Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity

by David Kirby

  When it came to captivity, list members ran the gamut from pro-cap animal trainers to people such as Naomi who were fighting to end the need for trainers at all. She had a number of pitched arguments, including over the proposed release of Keiko. One of her most biting—though respectful—critics on MARMAM was a British trainer named John Dinely. On July 8, 1995, for example, he complained that no research had been done “regarding the release of Icelandic orcas back to their area of capture.” As a result, “such releases would be an experiment with an unknown outcome. I cannot see how this can be presented as a viable option that will enhance the INDIVIDUAL welfare of the captive animals targeted by various groups.”

  Naomi took her time to craft a response. She knew that hundreds of people in science, industry, animal activism, and marine environmental protection would be reading it. She offered an eloquent defense to the many critics who were online:

  Although to some extent I concur with Mr. Dineley that the risks involved in a precedent-setting, experimental return-to-the-wild for a killer whale do not entirely support the goal of enhancing the individual welfare of the experimental subject (in this case, we are speaking of Keiko), I do not think these risks are prohibitive or unreasonable and frankly, the first steps must be taken, risks and all, or no benefit will ever accrue to that first or any other whale.

  Since I firmly believe (and history and the odds support me) that Keiko will not live much longer in captivity, the risks involved in rehabilitating him and at the least retiring him in a natural sea-water pen in Iceland (to emphasize a point that seems frequently to be lost in this debate, release is not a rigid goal for most of those who support it as a concept) seem balanced and in Keiko’s best interests. In the same sense that a terminally ill human submitting to an experimental drug treatment that may cause an even earlier death, but then again may give the person several more years, seems worth the risk to many people, submitting Keiko to an experimental rehabilitation and release program seems worth the risk to those who support such a program for him—yes, he may die (for any number of reasons—and he will die sooner than later anyway), but he also may retire in a sea pen in Iceland and live a few more years there, and better yet, he just may successfully return to his pod for the remainder of his life.…

  I find the argument that an experimental rehab and release project, whose primary goal is enhancement of the individual whale’s welfare, should not proceed because there are risks involved to the individual whale to be an unreasonable, Catch-22 kind of argument. I also find it incongruous coming from an industry that didn’t consider it a valid argument thirty years ago when captivity for killer whales was an experiment (and arguably still is) and the risks of being brought INTO captivity to the individual welfare of all the animals captured from the wild then were considerable (and in many cases promptly fatal).

  It had been another long and trying year for Naomi, but fortunately it seemed to be ending on a positive note. By December 1995 construction on Keiko’s new, high-tech tank by the sea in Newport, Oregon, had been completed, with its oscillating water jets, natural-looking rubbing rocks, and underwater viewing windows all artfully installed. The pool was nearly four times larger than his cramped quarters in Mexico and featured clean, cold ocean water pumped in fresh from the Pacific. It was an ideal environment to restore his health, energy, and appetite. Perhaps the seawater would heal his skin. Given the opportunity, he could be trained to catch live fish again. Within a year or two, Keiko might be ready to make his final journey home to Iceland.

  On January 7, 1996, residents of Mexico City lined the streets by the thousands to bid a tearful farewell to Keiko as he was driven to the airport. United Parcel Service flew the famous whale from Mexico to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, without charge, aboard a C-130 Hercules transport. Once inside his specially designed traveling container, whale and water weighed in at about forty-two thousand pounds.

  Keiko was greeted by equally adoring crowds in his multimillion-dollar home in the picturesque town of Newport. He seemed to take to his new environment immediately. Within just five days, aquarium officials announced joyfully, Keiko’s appetite had doubled from a hundred pounds of fish to two hundred pounds. He had also grown more energetic, they reported. Naomi was thrilled to hear the news. No matter what happened, she knew Keiko was already in a much better place than he had ever been since he was snatched from his native waters in Iceland.

