by David Kirby
The troubles had begun in March. Jonathan Smith, a twenty-one-year-old business major at Point Loma Nazarene College, was doing water work with several orcas in front of thousands of fans when, without warning, an unnamed killer whale pulled him into its mouth, dove thirty-two feet to the pool’s bottom, held him there for two and a half minutes, smashed him against the floor of the tank, then carried him bruised and bleeding to the surface, unceremoniously spitting him out. Smith, a consummate performer, waved to the crowd, trying to reassure them that all was well.
Then another whale slammed into him. Smith continued to pretend to be unharmed. The whales pushed and dragged him back to the bottom of the pool. Now the crowd was no longer fooled: This was a real emergency. Other trainers scurried to the water’s edge, banging pails and brandishing food in an effort to distract the whales. Smith eventually managed to climb out of the pool, exhausted and battered. His torso was lacerated on the front, back, and sides, his kidney was ruptured, and his liver had a six-inch laceration. He spent nine days recovering in the hospital.32
Smith was a rookie at Shamu Stadium. He’d been transferred from the seal and otter show only a few weeks before. Even so, nobody could explain the attack. Some experts speculated that Smith’s seal-like wet suit set off a hunting instinct of sorts. It was typical seal-killing behavior, but no one could provide a definitive explanation for what triggered it. Chief trainer David Butcher, however, played down the attack as mere roughhousing. “These guys were playing and got a little carried away and bumped into Jon,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
In June, SeaWorld trainer Joanne Webber, twenty-eight, was rehearsing with Kandu V when the whale let all three tons of her body land directly on top of Webber in the water. She was pulled from the pool with a broken neck and suffered permanent loss of head movement.33 Court papers from the ensuing lawsuit revealed that Webber said Kandu often exhibited “extreme characteristics of aggression when frustrated. She does occasionally bite and aggressively rake other whales.”
A little later that summer, trainer Chris Barlow was rammed in the stomach during a performance, sending him to the hospital,34 and an orca bit Mark McHugh on the hand as he was feeding the animal.35
Naomi was astounded to learn that no less than twelve SeaWorld San Diego trainers were injured by killer whales during a four-month period between August and November 1987.36 It seemed as though the captive whales had decided, all at once, to start biting back. But one more incident was still to happen before the dangerous year limped to a close.
On November 21, twenty-six-year old trainer John Sillick was riding on a female named Nootka I when Orky II slammed down on top of him. It took six operations over fourteen months to put him back together again, with the help of three pounds of pins, plates, and screws, including a plate in his pelvis. All the vertebrae in his neck had to be permanently fused.37
Some experts speculated that Orky may have been responding to another trainer’s (perceived) signal to breach. Court documents were sealed, but the judge’s remarks were not. They showed that Orky may have suffered from “visual limitations” that had not been disclosed to the trainer.38
Either way, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich had seen enough. Even though it took an extreme accident like John Sillick’s, SeaWorld finally made some fundamental changes.
Company chairman William Jovanovich went to San Diego to take command. He ordered trainers to get off the whales, and to stay out of the water entirely. It would be “dry work” only from that point on, he decreed. He also sacked chief trainer David Butcher, SeaWorld San Diego president Jan Schultz, and longtime zoological director and veterinarian Lanny Cornell. Thad Lacinak was installed as the new VP and corporate animal curator.39
But six months later, trainers were back in the pools doing water work with the orcas. Why the policy change? Some critics noted that SeaWorld’s twenty-fifth anniversary was fast approaching and the park needed a dazzling new show for Shamu Stadium.
