by David Kirby
Now, in the fall of 1994, Jeff had been at SeaWorld for nearly seven years, and it felt like the time to leave was approaching. He might have been a leading star in the killer whale pool, but it was starting to feel like a lowbrow circus act. Jeff had even made plans to start classes in January at Seminole State College in the northern suburb of Sanford, to begin preparing for the next stage of his life. Jeff wanted to go to medical school and become a physician, but he needed more premed credits to be accepted. In addition to hotdogging the Shamu show, he was now studying for exams in algebra, calculus, biology, and physics. It was a tough load, but Jeff was not going to spend the rest of his life at SeaWorld.
Jeff had seen some of his best friends at SeaWorld quit, including Carol Ray and Sam Berg (who had left SeaWorld in 1993 on good terms) and watched as another stream of people came in. John Jett and Mark Simmons, of course, were now his closest buddies and confidants. Jeff had also grown fond of Kelly Flaherty Clark, an orca trainer rising through the ranks. She was Jeff’s kind of person: smart and educated. He liked Kelly’s husband, Stew, as well.
Kelly’s circle of friends at Shamu included a young woman named Lindsay Rubicam, and a relative rookie to the stadium, another young, blond woman named Dawn Loverde (Low-VAIR-dee). Jeff hung out with Lindsay and Dawn at their place in the Metrowest district of Orlando, and he and Dawn together represented the animal training department at the annual SeaWorld golf tournament. Jeff liked Dawn. She was unwaveringly kind to everyone, fun to be around, shared his keen love of music, and was a terrific animal trainer. Dawn’s roommate, Lindsay, and Jeff would become close.
Dawn had always adored animals. As a kid growing up in Indiana, she would take in stray cats, dogs, birds, and other creatures. When she was eleven, her family came to Orlando for a vacation. She was so excited at the prospect of going to SeaWorld she could barely sleep. When the big day arrived, she walked into Shamu Stadium, grabbed her mother’s hand, and said with certainty, “This is what I’m going to do. I wanna be a Shamu trainer.”1
Dawn had received degrees in psychology and biology from the University of South Carolina, where she was active on the dance team and a member of Alpha Delta Pi sorority. After college, she started working at SeaWorld in Sea Lion and Otter Stadium. Within two years she was an apprentice trainer at Shamu Stadium. While at work, Dawn met a tall, husky man with dark hair and a goatee, Scott Brancheau. He was a performer in the park’s highly acrobatic waterski show, and the two of them fell in love. In 1996, they would marry.
Jeff experienced friction with higher-ups. One of the least popular superiors among the top brass was the chief training curator, Thad Lacinak. With his short auburn hair, bristly mustache, and muscular frame, Thad looked like a marine sergeant—and he could bark like one, too. Thad had a temper. Jeff, John, and Sam sometimes called him Thug behind his back.
Thad, like Jeff, had grown up in the Orlando area, where he spent a lot of time fishing and swimming in the many lakes that dot the landscape. Also like Jeff, Thad had been inspired in his youth by the TV program Flipper. He dreamed of one day training animals.
Thad had quit college in 1973 to begin working at SeaWorld as an apprentice trainer and rose through the ranks to become vice president and corporate curator of animal training for the entire SeaWorld park system, with more than a hundred people working under him. He spent much of the year in San Antonio. Thad was a key figure in developing and implementing SeaWorld’s celebrated training method (which was divided into discrete sessions such as husbandry, exercise, learning, etc.) and various animal “enrichment” programs.
Enrichment is the provision of stimulating environments for captive animals that let them engage in typical behaviors and allow them to exercise some choices over their highly controlled and unnatural environment. For orcas, that might mean introducing new objects, sounds, or other stimuli into the pool. Thad was also instrumental in developing new husbandry programs and helped create many of the crowd-pleasing behaviors the animals performed.
Despite his gruff drill-sergeant demeanor backstage, Thad was also a public face for SeaWorld and was often featured in local and national news stories about the park. He was fond of telling reporters that the tank at Shamu Stadium was like a “mini-ocean” and a “big playground” for killer whales.2
Thad had little patience for animal-advocacy types, including the staff of HSUS and their new marine mammal scientist, Dr. Rose.
