by David Kirby
Everyone at the meeting assumed they were together, but Naomi and Chris were only friends—nearly inseparable, but still only friends. A few days before Naomi’s flight home, Chris left for Scotland. Naomi was crestfallen, but said nothing. She wasn’t sure of his feelings.
But the ticket machine at the tube station swallowed Chris’s credit card. With little cash in his checking account and just sixty pence in his pocket, he couldn’t make it to the airport on time. Stranded and broke, he wandered back to the meeting venue, hat in hand. Chris asked if he could crash in someone’s room until he could get some funds transferred into his bank account. Naomi told him he could stay in her room for the night.
The next day they hung out together and went for a long, enchanting walk, pub-crawling through Notting Hill. They were falling for each other. Chris postponed his departure by four days, when Naomi was scheduled to leave.
On their final day, as they were saying good-bye, Chris said, “Well, I guess we’re going to get married then?”
“Yeah,” Naomi replied, “I guess we are.”
They made plans to see each other in September, stateside.
When Chris flew over to see Naomi, in mid-September 2001, the world was still reeling from the atrocities of 9/11. His flight was nearly empty and the terminal at Dulles was deserted when Naomi went to pick him up. Chris had brought something with him to present to Naomi: his great-grandmother’s engagement ring.
The Al Qaeda attacks did little to halt the scientific research going on around the Westman Islands in Iceland. Ocean Futures had managed to photo-ID some 250 killer whales in the area, with many of the animals’ vocalizations recorded and some biopsied for DNA samples, using a small dart gun that pulled a sample of skin and blubber from an animal with a retrievable plug that floated.
But Naomi, and many others who had worked on the Keiko project, had grown disillusioned with Ocean Futures and their SeaWorld-based staff. Keiko had been in Iceland for more than three years, and he was still far too attached to his human trainers. Naomi learned that Robin Friday, Mark Simmons, and others would grow nervous whenever Keiko demonstrated too much independence on his “walks.” If he wandered too far from the tracking boat, they would call him back with underwater tones. Despite the tracking tag on his fin, they seemed afraid to “lose” him, even though, in many ways, that was the whole idea.
Naomi now suspected that Keiko’s trainers did not want him going off on his own. Howie had been prescient in the warning: This was a subtle form of sabotage. Robin and Mark were training him the way the navy did its dolphins—to follow a boat and remain focused on it, so they did not go AWOL.
Then the funding from Craig McCaw dried up.
The billionaire had taken some hefty losses in the dot-com bubble bust and decided it was time to get out of the whale-rehab business. McCaw had already contributed $10 million of the estimated $15 million spent on Keiko.8 In 2001 alone, the bills had reached about $1.8 million to underwrite twenty-five staff members, plus fuel, food, and equipment. The 2002 budget would be drawn down to $500,000 with a staff of fourteen. The helicopter and the large tracking vessel would have to go. Around that time, Robin Friday and Mark Simmons left the project and left Iceland.
With no one else stepping in to pay for Keiko’s care and training, HSUS took over the project. Naomi and her colleague Richard Farinato—HSUS’s captive-wildlife specialist—helped usher in new rules that barred team members from making eye contact with Keiko unless they were asking him to do something that contributed to his development. If Keiko approached their boat, they were instructed to go belowdecks before he saw them, so he would get no reinforcement for that behavior. Rubdowns purely for affection were likewise stopped, as was hand-feeding the whale.
Keiko began spending more time in the ocean, often in the company of other killer whales. He passed days out there at a time without returning to his pen. Naomi and Richard Farinato made another visit in June of 2002 to check on his remarkable progress. It was all good news. While under Ocean Futures’ care, Keiko had never done anything nearly so adventurous as spending days on end away from his pen. Naomi did not think he would ever have left without the new tough love being shown him to nudge him from the nest.
Keiko spent much of his time near pods of whales that were foraging on fish, but there was no hard evidence that Keiko himself was eating. On some occasions when he was recalled to the tracking boat, the staff would perform a “stomach lavage” but never found any sign of fish.