Then the lawsuits were filed. Jonathan Smith’s lawyer charged that SeaWorld and HBJ “negligently and carelessly owned, maintained, trained, inspected, controlled, supervised, located, transported and placed” the killer whales, exposing Smith to serious injury. Smith’s superiors had concealed the “dangerous propensity of killer whales” and instead “induced” him into the water. The lawsuit accused SeaWorld of telling Smith it was safe to swim with the killer whales, even with little or no training, all the while “knowing well that killer whales have a dangerous propensity for attacking, ramming, dragging and smashing people.” Management had assured Smith that the killer whales were “gentle.” He was suing the defendants for fraud, battery, and emotional distress as well.40
Sillick and Webber also filed suits. All three were settled out of court, with gag orders imposed as part of the settlement agreements. Years later, Naomi regretted that society could never learn or benefit from the thousands of pages of prepared evidence those files must have contained.
Following the spate of dangerous events in San Diego in 1987, the media again began taking note of all the blood in the water, including a New York Times article that said the injuries had left the company with “some profound questions”:
Why did [the whales] turn on two of their trainers, nearly killing them? Are these highly intelligent ocean creatures happy spending their lives in a big tank doing stunts for human audiences? Does the human species have the right to confine them for entertainment and profit, or even research? What, in short, is the proper relationship between the two most highly evolved species in the planet’s two biological realms, land and sea?
The article said some experts considered orcas to be so “emotionally sensitive” that, “like humans, they get ulcers when unhappy and depressed.”
18
The Case Against
The second half of 1993 was a high-pressure period in Naomi Rose’s life. In early June she was still unpacking at her new Maryland apartment and adapting to her career as an animal advocate/scientist. These were uncharted waters for the recently minted doctor. She had a lot to learn in woefully little time—not only about captive killer whales, but also about the byzantine ways of Washington and its satellite community of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs in Beltway-speak.
Naomi was by no means only working on orca issues. As the marine mammal scientist at HSUS, she was drawn into a wide range of issues and controversies ranging from the Japanese drive fisheries (which slaughtered hundreds of whales and dolphins a year) to the sport hunting of polar bears, from “swim with the dolphin” programs (which critics charged were unhealthy for dolphins and risky for people) to noisy human activity in the ocean and its impact on marine mammals.
Meanwhile, HSUS president Paul Irwin and Naomi’s boss, John Grandy, vice president for wildlife and habitat protection, were keen to ride the publicity bandwagon that was sure to follow the release of the movie Free Willy as it opened that summer in theaters across the country. The pending premiere, they told her, was an unprecedented opportunity for HSUS to highlight the darker side of confining whales to aquariums and theme parks. HSUS had hired Naomi, she knew, in part to help the society launch its new anti-captivity campaign for marine mammals.
Free Willy was a quintessential Hollywood heart-warmer about a troubled teen who bonds with a killer whale, played by the orca Keiko (KAY-koh). Willy is languishing in a substandard aquarium, where the boy teaches the beast to perform tricks. But progress is slow and Willy’s owner decides to kill the whale and collect on the $1 million insurance policy. That’s when the race to free Willy begins. The film, despite having no major stars, was already getting great buzz from the entertainment press as a family classic.
Naomi was asked to prepare a report that Paul Irwin could release to the media on the opening weekend of Free Willy. She was to gather published data on the well-being of captive cetaceans versus those in the wild and condense it into a handout for the press.
The movie premiere was scheduled for Frid
ay, July 16. Naomi had six weeks.
To Naomi, the case against killer whales in captivity was a slam dunk. She could now name twenty orcas that had died at SeaWorld—and many more at other facilities. In addition to that, she knew, more than a dozen whales had attacked a trainer or another whale. Those facts alone were irrefutable evidence that captivity was unsuitable for these animals.
Still, even more anti-captivity ammunition was stockpiled in the HSUS armory—in addition to the published literature—to aim at the public display industry. The more Naomi learned about captivity, the more it infuriated her. She had definitely made the right career choice: These whales needed advocacy; they needed a voice.
Naomi began wondering how much captivity was contributing to abnormal behavior in killer whales. That was difficult to quantify scientifically. First, what was “normal” when speaking about intelligent and highly adaptable social animals, including humans? After all, it was once considered “normal” for Egyptian royals to marry their siblings and for Europeans to enslave Africans. Today, many people love eating beef and consider it part of everyday life, while many Hindus find that practice barbaric.
