by David Kirby
* * *
Even though it had been nearly a month since Dawn Brancheau had died, park guest John Kielty found that he couldn’t leave the case behind. The more he researched what had happened at SeaWorld, and the more he learned about killer whales in captivity, the angrier he grew. John was unwittingly on his way to becoming a full-fledged anti-captivity campaigner.
In April 2010, John found an ally and kindred spirit in a St. Petersburg woman named Colleen Gorman. Vivacious, in her forties, with blond hair and blue eyes, Colleen was adamantly opposed to SeaWorld’s keeping marine mammals in captivity. Colleen used to visit SeaWorld as a young girl, and even back then the place disturbed her tremendously. Guests were greeted by a live elephant seal plopped in the middle of a busy walkway. Everyone reached out to touch him as they walked by, and it appalled the nine-year-old, who shouted, “Stop it! Stop touching him!” Young Colleen felt sorry for the orcas in the Shamu show, and once, when she was chosen to be kissed by the whale, she adamantly refused to take part. She wanted to leave.
Colleen was at her computer at her condo in St. Pete Beach when she got word of the attack. She immediately googled Tilikum and began reading. “You better not kill that whale!” she cried out loud at the screen. When the county sheriff’s spokesman said the trainer had fallen in, Colleen instinctively knew that was not the truth.
Within hours, Colleen had located a small group discussing the incident on Facebook. Mostly women, they began calling themselves the “mermaids,” or simply the “merms.” Their main focus, aside from Tilikum, was the effort to free Lolita down in Miami. Colleen also went to Jack Hanna’s Facebook page and began posting indignant but reasoned comments to counter what she felt were the “lies” he was writing. She did the same thing at the SeaWorld fan page on Facebook.
Colleen, now somewhat obsessed with the Tilikum saga, read all she could on the attack, including the excellent daily reporting by Jason Garcia and others at the Orlando Sentinel. While commenting on one of Garcia’s stories, Colleen came across the passionate anti-cap opinions of John Kielty. Soon they were friends on Facebook, and before long John had become a merm. So did Howard Garrett.
It soon became clear to Howie, Jeff, and others that they were becoming part of a small network of killer whale advocates around the country—and beyond—concerned about the well-being of whales in captivity (and in the wild). They were scientists, environmentalists, animal rights activists, former trainers, a journalist, and concerned citizens. But they lacked a place to come together, compare notes, get information, share ideas, post new studies, and discuss strategies for defending the orcas. If someone had a question, chances were good that someone else in this group had the answer.
A new, private Google group was formed. On July 8, 2010, Jeff started the Orca Aware list, which began with a handful of allies, including former trainers John Jett and Carol Ray, who had kept up with Jeff over the years, and John Kielty and Colleen Gorman, who were fighting SeaWorld in Florida. Other founding members were Jeff’s sister, Kim Ventre; his girlfriend, Michelle “Chica” Duncan, a GIS specialist/computer cartographer; his old friend and Theta Chi fraternity brother at Florida State, attorney Todd Bricker; and Stefan Jacobs, an IT specialist and orca website operator from Germany who volunteered every summer with Ken Balcomb’s killer whale survey.6
Orca Aware was the germinating kernel of an opposition force that would only grow larger and more organized.
* * *
A week before the showdown on Capitol Hill between the anti-caps and industry leaders, Naomi got a startling e-mail from a former SeaWorld employee. It would play a role in OSHA’s legal case against the company and affect the ongoing debate over captivity as well.
The message arrived via the HSUS website. It concerned Loro Parque, the Canary Island facility housing four young surplus killer whales under a “financial arrangement” with SeaWorld. The writer, an American woman named Suzanne Allee, had been recruited while employed at SeaWorld Texas to work in the Loro Parque show’s production crew. She stayed at Loro Parque until July 2009.
“I’m trying to raise awareness about the plight of the orcas at Loro Parque—as unfortunately the worst premonitions have come true,” Suzanne wrote. Park trainers had sometimes forced the four SeaWorld whales to perform “while they were injured and bleeding.” Suzanne also claimed to have seen trainers leave discarded plastic wrappers on the pool ledge just feet from the animals. Meanwhile, the four whales were stripping away shreds of material used for lining on the newly installed pools. “The animals have been subjected to numerous endoscopes because the Spanish park never wanted to invest money into surfacing the pools correctly.”
