by David Kirby
The next morning, Astrid took Jeff and the other volunteers out on the High Spirits. It was a windy day—the air cool and clear, the water a bit choppy. The Olympic Mountains glowed white against a sapphire sky.
Suddenly there were whales everywhere. “J pod!” Astrid shouted, then started calling out the ID numbers one after the other. “There’s J5. And J11.” The animals traveled in twos and threes, the males easily distinguished by their tall, triangular, and, most of all, perfectly erect dorsal fins. They moved toward the north in an unhurried fashion, rolling slowly up and out of the water with their poofs of breath, and sinking back down again. Jeff was amazed by their graceful movements, their slow rising and falling beneath the surface. The High Spirits followed along for miles, passing a solitary minke whale on the starboard side. At Lime Kiln Point, a beautiful state reserve bordered by cliffs and kelp beds, the J’s stopped to rest and mill about in the seaweed.
The oldest orca of all, J2, abruptly leapt from the water in magnificent breaches like nothing Jeff had ever seen before at SeaWorld. “That’s Granny!” Astrid told him. “She’s about eighty-five years old, the matriarch of the whole pod.” Next to her was J1, better known as Ruffles because of the wavy pattern on the trailing edge of his dorsal fin. Ruffles was probably about forty-seven at the time.
Jeff could feel emotion well up inside him. It was like a melodramatic movie, when the John Williams–style Hollywood music rises to a heart-pounding crescendo. Teardrops began streaming from Jeff’s eyes—some for joy; some for sorrow and shame. Jeff was now sobbing silently, embarrassed that others might notice. He was grateful for the dark, wraparound glasses he had on, hidding his face.
It was one of the most profoundly bittersweet moments of Jeff’s life.
I am so lucky to be here at this spot, he thought, witnessing this amazing sight. So, what on earth was I doing at SeaWorld for eight years? Damn it, we were monsters for keeping those animals locked up in pools. Jeff’s head was spinning with the conflicting feelings.
Howie was waiting for the boat when the crew returned to shore. “You know something?” Jeff said to his friend. “I just realized that, all of those years at SeaWorld, I was helping to perpetuate this insane captivity industry. What a tragedy. It’s hard to believe that one can be so naïve. It’s a tough pill to swallow.”
26
The Strange Case of Daniel Dukes
Back in 1987, a string of trainer injuries rocked SeaWorld San Diego, culminating in the crushing of John Sillick by Orky II. In response, the company implemented a raft of safety measures designed to keep employees out of harm’s way, especially during water work. By 1988, when trainers got back into the pools for the first time after the Sillick affair, SeaWorld had a rigid system of trainer seniority, one that required employees to attain specific levels of skill and experience before they could swim with the whales.
The new safety regime also required more spotters to be on duty during all interactions with the killer whales. And it required trainers and their supervisors to complete an official incident report each time a whale went “off behavior,” displayed precursors to aggression, or engaged in aggressive behavior. Those reports would be circulated among the four SeaWorld parks for comment and review by supervisors and training curators and made available to all orca trainers as learning tools. Kept together in a master Incident Log, each report was supposed to describe the incorrect behaviors, determine their cause, and offer recommendations for preventing such problems from happening again.
For years, the new precautions were working. Although safety incidents did make it into the log, no serious injuries (at least among those reported) occurred at any SeaWorld park between 1988 and 1999. Indeed, the century would close without any further major problems involving captive killer whales and their trainers.
One near miss did occur before the new millennium dawned, however. It involved the park’s twenty-two-year-old dominant female Kasatka (Russian for “killer whale”), an Icelandic orca taken in a 1978 roundup that had also netted Katina, the matriarch of Orlando.
Unlike Katina, Kasatka was not easy to work with. She was also fiercely protective of her calf, Takara, sired by Kotar and born in San Diego in July 1999. At night, when Kasatka was put in a separate pool from Takara, mother and child spent most of their time rostrum-to-rostrum on opposite sides of the metal gate. Sometimes when Takara called for her mother, Kasatka would split from the trainer’s control to spend time with her calf at the gate or swim in angry circles around the pool until finally responding to a callback signal to the stage.