Whether a whale’s behavior was normal or not could be somewhat subjective. But it was a fact that no killer whale had ever been reported to have killed a human in the wild, or even seriously attacked a human in the wild, and no killer whale had ever been known to be killed in a fight with another whale. All three of those things had happened in captivity. Based on that alone, Naomi was ready to say that it was not okay to keep them locked up in tanks.
Was the excessive aggression a sign of impaired mental health? Not necessarily. Naomi believed there was something abnormal about the close proximity of life in a pool, and that putting strange animals together in a confined space with nowhere to run—and then throwing people into the mix—could clearly be dangerous.
On the other hand, it was impossible to rule out mental illness in some of the captives. From what Naomi had observed and read, certain whales had grown neurotic after many years in a tank. Tilikum was spending much of his time in Orlando floating alone in his pool, practically motionless. “When you see a solitary whale like that, endlessly floating around, not swimming but just logging at the surface for hours at a time, when he would normally be traveling for miles with his family,” Naomi told colleagues, “it seems perfectly reasonable to compare that to someone sitting alone in a darkened room in a deep state of depression.”
Naomi knew she was committing science’s cardinal sin of anthropomorphizing—the attribution of human traits to nonhuman animals or objects. But in her opinion, the analogy was appropriate: “They’re intelligent, social animals, and so are we. The only gauge we have, the only measuring stick we have, is ours. I don’t know how a dog thinks, and I don’t know how an orca thinks. But I do know how they behave. And I can see how they behave when they’re under certain circumstances, and I can draw some conclusions.”
Naomi was familiar with several primate studies on social deprivation and mental health. One paper on isolation in infant macaques was particularly disturbing.1 Each baby monkey was kept isolated, save for a little cloth surrogate mother, made of socks. The infants would curl up pathetically with the only “mother” they knew. It was not normal behavior, even though it was understandable. It hardly painted a picture of sound mental health. Naomi wondered, did male orcas such as Tilikum suffer similar trauma from being isolated from their own mothers?
Another topic she thought about including in her case against captivity was the collapsed dorsal fin seen in 100 percent of the captive adult males. Based on her knowledge of biology and what she had learned about the species in the wild, Naomi considered a number of potential causes of the deformity. They included the stress of captivity, dietary changes, restricted physical activity, and simple gravity acting on the collagen-like tissue in the fin that had been heated and softened by the abnormal time spent at the surface, especially in sunny, subtropical locales such as Florida, Texas, and Southern California.
In the wild, collapsed fins were extremely rare, usually the result of an identifiable cause such as gunshot wounds or collisions with boats. In 1989, following the Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster, two male killer whales exposed to the toxic slick quickly experienced a folding in their fins, which, within two years, had flattened onto their backs entirely. Marine mammal scientists on the scene assumed the animals were ailing. Both animals died shortly thereafter, suggesting that fin collapse could also be a sign of chronic health problems.2
Naomi came across even more details on the pitfalls of orca display in a paper commissioned by the UK-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) and written by Erich Hoyt, author of the book Orca: The Whale Called Killer. Published in 1992, the anti-captivity manifesto was titled The Performing Orca—Why the Show Must Stop: An In-Depth Review of the Captive Orca Industry.
Hoyt opened with the violent death of Kandu V—who had shattered her jaw against Corky II in San Diego during a fierce fight. He described the grueling string of occurrences and injuries in San Diego in 1987, as well as the brutal death of Keltie Byrne in 1991.
“Are these unfortunate, unconnected accidents or telling incidents that ought to be investigated?” Hoyt asked. “Could these be examples of predatory behavior—normal in the wild but dangerous in a confined area and when applied to humans? Are these real signs that orcas are unsuited for life in captivity?”