  But a fairy-tale ending was still far from guaranteed. The government of Iceland, for one, was hardly enthralled by Keiko’s taking one step closer to home. Officials in Reykjavík restated their prior decision that Keiko could not be released in Iceland because of fears he would transmit diseases to wild whales.

  Critics of the project increased in number and acrimony, even though Keiko was clearly on the road to recovering his health and strength. The MARMAM list was ablaze with division as people fought over the merits of the project. Naomi and HSUS were frequent targets. Most people complained about the huge costs involved, and how that money could have been spent saving thousands of animals, rather than just one. The point was not lost on Naomi.

  A pointed critique, for example, was posted by Timothy Desmond, the animal trainer who’d coached Keiko for Free Willy, under the subject head “Keiko—a blown opportunity.”

  Desmond was following the debate over “spending $10.5 million on a sick, but famous killer whale who is a terrible candidate for release by any reasonable measure.” The campaign was “a terribly misguided bit of conservation and/or animal welfare activism. The money could and should have been put to much better use.”

  Desmond had been hired by Free Willy’s producers to plan a facility that was originally proposed for Keiko on Cape Cod. Keiko should have gone there instead, he insisted. The Massachusetts site would have doubled as a “critical care facility for the hundreds of marine mammals that strand every year on the northeast coast of North America,” while also serving as a regional marine research center.

  That plan had enjoyed local and federal support, and from “several universities, aquariums, several moderate animal welfare organizations, and many potential private donors,” Desmond continued. “However, the animal welfare activists couldn’t stand not having complete control over the political agenda and the money.” Instead, they “conducted a coordinated attack on that center and killed it.

  “So now, Keiko goes to guess what? A captive display facility—where there are very few cetacean strandings. Many, many marine mammals will die because of the lack of that critical care facility while Earth Island will float the illusion of releasing Keiko as a long-standing fundraising mechanism for their agenda.”

  Groups such as Earth Island and HSUS had reached the point “where they will start killing more animals than they are saving. In this case, hundreds of nameless whales and dolphins will die on the shores of New England over the next several years because the $10 million to save Keiko was not made available to them at the same time.”

  Naomi thought it was a stretch to blame those deaths on the Keiko project. Besides, the money had been donated to free Keiko. It’s not as if the campaign could simply sign over the millions in donated funds to another project. It was a harsh reality: no Keiko, no cash.

  23

  Tilly’s Willy

  One of John Jett’s biggest regrets in his life was that on that December day in 1995 when his best friend, Jeff, got fired from SeaWorld, he did not walk out with him in solidarity.

  “These are totally trumped-up charges,” John agreed with his buddy. “Nobody has ever been fired for a tongue-tactile before, as far as I know.” However, John decided to stay at SeaWorld; he had no money and nowhere else to go. But John knew his days at the park would not last long. He had become as cynical as Jeff about killer whales in captivity.

  “I wish I could go with you,” John said to Jeff. He was disillusioned with the whole operation, with watching the animals getting chased and beaten up, with the teeth drilling, the chronic
infections, the small pools. Tilikum’s tail flukes dragged along the bottom in all but two of the tanks. Most of the orcas sat in the enclosures for much of the day with nothing to do but get bored. John had learned through Jeff, Astrid, and other sources about wild killer whales and their natural behavior. He was aware of the disconnect between what happens in the wild and what was going on in captivity. John was sickened by the living conditions of the orcas and put off by the urine- and feces-smelling backstage area at Sea Lion and Otter.

  “It’s just not working out for me,” he told Jeff a few weeks after his coworker was fired. “I can’t continue to ignore how I feel about it.”

  John’s unease toward SeaWorld was about to get worse. Chuck Tompkins called him into his office one day to inform John of a new assignment. As Tilikum’s team leader, John was to begin teaching Tilly approximations—small, discrete training steps—to present his penis to trainers. After Tilly learned to do that correctly, John and his team were supposed to masturbate the phallus, collect the semen, and freeze it for use in SeaWorld’s new artificial insemination (AI) program.