Kasatka grew more aggressive with trainers in the water after Takara was born. Her water-work relationships were deeply impacted by the whereabouts of her calf. Though she was impatient with rookie trainers in the water, she was protective of her control trainer. When others would engage in a little horseplay with a control trainer onstage, she might express her dismay at the perceived aggression with a high-pitched shriek or quick pop of her jaws.
However, Kasatka was known to display aggression without any noticeable precursors, apart from separation from Takara. She had engaged in mouthing behaviors when switching control trainers during water work and mouthed the feet of trainers during foot pushes. She pulled bootees off trainers’ feet, grabbed diving gear in the water, and squirted water at maintenance workers when they made excessive noise around the pool. She also squirted trainers and guests when she became frustrated or agitated. At times, Kasatka jaw-popped at people or slid out of the water to challenge strangers.1
Kasatka was also aggressive toward subdominant whales, especially the males, whom she would repeatedly rake or even bite with her teeth. She also learned how to catch seagulls. Sometimes she brought them to the pool’s edge. Other times, she ate them, ripping the birds apart in a spray of blood and feathers.
Her aggressive tendencies became more pronounced when social conflicts erupted among other whales, or when trainers had her switch behaviors with little or no positive reinforcement.
According to her official company Animal Profile, Kasatka had racked up a long rap sheet by the end of the century. In addition to minor foot-mouthing incidents, she had also jaw-popped (snapped down on) a trainer’s foot and whacked a trainer in the back with her fluke.
In April of 1993, Kasatka had progressed to mouthing the legs of a trainer during a hydro. Three months later, she did the same thing. But this time, she grabbed a trainer by the knee and dunked him underwater, then grabbed a foot and dunked the trainer a second time. Neither incident led to a trainer injury.
Despite these reports, SeaWorld continued to allow water work with Kasatka. “After establishing a relationship with Kasatka, most find her a great animal to interact with,” her Animal Profile stated.
Then, on June 12, 1999, an experienced trainer named Ken “Petey” Peters was doing the 2:30 Shamu show with Kasatka and her calf, Takara, in the main pool. Takara unexpectedly split to a back tank during the performance. Kasatka then left Peters in the water and began circling the perimeter of the pool at high speeds—a known sign of frustration and a precursor to aggressive behavior. She then opened her jaws wide, moved in to grab Peters’s legs, and tried to push him out of the pool. Fortunately he was pulled from the pool by the spotter trainer before she could reach him. The show was canceled, but later reopened with another whale.2
Peters was unhurt, allowing SeaWorld to enter the new century with its trainer-injury record unblemished since 1987. (Kasatka, however, was by no means finished with her unpredictability in the years to follow, especially when it came to water work with Ken Peters.) Though the company had dodged any serious trainer injuries for twelve years, its safety record was about to sustain an unlucky blow.
There is no way to know how many people have successfully snuck into a SeaWorld park without paying the admission fee. But in July 1999 a man named Daniel P. Dukes apparently did just that.
The twenty-seven-year-old grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, but never fi
t in with the staid mores of his conservative hometown. His parents sold real estate for a living. Dukes ambled from state to state, with stops as far afield as Washington and Texas, before he returned East and headed for Florida. He rarely stayed anywhere for more than a couple of months.
With his thin, five-foot-ten frame, scraggly beard, light brown hair pulled back into a long ponytail, and red-lettered D tattooed above his left nipple, Dukes was an odd-looking young man, but he considered himself a private soul who loved nature, animals, and music. Perhaps it was hard for Dukes to get or hold a job. His record of petty-crime convictions could not have helped matters. Dukes had done jail time on theft and drug charges and carried more than a dozen convictions in a number of states. On Christmas Day 1998, he was arrested in Marion County, Florida, on a misdemeanor marijuana charge, and again for pot possession in March 1999 in Volusia County, where he told the arresting officer he was heading for a “rainbow fair”—a type of New Age hippie gathering—in Ormond Beach.
