captivity.11 The next year, Ramu passed away at SeaWorld Florida. The K pod member died in January 1982 of cardiopulmonary decomposition after a remarkable fifteen years in captivity.12 At the approximate age of eighteen, he was the oldest orca so far to die at SeaWorld.
In January of 1986 SeaWorld’s second killer whale born in captivity arrived in San Diego. It was Kenau’s calf. SeaWorld naturally called the newcomer Baby Shamu 2. But the infant died of heart failure just eleven days later.13
Three months after that, San Diego lost its great breeding bull, the Southern Resident Winston, who had been captured in the notorious Penn Cove, Washington, roundup of 1970, when his dead relatives were found with anchors, chains, and slit bellies. Winston died of heart failure in April 1986 at approximately nineteen years of age.14 He had survived in captivity for fifteen and a half years. “He was showing signs of age, as any animal would,” Lanny Cornell, SeaWorld’s zoological director, told the media.
The following year, in October 1987, the Icelandic whale Kona II died in Orlando of a lung abscess, at about age twelve.15
Over the next five years, SeaWorld would sustain another seven killer whale deaths, plus two stillborn calves and at least one miscarriage. Naomi, however, knew it was uncommon for whales in Johnstone Strait to die in their teens or twenties.
The company had owned just two Transients in its killer whale collection, and both of them died in 1990. The original Nootka passed away in San Diego on March 13 of pyogranulomatous pneumonia, in which the lungs become a mass of inflamed tissue, often associated with ulcerated infections. She was about twenty years old and had been in captivity for nearly her entire life.16
Just six months later, in September, the moody bull Kanduke died in Orlando, reportedly of bacterial pneumonia. Kanduke couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
Eight months after Kanduke’s demise, in May 1991, the female Kahana was found dead in a back pool at SeaWorld San Antonio.17 She had smashed her head against the concrete wall and hemorrhaged to death. SeaWorld later revealed that Kahana had a brain tumor, which park officials said drove her to such bizarre behavior. But critics questioned whether aggression by the two other whales in the pool had anything to do with the bloody incident. Kahana had been in captivity for twelve and a half years and was estimated to be about fourteen.
Early the next year a female Icelandic orca named Samoa, approximately twelve, began showing bizarre and repetitive behaviors. Guests at the park reported watching in horror as she repeatedly hurled herself out of the water and crashed down onto the concrete surface of a slide-out area. (SeaWorld staff claimed to have never observed this.)18 Samoa was pregnant and was in labor when she died in March 1992. Her calf also perished.19 Samoa was the first killer whale to die at SeaWorld while giving birth, but certainly not the last.
There were more animal files jammed with information, including documents on three of the highest-profile orca deaths ever at SeaWorld.
First was Orky II, the great Northern Resident male, probably from the A5 pod, whom a teenage Naomi had seen performing at Marineland in LA. He died at SeaWorld San Diego in September 1988—just three days after visitors witnessed the live birth of his calf, Orkid, by the female Kandu. The birth happened during a performance.
Orky II, who was about thirty, had been wasting away. Despite veterinary intervention, he had lost four thousand pounds, or one-third his weight, in just a few months. One morning he refused his breakfast and instead chose to swim in tight circles in the middle of the pool. He vomited, lost balance, and listed to one side, made agonizing vocalizations as he tried to breathe, then plummeted to the bottom and died.20
Unconfirmed reports said that Orky’s trainer was afraid of him and used food deprivation as punishment against the whale when he showed signs of aggression. After he started losing weight, Orky was given massive amounts of food, but could still not gain weight. SeaWorld’s necropsy report said he died from kidney failure, which would not have been helped by the increased food he received at the end of his life. The organ damage was already done.
Orky made national headlines. “The death leaves the amusement park chain with only one proven breeding male among its 12 surviving whales, dealing a blow to the breeding program it hopes will supply killer whales for shows at the park,” the Los Angeles Times noted. Orky had been so critical to that breeding program that SeaWorld had reportedly paid $23.4 million to buy Marineland of the Pacific in 1987. SeaWorld’s owner, publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which bought the chain of parks in 1976, promised not to move the whales from LA. But three weeks later, Orky and Corky were on a truck bed packed with ice water heading south on Interstate 405, the San Diego Freeway. HBJ shuttered Marineland soon after.
While they were at Marineland, Orky and Corky had produced seven offspring, but two were stillborn and the others died shortly after birth. The apparent reason was “at least partly because Corky, isolated from other females, didn’t know how to treat a calf,” the Los Angeles Times said.
Then the most shocking orca death took place on August 21, 1989, in front of thousands of horrified fans, again in San Diego.21 It involved Corky II and Kandu V, an Icelandic female about fourteen years of age. (In 1987 witnesses reported that Kandu violently collided into Corky, leaving a three-foot-gash along Corky’s stomach.)