Naomi and the HSUS team working on Keiko consulted the project veterinarian, Dr. Lanny Cornell, to get this assessment. “The only way he’ll ever go off and eat in the wild is if he gets hungry enough to do it,” he told them. “Leave him out there. Let a couple more weeks pass and see what will happen before getting worried. He needs to be pushed to the limit if he’s going to be free.”
Keiko continued to swim and travel with wild whales, usually keeping a hundred yards or so away, though it was still unclear whether he was eating. Killer whales can go for some weeks without food—though they start losing weight after two—and Keiko was still returning to the pen for meals. Even so, his team saw that as a positive development. Exercising his choice to come and go from his pen as he saw fit was a major advancement in Keiko’s rehabilitation.
On August 4, 2002, Naomi arrived on the site for her second visit of the season, this time on her own. But Keiko was not in the bay—he was offshore swimming with wild whales. The next day, the pod he was following began heading east, out into the open North Atlantic.
Keiko went with them. He continued swimming eastward, occasionally making deep dives down to sixty meters or more, reminiscent of foraging behavior among wild killer whales and suggesting he might be pursuing schools of fish.
Naomi, meanwhile, spent much of her time in the company of the accomplished writer Susan Orlean, who had arrived in the Westmans to write a feature about Keiko for The New Yorker magazine. But now her superstar subject had taken off, leaving Orlean to write a disjointed profile published under the fitting title “Where’s Willy?”
When the former Ocean Futures workers got word of what had happened, they complained that Keiko had been abandoned. They said Keiko had decided to take off because his caretakers were being “cruel” and ignoring him, denying him any social interactions with them. Keiko left, as they saw it, because he was lonely and “his humans” had betrayed his trust.
Naomi was bemused by such disingenuous platitudes. Keiko had not been abandoned. He was being tracked daily. “These people literally do not get that the whole point is to dehabituate him to humans,” she told colleagues back in Gaithersburg. “The goal is to break those very bonds that the SeaWorld crowd goes on and on about. They see this kind of ‘detraining’ as cruel and coldhearted, rather than a means to allow him to regain independence. They believed they had to take care of Keiko, when the point was getting him to where he could take care of himself. The whole thing seemed to go completely over their heads. That’s why he never ventured far in three and a half years.”
Naomi never saw Keiko again.
The whale was tracked by satellite all the way across the Atlantic. His path was fairly steady and straight, with only the occasional zigzag, which may have been Keiko following fish schools. A few days into his journey, the wandering cetacean turned up in a fishing harbor in the Faroe Islands, a remote Danish colony about midway between Iceland and Norway. Two of the caretaking team were sent to “get a visual” on him, but he didn’t stick around long enough. Keiko continued his mysterious eastward trek. On September 2, 2002, after spending some five weeks swimming across the North Atlantic, Keiko followed a fishing boat into Skålevik Fjord on the coast of Norway.
His arrival attracted a lot of attention, to put it mildly. People boated and even swam out into the inlet to play with the Hollywood celebrity. Tour operators began charging people to go out on the water aboard “Keiko safaris.” Keiko started to beg for handouts from tourists. Stil
l, he seemed vibrant and healthy, despite the long journey. A stomach lavage showed no sign of fish, but his good health and steady weight and girth indicated he must have been eating something in those weeks at sea, according to vet Lanny Cornell.
But even as Keiko splashed and posed for photos with the good people of coastal Norway, a local scientist named Nils Øien of the Institute for Marine Research in Bergen warned that Keiko would probably perish during the coming winter if he didn’t detach himself from people. Øien told Norwegian media that Keiko might pose a threat to Norway’s booming salmon-farming industry. “Reports are coming in now that the killer whale is disturbing fish farms within the Skålevik Fjord,” Øien said. “If there are more such episodes, he should be destroyed.”9
The researcher insisted he was also thinking of what was best for the animal, unlike those sentimental Americans. “I think the entire Keiko story is more or less crazy,” he told reporters. “Millions have been used to tame him, in order to turn him into a movie star. Then millions more are used to try and make him wild again. They should have let him live and die in captivity. Now that they have decided not to keep him in captivity, they should put him down. Those who think that they are helping Keiko by setting him free are actually doing just the opposite.” Øien doubted Keiko could fend for himself in the wild and asserted, “It is better to destroy him now instead of letting him starve to death.”