Dukes then headed for Miami, where he ended up staying at a Hare Krishna temple in the tony Coconut Grove district. He lived there peaceably with the community of six worshippers, including a temple priest named Paul Seaur. Dukes told Seaur he had come from Jacksonville and was seeking “spiritual tranquillity.” Seaur agreed to take the young man in as a religious volunteer.
Dukes seemed to adjust to temple life. He took part in its feed-the-homeless program and worked in the communal garden. He spent time writing in his journal and giving scraps of leftovers to wild birds. He never became a member, but while at the temple he did try to adhere to its rules, including a ban on alcohol, drugs, gambling, sexual activity, and eating meat or eggs.
Not everyone liked having the stranger around. One member, Lilakara Das, called him an “odd bird” who always seemed “in his own world.” He also had a hard time getting up at 4:00 a.m. for prayers and began to skip out on assignments. Das would sometimes find him AWOL, meditating in the chapel while listening to heavy metal bands like Metallica. One day Dukes proclaimed a vow of silence, something that puzzled the others, given that the Hare Krishnas encourage chanting and singing.
A month later, Daniel Dukes left the community. “I want to be free,” he told one member, “I want to travel around.” Dukes made his way north to Indian River County, where he was arrested in Vero Beach after stealing a 3 Musketeers bar for breakfast. Dukes was still honoring his vow of silence and denied the charges by writing down on a piece of paper that he had not been inside the store. He was sentenced to three days in the county jail.
Dukes was released on Friday, July 2, and headed for Orlando.
On July 4, and again on July 5, amid the happy families strolling around SeaWorld, the disheveled wayfarer was spotted by security staff at the park. They noticed his fixation with both girls and killer whales. Dukes spent a lot of time at Shamu Stadium, staring at the animals. Still, his behavior did not warrant intervention from security.
On July 5, after dark when SeaWorld finally closed, Dukes hid somewhere behind Shamu Stadium. When no one else was around (it’s not clear if night-watch staff were on duty at the time of the incident), he headed toward the “Dine with Shamu” area and its large, rectangular G Pool. Dukes climbed over a three-foot Plexiglas barrier and walked toward the water. He removed his cap, shirt, and trousers and laid them on the deck. Clad in black nylon trunks, he walked over to the low rock wall that enclosed the pool and approached the ledge.
Of all the places at SeaWorld, G Pool had to be the worst choice for a swim with the whales. On that night, it was Tilikum’s pool.
At 7:05 the next morning a worker named Arturo Cordoba arrived at Shamu Stadium to begin cleaning the area around G Pool. As he was working, Tilikum swam by. Cordoba noticed something white on the whale’s back. He asked a coworker, who said it was probably a toy. But then Tilikum surfaced from the water, and they could see it was no toy. As Cordoba ran to notify security, physical therapist Michael Dougherty was arriving for work. He glanced through the underwater glass and saw Tilikum floating calmly in the water, staring back at him. Then he noticed two legs dangling from the giant whale’s flank, and they were not moving. A nude person was draped across Tilikum’s back.
Tilikum allowed himself to be herded onto the medical lift, and SeaWorld staff retrieved the corpse. The young male had puncture wounds, multiple bruises, and abrasions across his face and body.
His swimsuit was still in the tank. The crotch and one leg were torn: Tilikum had nimbly opened Duke’s scrotum and removed his left testicle. Divers had to retrieve it from the bottom of the pool.
Police could find no admission ticket among Duke’s meager possessions (to this day SeaWorld refers to him as a “trespasser”), which included a white metal ring, a beaded bracelet, beads, a hair scrunchie, and $2 in cash. Orange County sheriff spokesman Jim Solomons said the cause of death was not clear. “The whale may have been surprised by the man in the tank,” he said. “He may have dived suddenly, creating a vortex that pulled him under.” Officers did find what seemed to be a Marlboro cigarette that had been restuffed with marijuana.
