by David Kirby
SeaWorld canceled the Shamu show for the rest of the day. Three days later, Aibel returned to water work with Ky.
The incident was followed by yet another attack, in Orlando in 2005, which sent an unidentified trainer to Sand Lake hospital for treatment of minor injuries. The cause was an “overly excited” killer whale, according to SeaWorld official Becca Bides. Later that same year in Orlando, an orca named Taku began bumping a trainer in the slide-out area. The other whales refused to perform after that incident, witnesses reported.8
April of 2005 brought even worse news to SeaWorld. Splash, the male orca that had fractured the arm of San Diego trainer Tamaree, was ailing once again. This time, he was not recovering quickly. Splash languished in the med pool, not responding to antibiotic treatment for his infection, which reportedly began in a tooth. Off-duty trainers came in to work just to be with the whale and his distraught caregivers.
“They were trying hard to be professionals at the same time they were losing a friend,” recalled animal-training supervisor Al Garver. Watching his trainers trying to conceal their sadness “was the toughest thing for me to see.”9
Splash was slowly disappearing. His two best friends, Orkid and a seven-year-old male named Sumar, tapped at the med pool’s gate for him. Sumar’s life had been no less abnormal than that of Splash and Orkid. He was born in 1998 at SeaWorld Orlando, the offspring of Taima and Tilikum. But Taima rejected Sumar and attacked him when he was just three months old.
Whatever Taima’s motive, her son had been taken away from her and placed in another pool with the park’s other females, Katina and her daughter Kalina. Nine months later, Sumar was sent to San Diego, where the matriarch Corky once again adopted an infant newcomer as her own.10
Now, Sumar watched in helplessness as his best friend expired quietly in the pool next door.
Splash’s demise and its aftermath were covered in an in-depth feature in the San Diego Union-Tribune. In captivity, the death of a killer whale was as unnatural as its life. “Within the normally upbeat environment of SeaWorld, personnel who had worked closely with the 16-foot-long killer whale were devastated,” the article said. SeaWorld veterinarian Tom Reidarson called the death “as hard a loss as when I lost my best friend,” and Robbin Sheets, the supervising whale trainer, called Splash “a big sweetheart,” who needed “a little extra attention.”
Bereft trainers “put on brave faces and returned to work,” the article said. “The killer whale shows at Shamu Stadium continued uninterrupted.” Hours later, “trainers were so upset they could only perform a ‘dry’ show”—they could not focus on doing water work.
Few members of the public knew that Splash had died. Most of them didn’t even know there was a Splash. The “Shamu” stage name had made it nearly impossible for people to tell one black-and-white whale from another. The San Diego News Tribune asked Naomi about that practice. “It’s a great technique for keeping people unaware of just how many animals die,” she said, adding that, during the previous nineteen years, on average one orca died each year at SeaWorld’s parks combined.
But SeaWorld argued that Splash had lived far longer in captivity than he would have in the ocean. His life span “was a testament to everyone’s hard work on his behalf,” chief vet Tom Reidarson remarked. Naomi was not given a chance to respond to that claim. But she considered what she might have told the press. It was possible, she thought, that captivity started Splash’s problems in the first place, causing his premature delivery, which led to the calf’s developing epilepsy and other health problems.
Even if captivity wasn’t the cause, one could argue that prolonging the animal’s life was no mercy. In the heartless calculus of evolution, a diseased or deformed infant would be detrimental to the gene pool. In nature, the best thing for such an animal was for it to die of its maladies quickly.
Splash’s necropsy report indicated that he died of stomach perforations.
The year 2005 was not over. More aberrant behavior among captive killer whales lay ahead.
On October 9, SeaWorld San Antonio’s female Kayla gave birth to a new calf. Kayla was the offspring of the Icelandic female Kenau and the Northern Resident male Orky, both now deceased. The calf’s father was Keet, offspring of Kalina (Baby Shamu) and Kotar (who died in 1995 when a gate crushed his skull).