Naomi was horrified when she heard about all the human interaction Keiko was having. It could wipe out everything they had worked hard to achieve—complete or at least partial autonomy from people.
Though Naomi was transfixed with the Keiko saga at work, as was much of the world (he made headlines around the globe), she was also happily distracted by another matter.
On September 14, 2002, she married Dr. Edward Christien Michael Parsons in Scotland’s iconic Eilean Donan Castle, a thirteenth-century fortress built on a small island on Loch Duich, in the northwest corner of the country. Naomi’s mother, her father and his second wife, her brother Greg, an uncle, and some cousins all made the long journey there. Naomi’s side of the wedding party also had some old friends, a few coworkers, and people from college and grad school—including one of her field assistants from Johnstone Strait.
Chris and most of the men in the wedding were dressed in kilts with traditional Scottish regalia. Naomi wore an elegantly simple ivory dress with her hair swept up and dramatically back. A simple silver circlet graced her head, but no veil. For a pair of geeky whale scientists, they cut a glamorous, romantic figure on the parapet of the medieval citadel.
Soon after that, Chris landed a job teaching marine environmental conservation and marine mammal biology in the environmental science and policy department at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia. He moved to the United States to be with his new bride—and to continue advocating for cetaceans along with her from the North American side of the “dark and miserable” Atlantic.
28
Abnormal Activities
When killer whales were kept in captivity for extended periods, what effect did it have on them? Did confinement in a concrete tank morph them into some other category of animal? Some creature that is more neurotic, unpredictable, and much more dangerous, unlike anything found in nature? Naomi believed that to be the case.
Keiko, for one, was not a “natural” killer whale. Despite several years of rehabilitation, he was still a very different animal from the wild whales he was timidly trying to mingle with in Iceland. Keiko was abnormal because he could not find a family to bond with.
But at SeaWorld, the opposite dynamic was true: Animals that were completely alien to one another were compelled to form artificial “pods.” Their bonds were involuntary; Keiko’s bonds were nonexistent. In both cases, it was the pinnacle of abnormality for a killer whale in nature.
In late July 2002—just days before Keiko headed off eastwardly through the North Atlantic on a curious expedition we’ll never understand—SeaWorld suffered its first serious trainer injury in fifteen years. This time, the incident went beyond the mere mouthing of a bootee.
A twenty-eight-year-old San Diego trainer, identified only as Tamaree, was doing dry work at the pool’s edge with two killer whales, the female Orkid and the male Splash. Suddenly, one of the orcas lunged up and pulled Tamaree down into the water, where both continued to tussle with her. She would not escape unharmed.1
If there was one thing that experts on wild and captive orcas agreed upon, it was that killer whales’ pulling humans into the water was far from a normal behavior—in either environment. Then again, neither Orkid nor Splash had experienced what could reasonably be considered “normal” upbringings.
To begin with, they were both born in captivity and had never experienced the natural world. Orkid, who was thirteen at the time of the Tamaree incident, was the offspring of Orky II, a Northern Resident male, and Kandu V, an Icelandic female. Orkid was extremely intelligent, perhaps the smartest whale in SeaWorld’s collection, many people speculated. But she also had rather aggressive tendencies. Then again, Orkid had witnessed a lot of unnatural events in her young life, beginning the day she was born in San Diego, smack in the middle of the Shamu show, before thousands of awestruck strangers and their flashing cameras.