The media devoured the sensational story. Naomi’s phone started ringing before she got to work. She spent the next several days reacting to the bizarre incident. First, HSUS issued a statement arguing that the death proved “why whales should not be held in captivity.” It included a lengthy statement from Naomi, noting, “The fact that a SeaWorld patron was able to gain access to the whale pools after the park was closed demonstrates that SeaWorld does not provide enough security for whales and visitors alike.”
But there was much more to it than simple security precautions. “SeaWorld’s programs are not properly educating spectators about the wild nature of these five-ton animals,” Naomi declared. Tilikum was smart enough to know this was not one of his trainers, she said. He was also desperately in need of something, anything, new.
“Putting orcas in captivity creates an environment in which boredom is often the norm, and a reaction to a novel ‘object’ in the tank is to be expected,” Naomi said. But that critical safety message was not reaching SeaWorld audiences. Instead they were told that “the animals are friendly and enjoy being around humans. This man obviously believed what he heard at SeaWorld.”
Later that day, Naomi told reporters that Tilikum was not at fault for Dukes’s death. “He didn’t kill him on purpose. This happened because SeaWorld put him in the way of people. This would not have happened in the wild.” The destruction of the family structure so critical to orca mental health and well-being had turned some whales into sociopaths. “They’re all socially warped, because they didn’t swim with their mothers long enough to learn to be orcas.”3
In yet another interview that hectic day, Naomi claimed that SeaWorld was portraying killer whales as benign cartoon characters: “They’ve turned them into Mickey Mouse.” On her tour of SeaWorld, she added, she had been deeply disturbed by Tilikum’s situation. “They are strictly controlling his behavior to suit their purposes. Everything he does is mapped out by humans. If that’s not going to make him crazy, I don’t know what will.”
Ken Balcomb also did interviews from San Juan Island that day. He blamed the stress of captivity for Tilikum’s aggressive behavior: “You pull them out of their element and you’ve already got a potential delinquent. You put them in a captive situation where they are locked in a small space with limited contacts. Basically, you’re building a psycho.”
SeaWorld officials criticized the critics. Dukes’s death had been a “senseless, stupid situation,” said Brad Andrews, director of zoological operations for the SeaWorld and Busch Gardens parks. “And then the Humane Society wants to make hay of it. It’s sad when they want to make issue of this when they are not experts at all. We make sure people know these are wild creatures. We create opportunities for people to get close and appreciate them in a safe manner.”4
SeaWorld suggested the cause of death was a combination of hypothermia (
subnormal body temperature) and drowning, as though Tilikum had little to do with what befell Daniel Dukes. But the coroner’s report contradicted that.5 There was no mention of hypothermia; and Tilikum had caused injuries to the young man even while he was still alive.
Among his “pre-mortem” wounds were scrapes and bruises to the forehead, nose, eyelids, left lower eye socket, lower jaw, earlobes, left ear, chest, abdomen, shoulder, arms, right leg and foot, left hip, right knee, and left lower thigh. Mild hemorrhaging was also found beneath the skin of the skull and the chest and also in the brain and bronchial tubes.
After Dukes died, Tilikum continued to bat him about and nibble at parts of his body. He surgically removed the skin of Dukes’s pubic area, including the scrotum, and left a three-centimeter bite wound behind the right knee, three bite wounds on the lower left leg, and two more tooth incisions above the left ankle. The deceased’s blood showed no evidence of any drug use, including marijuana.
G Pool had been installed just six years before, and now someone had died in it. A decade later it would be the site of more destruction, again by Tilikum.
27
Transatlantic Ties
It was time for Keiko to head home.
In early 1998, the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation had big news. They unveiled designs for the one-of-a-kind floating pen that would house the famous whale in a North Atlantic bay or fjord during the next phase of his lengthy and costly rehabilitation. Made of heavy-duty, plastic pipe frame filled with foam, with mesh netting along the bottom and sides, the state-of-the-art enclosure would be 60 percent larger than Keiko’s current tank at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. It featured a walkway around the pen, a medical pool, food-prep area, dive locker, and generator room.