This was Kayla’s first pregnancy, and she had never spent time around nursing mothers before. She’d never learned any proper maternal skills because no female orca had ever taught her. Even though her calf was normal and healthy, Kayla rejected it, refusing to offer it milk.11 For the first time, SeaWorld employees had to take on the nursing responsibilities of a captive killer whale who had failed her own calf.
More than fifty staffers were assigned to provide around-the-clock care for the calf, a female, including bottle feedings every two hours with infant formula, mixed with milk expressed from her mother. SeaWorld called the infant “K-calf” after her mother, but later renamed her Halyn. After separating Halyn from Kayla, veterinarians at San Antonio put the infant into a holding pool along with a bottlenose dolphin, but that animal shunned her as much as her mother had. She was moved back to her original tank.
SeaWorld took the maternal rejection in stride. It was all in a day’s business, seemed to be the message. “We don’t know all of the specifics of why an animal rejects a baby,” Dudley Wigdahl, vice president of zoology, told reporters in Texas. “A first-time mother may have been confused with the birthing process or mechanics of birth.”
Some staff at SeaWorld, meanwhile, relished the chance to play surrogate mother to a newborn orca. They viewed the episode as a plus. “This is a career goal to work with a calf from day one,” said Julie Sigman, who had worked at the park for a decade. Usually, she added, it took several months.
Naomi shook her head when she read that. These people are delusional, she thought. They should be asking themselves why Kayla rejected her calf in captivity when something like that was highly unlikely to occur in the wild. Instead, they were doing a cheery public-relations dance about how lucky they were to hand-raise a newborn killer whale—an animal they were now anthropomorphically referring to as SeaWorld’s newest “baby.”
29
Ken and Kasatka
If, one day, SeaWorld is forced to remove trainers from its killer whale pools once and for all, historians may look back on 2006 as the beginning of the end of water work. Two attacks at the end of the year, both in San Diego, were frightening and fateful.
First came an incident with the aggression-prone Orkid. On November 15, she was doing water work in the newest Shamu show, called “Believe.” The thirty-minute multimedia spectacular celebrated children’s fascination with the sea and its creatures. “Believe” was divided into six acts: Discovery, Share the Joy, Ballet, Immersion, Pass the Torch, and Celebration. SeaWorld boasted that its choreography showcased one hundred separate orca behaviors, fifty-two of them newly developed. On average, water-work performers were now doing thirteen behaviors with the whales, as opposed to previous shows that averaged about eight. The extra workload heaped additional stress onto humans and orcas alike.
On this day, Orkid was doing a water-work segment along with Sumar—the juvenile son of Tilikum and Taima—and orca trainer Brian Rokeach. Rokeach had worked with killer whales for less than three years. This was his first time doing water work with the unpredictable Orkid.
Three other trainers were onstage, including Ken “Petey” Peters, who had already experienced aggressive incidents with Kasatka in 1993 and 1999. Rokeach had just completed a successful “fluke splash ride” and dove off Orkid, who was now at one end of the pool. Then she swam up beside him, which was not in the playbook. The other trainers called Orkid and Sumar back to stage. The whales dove under the surface and disappeared, presumably to head back to the control trainer onstage. Rokeach began swimming the short distance to the stage when Orkid sneaked up behind him and took his left ankle into her mouth.1
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sp; Orkid executed a barrel roll and, with Rokeach in front of her, pushed the trainer all the way to the bottom of the thirty-six-foot-deep main tank, A Pool. Sumar dove to the bottom with them, but did not take part in the attack.
Back onstage, Ken Peters scrambled to slap the water’s surface in an effort to recall the off-behavior whales to stage. When that failed, he ran in the back and retrieved the remote audio recall box and signaled to them three or four times to return to stage. Neither orca obeyed the tones. Peters slapped the surface one more time, and it worked. Orkid and Sumar swam up to the stage and rested their chins contritely on the curved concrete like errant children.
Finally, and much to the relief of staff and audience members alike (a video of the incident is also playing on YouTube), Rokeach broke the surface and took a deep breath. He had been underwater for about twenty-six seconds.