Three days after her arrival in the glass-and-concrete barrenness of her new world, Orkid’s father, Orky, wasted away to death in an adjacent tank, a victim of pneumonia and kidney disease.2
Just eleven months later, Orkid was an orphan. The nursing infant witnessed her mother, Kandu, slam her head into the peduncle (the area between dorsal fin and fluke) of Corky II during a fierce altercation in San Diego, then bleed to death. The orphaned calf was essentially raised by humans, and two surrogate orca mothers, Corky II and the erratic Kasatka. Orkid also formed a tight bond with a male in San Diego named Splash.
Just about her age, Splash already had a lengthy history of abnormality. He was the first killer whale born at Marineland Ontario in Canada. His delivery, however, came prematurely, and he developed a form of epilepsy, requiring lifelong medication to control his seizures. At two years of age, Splash was taken from his mother and flown to San Diego, where he could receive superior medical attention at SeaWorld’s facilities.
In 1995, Splash and Orkid were playing around when Splash suffered a serious seizure and slammed into a gate. Orkid and Kasatka kept him afloat until trainers could get the wounded youngster into the medical pool. His lower jaw had been severely injured, and despite a stiff regimen of antibiotics, an acute infection set in.3
SeaWorld vets decided to remove his lower teeth. The extractions left his mouth so deformed he could never fully close it again; the bottom part was now an unsightly mass of extruded flesh, with black spots where the roots of his teeth once were.
On the day that Orkid and Splash assaulted Tamaree, “she was playing with the whales, talking to them,” according to SeaWorld spokeswoman Darla Davis. “The next thing we know, as it appears from the video, she was pulled into the water,” Davis told the media, after she’d watched footage taken by tourists and security cameras at Shamu. Tamaree managed to climb out of the pool on her own, suffering scrapes and bruises. But soon her arm throbbed with pain and Tamaree learned it was badly fractured. A nearby hospital reset it with a pin.
SeaWorld insisted that neither of the whales had shown aggressive behavior in the past. But Orkid’s Animal Profile (leaked many years later) showed another story entirely.
Between 1990 and 2002, her profile listed twelve aggressive incidents—one per year—which SeaWorld considered serious enough to include. She had head-butted a trainer’s head, bumped a trainer’s body, whacked several trainers with her fluke, and rammed a number of thighs, all during water work.
Trainers engaged in dry work with Orkid were not safe from her aggressive behaviors either. In several interactions with people standing on the relative safety of the ledge, she had lunged from the water to push a trainer in the stomach, m
outh someone’s thigh, bump a hip, and jaw-pop an arm.
In 1998, “Orkid was performing a hydro-hop behavior during a night show,” her Animal Profile said. “The trainer accidentally hit her tail flukes with his hand upon his reentry and she responded by hitting him in the stomach with her head. She responded to stage call calmly.” Orkid began to displace other whales by leaving her control trainer and “aggressed upon trainers after or during tactile reinforcement,” according to her Profile. She also enjoyed “baiting seagulls and often catches them,” it said, noting, “She is good at retrieving them alive.”
Despite the incident with Tamaree and the record of Orkid’s aggressions, SeaWorld decided that both Orkid and Splash would continue performing, but they would not be used for water work until officials completed a thorough safety investigation. The half measure did little to mollify SeaWorld’s critics.
Meanwhile, the dispute raged over what constituted “normal” behavior for a killer whale in regards to Keiko and the strange saga his life had become. The whale’s unexpected entrance on the scene in the coastal waters of Norway only made the arguing more frequent and bitter. Critics—and there were many—charged that Keiko’s preference for the company of humans and lack of proof of any foraging in the open ocean were clears sign that his “freedom” had been a failure.
On the pro-release side, advocates argued that Keiko had spent nearly sixty days on his own at sea—a strong sign of self-sufficiency—and traveled more than a thousand miles without incident or weight loss. Even in Iceland, he was content to spend days on end in the ocean without returning to his pen. No matter what, his conditions were better now than they had been in Oregon, and far better than anything he endured in Mexico City or Ontario, Canada.
The fjord that Keiko had wandered into, however, was not suitable as an overwintering site because it would freeze over. Some people suggested taking Keiko back to Iceland. Others said he should be sent back to a display facility, where he could be cared for again by human handlers.