Kandu had been resting in a back pool with her one-year-old calf, Orkid, along with Corky. Corky had shown undue interest in the calf, something that agitated Kandu intensely. Though younger and smaller than the twenty-five-year-old Corky, Kandu had exerted dominance over her from the beginning. On this day, she engaged in a “normal, socially induced act of aggression to assert her dominance over Corky,” according to Dr. James F. McBain, Kandu’s veterinarian at SeaWorld.22
Kandu slammed her head into Corky, severing a major artery in Kandu’s upper jaw. Blood stained the back pool and a ten-foot geyser of crimson spouted from Kandu’s blowhole. Over the next forty-five minutes Kandu bled to death as SeaWorld staff and the audience looked on in helpless distress.
Captivity opponents blamed SeaWorld for the disaster. Again they argued how stressful and unnatural it was for orcas to be confined to a tank with other whales with whom they shared nothing in common. Captive whales fought so violently because they had no place to run.
The activist group Greenpeace was the harshest critic of Kandu’s death. Benjamin D. Deeble, an ocean ecologist for the group, contended that Corky and Kandu had been aggressive toward each other from the beginning and should have been separated years ago. This type of attack went well beyond the ritualistic displays of aggression found in the wild. Kandu’s death was a sign of things gone wrong at SeaWorld, he said.
“Even a four-million-gallon enclosure is a tiny pool for killer whales, because these animals in the wild swim over a hundred miles a day,” Deeble told The New York Times in a major article on the incident. “An orca in captivity is like an eagle in a parakeet cage.” Greenpeace had long opposed captivity for orcas because they “almost invariably” died within ei
ght years of capture, he said, adding that females lived up to eighty years in nature and males could reach fifty.
SeaWorld had rejected the allegations.
“The problem was that Kandu fatally damaged herself in the process of doing this ritualized biting to Corky, which she has always done periodically,” SeaWorld vet James McBain told The New York Times. “The fracture was literally a freak of the position and point of impact—everything came together to produce a rare outcome.”
As for the longevity issue, SeaWorld officials trotted out the “we still don’t know” line. “There’s a big dispute about that, and the truth be told, we won’t know until killer whales are reared in captivity,” spokeswoman Corrine Brindley told the Times. “There are studies that suggest killers live about thirty years in the wild and in controlled environments.”
Plenty of evidence showed that SeaWorld’s thirty-year estimate was way off the mark, but park officials simply chose to ignore it—at least publicly.
Kandu’s death was enormous news in San Diego, where the city’s two hometown papers had different takes on the captivity debate that inevitably followed the tragedy.
The San Diego Union’s lead editorial on August 25, 1989, declared Kandu’s death a freak accident, even though “the effects of unnatural confinement cannot lightly be dismissed. After all, in the spaciousness of the natural ocean environment, the challenged female, Corky, might have had room to swim away and avoid the encounter.”
But that kind of criticism had to be balanced by “the unquestionable scientific and educational benefits” conferred by keeping orcas in captivity, the Union insisted. “Educating the public through entertainment does a greater service to marine mammals than scientific research alone.” Moreover, Kandu’s death would help because it “added to our store of knowledge. As long as the animals were treated well and studied for the benefit of the entire species,” the editorial declared, “there is no need to curtail popular programs such as those pioneered by SeaWorld.”
Over at the Tribune, the editors had agreed that zoos and aquariums were vital “in a world that grows ever more threatening to creatures in the wild,” thanks to their education, research, and conservation programs. But there was a “thin line between education and entertainment, between legitimate research and exploitation,” the Tribune cautioned. “What we should enjoy, perhaps, is not their performance, but the mere fact of their existence. That, we believe, is wonder enough.”
Not just the media was beginning to sour on Shamu. Even some of SeaWorld’s leading supporters were getting sick of all the whale deaths.
When Kenau died during a stillbirth in Orlando on August 6, 1991, it sparked a wave of outrage among some fans. One file contained a letter mailed to HSUS at the time from Yvonne Alldredge, a SeaWorld “Founder Club” member from San Antonio: “I write this with heavy heart and yet the determination at this time to express my sadness and yes, anger over the tragic death of Kenau.” Alldredge said she had tried to justify the “fish bowl conditions” at SeaWorld because, otherwise, so many people would never get to see a killer whale in person.
But, she asked, “When is enough, enough? Is it after all the orcas in captivity are indeed dead?” Kenau’s second calf, Kayla, had been taken away when the infant was only two and “I feel Kenau died from stress related symptoms of losing her daughter. Perhaps her big heart either broke, or perhaps she wasn’t about to give SeaWorld the gift of another child.… As Dian Fossey so passionately replied upon learning of the death of a captive baby gorilla: ‘Good for her.’”
Were orcas better off dead than held at SeaWorld? Naomi wasn’t sure, but the capacity for cruelty in the human species was certainly striking.
As she reviewed the files over time, Naomi noticed a number of articles, reports, and other documents on killer whales’ aggression against their trainers. She could tell it was going to be another eye-opening topic. “Aggression expressed by killer whales toward their trainers is a matter of grave concern,” wrote respected veterinarian Jay C. Sweeney in the CRC Handbook of Marine Mammal Medicine. Such aggression, he said, had resulted in “butting, biting, grabbing, dunking, and holding trainers on the bottom of pools and preventing their escape,” and many situations caused “potentially life-threatening incidents.”