With the two rambunctious whales under control, Rokeach paddled over to the stage behind them and, with help from other trainers, escaped from the water. The trainer waved gallantly to the anxious crowd and slowly limped backstage with a torn ligament in his ankle. It took a lot of physical therapy for him to recover.
Rokeach and Peters later said that Orkid did not appear to be acting aggressively. She was simply presented with the chance to grab Rokeach’s foot, so she did. Both trainers said Orkid tended toward opportunism and had grabbed feet before. They could recall no precursor to explain why Orkid went off behavior.
Brian Rokeach took the fall for the incident. It was his fault, he said, not Orkid’s. It had been a mistake for him to swim toward stage before Orkid and Sumar were under control. But he explained that he knew that other trainers were about to bring another whale into the pool and wanted to exit quickly so as not to delay the next segment of the show. He could have left the pool from the side, but decided to go for the stage instead because it was closer.
After the attack, SeaWorld added new rules to its safety protocol, including a requirement to have one trainer stationed with the callback device at all times during water work, and increasing the number of trainers in the Shamu show from four to five. Orkid, meanwhile, was permanently taken out of water work.
These measures would do nothing to prevent another terrifying whale attack, in two weeks, in the pools of San Diego.2
For the third time, Kasatka turned on Ken Peters, this time with far more serious implications. On November 29, 2006, a small midweek audience of about five hundred people were scattered about the fifty-five-hundred-seat stadium to see the “Believe” show. Corky had been put on light duty that day because she had recently been raked by Kasatka and the wounds on her flukes had not healed. Orkid was not doing water work because of her incident with Brian Rokeach, so Sumar and Kasatka were called upon to perform much of the water-work segments in the show.
Backstage, however, Kasatka’s newest calf, Kalia (sired by Keet and just under two years old), was getting rowdy in one of the pools. One senior trainer, John Stewart, noted that Kalia was being extra playful and “acting a little goofy” during the performance, yet nothing out of the ordinary for a young calf. But a supervisor/trainer at the stadium, Tucker Petrzelka, disagreed, saying that Kalia was out of control during the show.
Two other trainers, Lindy Fordem and Matt Fripp, also noticed some type of commotion backstage between Kalia and her mother. Fordem saw Kasatka “head bobbing” the calf. Kasatka often behaved that way, but Fordem thought the older whale was being extra-stern that afternoon, describing Kasatka as acting like an “angry mom.” Fripp witnessed the same incident, but thought nothing of it.3
When Kasatka’s turn came to perform in the show, Lindy Fordem “walked” the whale through the connecting backstage pools and handed off Kasatka in the main pool to Ken Peters. “Mom was being very vocal with the calf,” she said of Kasatka, not as any kind of warning, just a point of information. Regardless, Peters did not hear her.
Kasatka began the segment by performing perfectly. Peters asked her to do a surf ride, followed by a foot push ending in a slide across the stage. He did some dry behaviors with her from stage, then dove into the water for the big finale, the rocket hop.
As Peters dove under the water to meet up with the whale, the four other trainers were onstage dancing and clapping to the loud music. Before long they could tell something was not right. Petey had been under the surface for far too long.
Peters had been waiting for Kasatka to touch his foot, the beginning of that particular behavior. He was about ten or fifteen feet down. Suddenly, he heard a killer whale vocalizing loudly. Peters described it as a distress vocalization or cry.
He later learned the wailing was Kalia’s screeching for her mother from the other pool.
Kasatka instantly pulled her rostrum away from Peters’s feet. Then she grabbed his ankles, pulling him underwater for several seconds. When he surfaced, she grabbed him again, this time “rag-dolling” her trainer violently by shaking him back and forth with her powerful neck muscles. Kasatka took him under again, for a minute or more.
Then slowly and deliberately, as if performing a bizarre underwater pas de deux, the whale began to spiral upward with Peters’s foot in her mouth. She exhaled a cloud of white bubbles from her blowhole.
When they finally resurfaced, Tucker Petrzelka heard a shout for help. He slapped the water, trying to bring Kasatka back to stage. Matt Fripp grabbed the callback device and deployed it while John Stewart slammed a metal bucket against the pool’s side. Kasatka was having none of it.