“All these so-called environmentalists who say the whales are not happy here—what proof do they have?” Thad once told a local reporter. “Everything I see indicates that they don’t sit in the pool thinking about the ocean.” Captive killer whales did not miss the ocean because “they seem to enjoy what we do,” Thad said. “The animals recognize you by face. They come swimming over and act like they want to be with you.”3 In other words, an animal such as Tilikum was having too much fun to ever miss his mother and family back in Iceland.
Jeff’s work at SeaWorld was getting harder to stomach. He hated having to spin lies for the public; he felt chronically and pathetically underpaid. He felt that SeaWorld was little more than a glorified circus. On many occasions, Jeff had seen killer whales ignore callback stimuli such as water slaps, stage slaps, and underwater tones. Callbacks were the fundamental means of controlling whales during an emergent, potentially hazardous situation. All trainers had experienced this intentional disregard of their commands; it was part of their workaday lives.
When a killer whale was unhappy, Jeff observed, it might well let its trainer know. There might be an instant expression of displeasure—a rough “love tap” for example, a bruising bump or a quick dunk under the water. Or the retribution might come later. The whales could potentially remember past slights. The vast majority of such incidents went unreported.
Jeff was not all that reassured by the safety procedures that SeaWorld had developed for Shamu Stadium over time. A brand-new tank had recently been completed—the large, rectangular G Pool deep in the backstage area—where special events, VIP performances, and the new “Dine with Shamu” events were staged. During the “Dine” show, guests paid extra to eat an all-American buffet lunch or dinner at tables set up along the pool’s edge as one of the killer whales swam around quietly. After the meal, they were treated to a low-key, twenty-minute demonstration, without all the leaping, splashing, and hotdogging found at A Pool.
When G Pool opened, Shamu trainers were handed photocopies of two-page, handwritten notes on safety procedures in the new tank. It spelled out what should happen if one of the killer whales became aggressive. It didn’t reassure Jeff that the trainer would get out alive. In summary, the “Emergency Action Rescue Procedures 6-Point Flow Chart” called for:
1. Spot trainer directs Education staff to sound trainer alarm and call 911. As soon as possible, a Senior Trainer or Supervisor will direct all rescue personnel.
2. Spot trainer attempts quick control response with whale(s) from behind rocks, with emergency food.
3. Arriving trainers: Bring additional food for control trainer and A) Shepherd’s hook to poolside, B) Life ring/ pony bottle [small oxygen tank] to poolside, C) E/F gate operation & control trainer spotter also brings water rescue equipment.
4. With whale(s) controlled at stage, extricate victim from water using a shepherd’s hook. If victim is unreachable, move whale(s) to E/F Pool. Once whales are separated & gated securely, trainers implement water rescue procedures.
Are they kidding? Jeff said to himself when he read that. Out of six points, they were going to wait until point 4 before extricating the trainer? The trainer was probably dead by point 3, he mused darkly. Still, the victim wasn’t necessarily out of the water yet.
5. If whale(s) refuse quick control response and/or separation to E/F pool: 1) Spot trainer continues control attempt; 2) Assisting trainers shift or maintain poolside positions with shepherd’s hook and life ring for optimal rescue opportunity.
Optimal rescue opportunity? This was b
eginning to sound like a Monty Python sketch, theater-of-the-absurd, gruesome-death edition. Finally, point 6 listed all of the things that should have got under way at the same time as point 1, begging the question, why was it listed last?
6. Activities occurring during rescue procedures:
1. 1–2 extra trainers suit up with full scuba and be prepared to enter water as soon as whale(s) are gated away.
2. One extra trainer to stay with whales once they are gated away.
3. Education staff communicates information to the public.
4. Operations staff control public for safety.
5. Paramedic and security arrive for assistance.
One day Jeff was shooting video of the Shamu show, which Chuck Tompkins wanted to send to the training department in San Diego, to share techniques and other information. It had been a stupendous show: the animal behaviors, musical cues, and trainer lines all came together. Chuck, who could sometimes come across as authoritarian, seemed pleased as he watched the taping.