Since the 1960s, numerous incidents had occurred with orca trainers. Many more of them, activists had charged, were covered up, except when brave trainers or members of the public spoke to the press. SeaWorld and other park venues seemed to play down the acts, calling them bizarre accidents, just as when Kandu mortally attacked Corky.
Many early incidents were poorly documented, some based on hearsay. Others appeared to be cases of young whales playing a bit too roughly, or genuine accidents caused by miscues during a performance.
The first fully documented act of aggression by a SeaWorld orca happened in San Diego on April 20, 1971. The original Shamu, just four months before she died, was in a publicity stunt gone terribly wrong. A young secretary named Annette Eckis had been convinced by SeaWorld’s PR department to put on a bikini and ride around on the back of Shamu for local newspapers and television stations.23
The tank was small, its diameter perhaps three times wider than Shamu was long, akin to a backyard aboveground pool. The nineteen-year-old gingerly climbed from the edge of the pool onto the back of the whale, who began slowly moving around the perimeter. The young woman reached behind with her arm to grab hold of Shamu’s dorsal fin. As they swam around in tight circles, Annette began to enjoy the ride. Shamu soon grew uneasy and began thrashing about violently, churning the water into a four-foot chop. She shook off Annette, who struggled to tread the churning salt water.
Then Shamu grabbed her legs. Annette was inside the whale’s mouth, sitting on the bottom row of teeth with the top row biting down on her. She grabbed Shamu’s rostrum for balance and screamed for help as the orca spun furiously around her tiny tank.
When rescue divers tried to enter the water, Shamu blocked them and responded by biting down harder on Annette’s legs. Every so often, she headed for the bottom, bringing the terrified secretary underwater with her. Annette thought she was going to drown. (The ordeal, recorded in horrific detail by the news crews, now appears on YouTube, capturing the screams and look of pure terror on Annette’s face as Shamu brutally assaulted her.)
Workers hoisted a pole over the water and pulled Annette to the edge. She was panting and out of breath, but she grabbed the wall and held it with the little strength she had left. It looked as if she were going to make it out.
But Shamu had other plans.
The whale surged back up from underneath the water and clamped down once again on Annette’s bloody thighs. She shrieked in fear. Eventually rescuers pried Shamu’s jaws open with a pole to free the legs and yanked Annette from the tank. The lacerations and puncture wounds that covered Annette from the waist down required two hundred stitches.
“There was a lot of blood, but there was no pain. The water was cold and I was in shock for quite a while,” Annette said later. Only after the attack did she learn that Shamu had never been ridden by a female before, and never by anyone not in a wet suit.
Naomi had some sympathy for the victim, but none for SeaWorld. It was a foolish thing to do, especially to get publicity. But back then, perhaps no one actually realized that.
The next attack had come in 1974 at the Windsor Safari Park in England. Four-year-old Winston (called Ramu at the time) lunged out of the water at his trainer, Doug Cartlidge, and tried to pull him into the water from the platform.24
In 1978, Orky II took twenty-seven-year-old trainer Jill Stratton to the bottom of the pool at Marineland of the Pacific and pinned her there for four agonizing minutes, before finally releasing her. Stratton, who nearly drowned, was hospitalized for three days. Upon release, she told reporters that she was “not angry” with the whale.25
Trainers at Marineland stopped doing water work with Orky II, who was eventually sent d
own to SeaWorld San Diego along with Corky II. The introduction was chaotic for the newcomers, and for the other orcas already at SeaWorld. Orky had suddenly been commanded to perform with several trainers in the water at once. He’d never done that at Marineland.
Some trainers had grumbled that management was rushing them. They alleged that SeaWorld was in a rush to “break in” Orky and get trainers in the water with him as soon as possible. Even Robert K. Gault Jr., who was then SeaWorld’s president, admitted to reporters that management “may have overemphasized” the importance of entertainment over safety, adding, “We did not have enough experienced trainers.”26
In 1984, SeaWorld San Diego had three incidents, two of them involving Kandu V. On February 24, the Icelandic female grabbed trainer Joanne Hay in her jaws and shoved the woman against a wall, holding her there for several moments.27 That November, forty-five-hundred-pound Kandu seized the legs of trainer Georgia Jones during a show but did not bite down.28 On August 12, also during a show, two unidentified whales clamped down on the legs of trainer Bud Krames and pinned him against the Plexiglas retaining wall. He suffered only bruises.29
There was another worrisome rash of incidents in 1986, two of them at Marineland Ontario in Canada. One male trainer tumbled from the back of a young male, named Kandu VII, during a performance. The whale then dragged him around the pool. Meanwhile, a four-year-old female named Nootka V smacked a trainer in the head with her pectoral fin, also in front of an audience. One former staff person alleged that Nootka V would routinely shoot out of the water aggressively to whack people standing close to the edge.30
That same year, on November 16, 1986, in San Diego, Kandu V pressed her rostrum against a trainer, Mark Beeler, in front of hundreds of tourists, pushing him against a wall for a moment.31
In 1987, Naomi would learn, things at SeaWorld San Diego spiraled out of control.