  John was shocked and disgusted. “Sorry, Chuck,” he said. “I’m not going to put Tilikum through that. Get someone else.” For that insubordination, John was banished from Shamu and transferred to Sea Lion and Otter Stadium. But John was already on his way out the door, psychologically speaking.

  Working with these smaller animals sometimes seemed more dangerous than working with the killer whales. John was bitten by an otter—a painful laceration on his leg—and often became uneasy around the other animals. Sea lions are smart, cunning, and surprisingly mobile on land. If they get mad, they can dash across the stage and bite somebody. Walruses are more dangerous—almost as quick on land as sea lions, they can easily push people against a wall and crush them with their heft and power.

  John did not especially like working with pinnipeds, but at least it was less painful for him than going to Shamu Stadium every day had been. The pinnipeds were extraordinarily intelligent, although John got the sense they either didn’t realize or didn’t care that they were enclosed behind walls. But John did feel that the killer whales knew they were in captivity, even those that were born at SeaWorld. They fully understood their predicament.

  “When you get to know an animal like a killer whale,” he told a friend, “you know that somebody’s home. And when they look at you, and you look at them, and they’re like ‘Yeah, man, this is pretty fucked-up’—well, it just breaks your heart. Going to work every single day had become agony for me.”

  Soon after John was kicked out of Shamu Stadium for refusing to masturbate Tilikum, Gudrun went into labor with yet another calf sired by the Icelandic bull.

  John and Jeff had previously discussed Gudrun’s pregnancy since she had begun eating less food in the final weeks of gestation. They were also concerned about the health of the fetus.

  With the completion of G Pool, SeaWorld had figured out a way to use Gudrun to generate new revenue streams. As one of its rare adult orcas whose dorsal fin had not bent over or collapsed, she was perfect to pose with tourists for photographs. Several times a day, SeaWorld would bring in tours of people to wait their turn in line for a picture shot by a professional photographer and sold to them at a premium. The pregnant whale would remain “dry” in the slide-out area as she held her pose for many minutes at a time. The weight on her unborn calf must have been immense.

  When Gudrun went into labor, the staff veterinarians could not get a pulse on the unborn calf. It was presumed dead. Since Gudrun was not expelling the calf, they needed to pull it from her. Gudrun was taken into the med pool, which was drained to immobilize her. They put a cable up her vagina and wrapped it around the flukes of the calf.1 The dead infant was reportedly pulled out manually by the animal care team.

  The pain must have been unearthly. Gudrun began to hemorrhage severely. Her dorsal fin collapsed, probably due to dehydration. She refused to eat and ignored all attempts by people to make contact with her. She remained motionless in one spot, unprotected by shade, so staff lovingly lavished her back with zinc oxide. After the bleeding stopped, Gudrun stayed that way for four days as her worried caretakers did all they could to nurse her back to health.

  On the fourth day, Gudrun finally moved. She slowly swam over to the gate where her disabled young calf, Nyar, was watching. Nyar had had to be separated from Gudrun after the mother began attacking her daughter. Now, Gudrun gently nudged Nyar’s rostrum through the bars, as if to ask for an overdue rapprochement. Gudrun died a few hours later.2

  John was devastated. Astrid took the news particularly hard. As for the brain-damaged Nyar, her own fate was uncertain. She still listed to one side when she swam. Her food was stuffed with drugs every morning. She could not perform, could never breed, and was of no use to SeaWorld. Still, a special four-person team was assigned to exclusively look after all of Nyar’s “special needs.” Some people speculated that management was basically waiting for the sad little calf to die.

  On April 2, 1996, John got a phone call from his friend Lindsay Rubicam. She was sobbing. John knew what it was about. “Nyar died,” Lindsay told him.

  Chuck Tompkins told the Associated Press that Nyar had “very obvious physical problems,” including poor motor skills and learning disabilities. “In a human, these could be likened to autism or something like that,” he said. “We filled the role of her family.”