As Jeff recalled, right toward the end when Tilikum was under control at the stage, he pumped his tail and surged up out of the water, lunging at trainer Liz Morris, who was standing at the edge of the stage. He was huge next to her, maybe fifty times bigger. Morris took three steps back to prevent him from grabbing her. It was a surreal moment. Tilikum slowly sank back down into the water. Morris adeptly gave the renegade animal a neutral response—standing still for three full seconds—and sent him on a side breach before finishing the show. Jeff thought that Chuck seemed more upset about the video than the potentially dangerous event that had just transpired—on video and in front of thousands of visitors.
As for Nootka IV, she had been capricious and volatile since the day she arrived in Orlando. She was known to lunge ferociously from the pool at people standing near the deck. The main job for Nootka, who was banned from water work and not used in shows because of her unstable past, was getting pregnant.
Nootka got to work right away. She arrived in Orlando in January of 1993. By February, Tilikum had impregnated her once again (their first calf, a male, was born while Nootka was still at SeaLand, but only survived a month).
On August 18, 1994, Nootka went into labor. The calf arrived dead.4 The stillbirth took its toll on Nootka’s health, and she struggled to recover. Less than a month later, she appeared sluggish in the water and her condition began to worsen. Vets prepared the forty-six-hundred-pound female for surgery, but she died during pre-op examination. SeaWorld VP and curator Frank Murru said blood samples showed some type of infection. He was not sure if the animal’s death was related to the stillbirth.
A columnist for the Boca Raton Beacon, noting Nootka’s loss of two calves in a row, asked if SeaWorld was perhaps “overlooking the complications of a broken heart.” Nootka IV was approximately thirteen years old.
Two months after Nootka’s death, her former tankmate from SeaLand, Haida II, who was now at SeaWorld San Antonio, gave birth to a seven-foot-long, four-hundred-pound female calf after less than two hours of labor—record speed for a SeaWorld killer whale.5 The father was Kotar, the bull who was exiled from Orlando after biting and severely injuring Kanduke’s penis back in 1987. This was the tenth calf born at a SeaWorld park, and the third in Texas. Glenn Young, the park’s general curator, called the new arrival “another tremendous opportunity to learn more about this fascinating species of marine mammal.”6
For the first three weeks or so the calf seemed to be doing fine, swimming and nursing with her mother, and even playing around with her half brother, Kyuquot, whom Haida had given birth to on Christmas Eve 1991 at SeaLand. (“Ky” was Tilikum’s first calf.) But in late December, the infant female began showing signs of breathing troubles. She died soon after that, of pneumonia.7 Unfortunately, the world got to learn little about this mammal, despite the rosy predictions.
SeaWorld claimed that Haida was “unaffected” by the loss of her calf. She was eating normally and otherwise showing no signs of stress. As for the father, Kotar, it was not known whether male killer whales recognized their own offspring. Indeed, Kotar seemed more interested in playing with the metal gates that separated the killer whale pools than paying attention to a baby whale. Jeff remembered this habit from when Kotar was in Orlando. He was obsessed with mouthing and tugging on the metal bars.
Three months after the death of his calf, on April 1, 1995, a gate that Kotar was playing with closed onto his head. It crushed his skull and he quickly bled to death.8 SeaWorld listed the cause as “acute hemorrhagic pneumonia” in the Marine Mammal Inventory Report.
Jeff was unsettled by the many deaths at SeaWorld. These animals were being exploited for profit, and they were paying with their lives. But that wasn’t the only exploitation going on at work, in his opinion. Jeff was now a senior trainer, one of the leading performers in the killer whale show and a seven-year veteran. But he was still only making about $15 an hour. Jeff had helped SeaWorld put millions of dollars into the pockets of Anheuser-Busch executives and stockholders every year. He was rewarded with about $31,000 a year in return.
In 1995, Jeff was ordered to perform as a stunt double for a television series being filmed on the Orlando campus. He did not get paid extra for it—it was part of his job—but it was kind of fun to do. The show, called Out of the Blue, was a teenage sitcom featuring young Latin American actors speaking in both English and Spanish. Many of the characters worked at SeaWorld, including Charlie, the orca trainer, who was played by the actor Carlos Conde. The camera crew would film close-ups of Conde at the stadium, getting ready to do a show. Then, when it came time for “Charlie” to get in the water and do stand-ons and rocket hops with a whale, Jeff would step in to play the role. The producers said he had the most “Latin-looking features” of all the male Shamu trainers.