In one of his chapters, “Health of Captive Orcas,” Hoyt reported that of the 127 wild orcas captured and held for public display, only 35 were still alive as of April 1992. The most recent data (from the 1990 paper by Mike Bigg and colleagues) showed wild female orcas with an average life span of 50.2 years and males with 29.2 years. “Only one male in captivity has even reached this average,” Hoyt observed, referring to Orky II. At the time, no other captive orca had come close to surviving that long. Moreover, out of twenty-seven known pregnancies in captivity, only nine successful births had been recorded.
Captivity also shattered the tight social bonds that supported orca well-being and survival in the wild. Killer whales did not live alone in nature. But in six of seventeen aquariums with killer whales, they were confined without companions of their own species. Calves were frequently taken from their mothers before the age of five, Hoyt said, “severing the maternal bond.” Whales from different pods and different oceans were routinely mixed together, especially for breeding.
All the while, the featureless, acoustically sterile tanks in which the captive whales lived “increased stress levels brought about by overcrowding, poor nutrition, noise, excessive light, transportation and so on,” he said, which could lead to impaired immunity and greater susceptibility to illness. Killer whales were curious enough to not “be driven neurotic in a year,” Hoyt wrote, quoting Graeme Ellis. “But it’s difficult because the novelty wears off.”
Hoyt also alleged that some trainers deprived disobedient whales of their full day’s ration of food. “A former SeaWorld trainer who requested anonymity told me that whales or dolphins that would not perform were sometimes denied food during or immediately after the shows,” he said. Uncooperative orcas received just two-thirds of their daily allotment, plus vitamins, the source alleged, adding, “The whales would start performing when they realized they weren’t going to get fed.”
Hoyt then attacked the size, design, and water quality of modern orca tanks, saying they failed the industry goal of keeping animals “in conditions that as much as possible replicate those for the species in the wild.” For large and social animals such as killer whales, such confinements “would ideally still have comparable areas as in the wild for play, rest and socializing.” Killer whale pools, even the sophisticated and complex enclosures at SeaWorld, were six thousand to nine thousand times smaller than the most conservative range for Resident killer whales in the ocean.
Hoyt’s full frontal assault offered Naomi some ideas for her own anti-captivity opening salvo.
But the response to Hoyt’s report by the industry hinted at the pushback she herself would feel once her own report went public. Erich Hoyt had struck a nerve at SeaWorld. The company responded to the author with a barrage of counterassaults.
In October of 1992, SeaWorld released a white paper charging that Hoyt had “overlooked, minimized and distorted information” on captive killer whales. His report was not the work of a scientist, but rather that of an advocate who “relies heavily and selectively on those who support his view.”3
Many of Hoyt’s sources went unidentified and were unverifiable, SeaWorld said. Hoyt had alleged that numerous accidents at SeaWorld were covered up, without defining what “numerous” meant. And if they had been covered up, SeaWorld demanded, then “how does he know about them?” The company also decried Hoyt’s use of the word “accidents” in quotation marks as being a “subtle way of implying that marine parks are less than honest.”
As for orca longevity, “Mr. Hoyt would have the reader believe that the matter has been settled,” SeaWorld contended. “In fact, we do not conclusively know the average and maximum life spans of killer whales in the wild. The best scientific thinking, however, is cited by [the] American Society of Mammalogists. They indicate that the life span of killer whales is estimated to be 25 years but could be as long as 35 to 40 years.”
Hoyt’s figures of a fifty-year average life span for females were only “theoretical estimates” made from a small population (of Resident orcas) which “may or may not be representative of all killer whales.” The estimates were “interesting” but no substitute for “factual, objective, scientific data.” More time was needed to complete conclusive studies on the matter.
SeaWorld also denied that food deprivation was ever permitted. All animal training within its system was based solely on the positive-reinforcement model. As for the size of its pools, SeaWorld said it provided killer whales with more cubic feet of water than any other operation, and far in excess of US government standards. Although its tanks were not the equivalent of the space provided by nature, Erich Hoyt had ignored “the fact that these animals thrive at SeaWorld.”