  That was it for John Jett.

  The next day he presented his letter of resignation to Robin Friday, walked out the main gate, and never went back.

  24

  Better Days

  Naomi Rose’s first two years at HSUS had been a wild ride, a trial by fire played out on a steep learning curve. First she had butchered the statistics in her “case against” report by including infant deaths in captivity but not in the wild. She’d also committed the rookie error of comparing the overall percentage of orca deaths in nature with those in captivity, without correcting for age and then treating them like comparable “mortality rates.”

  Then there was the MMPA drubbing, when the public display industry got almost everything it wanted in the reauthorization and the marine mammal coalition got almost nothing. That was followed by the nail-biting roller-coaster ride of trying to get Keiko away from Mexico and keep him out of another marine park, accompanied by the slings and arrows hurled at her on the MARMAM list for thinking that anyone could free “Willy” in the first place.

  With those defeats already notched into her belt, Naomi was thirsting for a victory on the captivity front. Despite the setbacks, she was even more determined to prove to her scientific colleagues, the industry, the media, and the world at large that keeping killer whales in captivity was unethical, indefensible, and hazardous to both animals and their trainers.

  Then she got a break.

  A pair of scientists from NMFS, Robert Small and Douglas DeMaster, were working on an analysis of survival rates among captive marine mammals. They offered to send Naomi an advance copy of their paper. They explained to her why it was incorrect to calculate mortality rates the way she had in her original report. Simply comparing percentages of deaths in each population without accounting for age was misleading.

  It was better, instead, to examine the annual survival rate (ASR, or percentage of animals that survived in a population from year to year); one could then compare the values between wild and captive populations. With the ASR method, if one took the total number of killer whales in a population, grouped by age, and calculated the total number of days they survived over any particular period, one could arrive at the annual survival rate for each age cohort, and for the population as a whole.

  Naomi jumped at the chance to have an early look at the paper. What she read that day altered the course of her battle against the display industry.

  Because many killer whales died in the first year of life, Small and DeMaster analyzed annual survival data for non-calves—in both captivity a
nd the wild—from 1988 to 1992. Statistics on captive animals came from the Marine Mammal Inventory Report and wild survival data came from the landmark paper that Peter Olesiuk, Mike Bigg, and their colleagues had published on Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest.

  “Survival of the wild population … based on approximately 250 non-calves, was significantly higher than our estimates for non-calf captive whales,” Small and DeMaster wrote.1 They had found an annual survival rate of 0.938 among killer whales in captivity, meaning that 93.8 percent of the population survived from year to year. Among the wild whales, the ASR was 0.976—97.6 percent of those whales survived each year.

  That might not seem like much of a difference, but if looked at inversely, the distinction was glaring. If 93.8 percent of the captive whales survived from year to year, then 6.2 percent of them died. By contrast, just 2.4 percent of the free-ranging whales died from year to year.

  The evidence, when laid out this way, could not have been clearer. The annual mortality rate among non-calf captive killer whales was more than two and a half times higher (6.2 percent vs. 2.4 percent) than the rate among noncalf whales swimming in the ocean. Statistically speaking, the difference was highly significant, and Small and DeMaster put the figure out there for all to see in their 1995 paper.

  DeMaster had published a similar study five years earlier in 1988, with Jeannie Drevenak of the US Marine Mammal Commission.2 Since that time, annual survival rates for California sea lions and bottlenose dolphins had actually increased in captivity, likely due to improved husbandry practices. But captive killer whales enjoyed no such rise. Industry assurances aside, things were not getting better for killer whales in captivity.

  Many advocates might have felt vindication—or even jubilation—to learn that hard science was backing up what they had been saying in public: Naomi’s original HSUS report coincidently had reached the same conclusion as Small and DeMaster’s peer-reviewed, published paper, even though her methodology was faulty. “Killer whales,” she had written, “are more than 2.5 times as likely to die in captivity as in the wild.”