During breaks in between shots, Jeff would sometimes sit down and shoot the breeze with Carlos. Inevitably talk turned to salaries. The young Screen Actors Guild member, who arrived for two hours to shoot a brief scene, earned $650. He got $250 just for showing up, plus $200 per hour of filming. In those same two hours, Jeff had earned $30, even though he was doing just as much “performing” as Carlos. Jeff was deeply bothered by the inequity. He began discussing it with friends at work, and even with one of his supervisors.
“I’m the one flying through the air, busting my ass, shoveling fish, and risking injury and death for fifteen bucks an hour and Carlos shows up and makes six hundred and fifty dollars?” Jeff told one of his bosses, who said nothing and looked glum. “This whole situation has got me thinking how poorly paid we really are.”
Jeff casually mentioned to friends at work that it would be nice to have some type of union representing trainers. But everyone knew that would never happen, including Jeff. SeaWorld viewed its trainers as expendable parts, he thought, and politically found collective bargaining an anathema.
Within weeks after grumbling about trainer salaries and safety hazards to his supervisor, Jeff was ordered to take a drug test. He passed, but the incident stuck in his mind. Jeff had never been subjected to drug testing before—not even when he got hired. Something just didn’t add up right.
Then there were the Taima incidents.
Taima’s intelligence was noteworthy. She was quick to learn new behaviors and how to interact with trainers, but she would also find clever ways to misbehave and amuse herself. Taima was rambunctious. Like her father, Kanduke, and like Tilikum, she was difficult to control at times, freethinking and experimental. In Orlando, she was Tilikum’s best friend. Only senior people worked with her and only senior trainers got into the water with her.
Jeff’s first misdemeanor with Taima came in October 1995. Taima had regularly been “gaming” during the foot-push segment of the show. When presented with the signal for a foot push, she would occasionally refuse. Sometimes she would begin the maneuver and break off before it was completed. Sometimes she would use the anatomical equivalent of her lips (the soft tissue aroun
d her jaws) to separate the outer sock from the inner sock on Jeff’s foot. Other times she would remind Jeff of her presence by nibbling on his toes.
On October 27, Taima broke from control in the middle of a foot push. She rolled away from his feet with her mouth open. Jeff thought she had spotted some low-hovering seagulls and was going off to goof around with them. When an orca breaks from control, things can escalate into a dangerous situation. Jeff’s trained response was not to react to Taima in this situation. He delivered a neutral response—three seconds of doing nothing—then regained control and finished the segment without incident.
But two of his managers didn’t agree with Jeff’s judgment in the pool. Thad Lacinak and Chuck Tompkins pulled Jeff into a closed-door meeting at Shamu Stadium. They were not pleased. “First of all, you can’t trust the animals, you can’t get too comfortable with them, but you did,” Thad told him. “You should have exited the pool the second Taima broke from control.” Jeff was going to be written up in the incident log, they told him. The slipup resulted in a three-day suspension without pay.
Jeff was taken aback by the reprimand. Nothing had gone wrong. Nonetheless, Jeff had clearly fallen out of favor with Thad and Chuck. First came the “random” and surprising drug test, and now this bogus charge about Taima. Jeff figured that management was probably unhappy with his grumblings about low trainer wages and his talk of organized labor. He had also continued his friendship with Astrid, had an open invitation to visit the Center for Whale Research, and had subversively questioned SeaWorld claim’s about the health, longevity, and mental stability of the killer whales.
On the other hand, Jeff was still a star performer and valuable staff member. His file was brimming with positive reviews from the public, and from his superiors. On April 3, 1995, for example, a guest had called in just to say he was “very happy with the trainer ‘Jeff’ and said that, in the 50 or so shows he had seen, this was the best and that ‘Jeff’ was excellent, and wanted to call and let us know of his pleasure,” according to the Guest Services Report that was forwarded to Chuck Tompkins.