She decided to take Peters to the bottom once again. They could be seen beneath the surface. She still had a foot in her mouth, and she dragged the trainer around, dunking him periodically and ignoring all signals to return to stage. Peters remained unbelievably calm, as he was trained to do (much like Steve Aibel when Ky had begun porpoising on him in San Antonio two years earlier).
Finally Peters told his colleagues to abandon the recall effort since it only seemed to be making Kasatka bite down harder. Each time he tried to extricate his foot from her huge jaws, she bit down again.
By now the audience was terrified.
Kasatka was careful to keep Peters in the middle of the pool and away from the other trainers, who were trying to rescue him at the edges. Peters managed to hold his head above water and gently stroked the whale in an effort to calm her down. For a while, she did just that.
Then a trainer threw a “scubacuzzi” (a life preserver with scuba gear and oxygen supply) onto the surface. Kasatka slowly swam over to inspect the object, keeping Peters in her mouth and away from the oxygen.
As park employees ushered the shell-shocked audience from the stadium, several staff members threw a net into the water and began pulling it across one end of the pool. Kasatka let go of Peters’s foot to go have a look at the net. He was treading water in the middle of the pool. The whale swam underneath him. Peters tried to keep her from grabbing his feet again by kicking her.
Peters realized the tactic was futile. Resigned that Kasatka was going to take him under yet again, he drew in air and waited. It didn’t take long. She grabbed his foot, thrashed him around a little, then dove to the bottom anew.
This time, she laid her entire five-thousand-pound body on top of the trainer, pinning him to the concrete for a minute or more.
Peters went limp. He felt his breath being forced out. He wondered when, or if, Kasatka was going to let him up.
Mercifully, she grabbed him and brought him to the surface to breathe. Peters began rubbing her sides again. Finally, she let him go and began drifting toward the stage.
By now, the staff had got netting across part of the pool, from stage to slide-out area. Kasatka and Peters were about three feet from the net, close to the slide-out. He backed away slowly from the brooding Kasatka, gingerly patting her flank the entire length of her body, then turning away quickly. He went over the net and, with a few powerful strokes, beached himself onto the shallow area. He sat in the few inches of water, now protected by the ne
t, catching his breath.
Kasatka noticed he had escaped. She turned away from the stage and charged toward the net, clearing the barrier without any problem.
“Look out!” someone yelled. “She’s coming over the net!”
Peters saw the whale coming back for him. He scrambled backward in the shallow water and tried to stand up to run. But his feet—wounded, numb, and bleeding—would not carry him. Peters was freezing and still out of breath. He felt ready to pass out. But his colleagues grabbed him just as Kasatka moved in only feet away. They pulled him to safety and a waiting crew of rescue personnel.
Kasatka turned and cruised away slowly. For several minutes after the attack, she swam around the perimeter with one of Peters’s socks in her mouth, making pathetic-sounding vocalizations.
“She didn’t show me any precursors. She didn’t tell me, she didn’t show me,” Peters later told his colleagues. The aggression had come as a total surprise, he said, without any signals that Kasatka was about to go off. (Later he would recall young Kalia’s pathetic cries from backstage, just before Kasatka went berserk.)
Ken Peters suffered puncture wounds to both feet and a broken metatarsal ligament in his left foot. He was transported to UC San Diego Medical Center for surgery and three days of IV antibiotics to prevent infection of his many bite wounds. He said that, although this was not normal behavior for Kasatka, he would not swim with her again.
The attack was big news. Networks descended on San Diego to cover the aftermath. CNN interviewed several guest eyewitnesses who talked about how shocked they were to see something so brutal at an entertainment park.
But SeaWorld’s chief trainer, Mike Scarpuzzi, told CNN that Kasatka had never before displayed “this particular unwanted behavior to this extent.” Yes, he admitted, “There are times like this. They are killer whales. She did choose to demonstrate her feelings in a way that was unfortunate.” But, thanks to Peters’s ample training and strong swimming abilities, he succeeded in calming the whale long enough to end the incident. “It turned out exactly the way we would want it if something like this were to ever happen.”