Three and a half years of “negligence and mistraining” had resulted in the near-fatal attack on Claudia Vollhardt in October 2007 and the death of Alexis Martinez in December 2009, Suzanne alleged. Left in their wake were “four very messed up orcas.”
Suzanne was hoping to find a reputable group “that will bring this issue to the US public and put pressure on SeaWorld to not abandon their orcas to the ineptitude of the Canarian trainers. These animals deserve the highest quality of life possible, and as the owner of these animals, it is SeaWorld’s responsibility to insure this.”
Suzanne wanted to speak with someone at HSUS “who could help me devise a media awareness campaign. Alexis Martinez already lost his life, and I have no doubt that if the orcas are abandoned by SW, it will be one of them next.”
As bad as things sounded in Spain, Naomi viewed the e-mail as an unexpected opportunity. SeaWorld might now face another avenue of investigation. Naomi was swamped with preparations for the congressional hearing, among all her other duties, but quickly wrote back to the whistle-blower.
“What you describe is horrendous and even worse than what we were all concerned about when the orcas left for the Canaries,” Naomi wrote. While she initially assumed that SeaWorld would be monitoring its whales more carefully, “now it sounds like I shouldn’t have given them even that much credit!” Naomi wanted to help. “No one wants to see another death of a trainer or an orca.”
Suzanne wrote back one day before the hearing. She had started at Loro Parque in February 2006 and moved up through the ranks to become A/V supervisor and department head. Now she felt that she had to speak up, despite her worries about repercussions from the industry. “The fact of the matter is that most everyone who was associated with Loro Parque is distressed by what a failure it is, but (as you well know) most of them are not in a position to freely voice their opinions.” Suzanne said she would be willing to speak to US lawmakers and wanted to file a written brief for the House subcommittee hearing.
Naomi asked Suzanne to compile a brief detailing everything she had witnessed in Tenerife that had put the US whales at risk. She also inquired if Suzanne would be willing to speak with OSHA’s Lara Padgett, down in Tampa. “This may not directly or immediately improve the situation for the four whales at Loro Parque,” she admitted, “but it could have the longest-term and widest benefits for whales in the future.”
As for repercussions, Naomi said, “I have always been told that the truth is the best defense. If you are telling the truth, then there is no defamation.”
* * *
Seventeen years had gone by since Naomi Rose had first appeared at a congressional hearing on the Byzantine captivity provisions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and its complicated division of labor among federal agencies. Congress had required facilities to offer conservation or education programs that met industry-recognized standards, but NMFS did nothing to oversee or enforce whether facilities were meeting those standards.
Not much had changed since then.
To Naomi, it was scandalous that nobody in the federal government was making sure that SeaWorld and other parks were providing correct and up-to-date educational materials on marine science and conservation. On the morning of April 27, 2010, just three months after the death at SeaWorld, the House Subcommittee on Fisherie
s, Wildlife, Oceans, and Insular Affairs would hold its hearing on the matter.
Naomi was invited to testify as an expert witness at the hearing, “Marine Mammals in Captivity: What Constitutes Meaningful Public Education?” She had worked hard to brief the Democratic majority members’ staff. The Democrats were generally more supportive of greater regulations for captive marine mammals than their GOP counterparts, with a few notable exceptions—including freshman Democratic representative Alan Grayson, a darling of the American left from Florida’s Eighth District, which includes SeaWorld and Orlando.
Joining Naomi on the same side would be Lori Marino, PhD, an old friend and colleague and veteran of the anti-captivity wars. A senior lecturer in neuroscience and behavioral biology at Emory University and faculty member in the Emory Center for Ethics, Lori had also served as a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History.
Lori, in her early fifties with long, dark hair and a soft face, was a leader in cetacean neuroscience who had published more than eighty papers on animal behavior, neuroscience, and human-animal interactions—roughly half of them peer-reviewed studies on dolphin and whale brains, biology, intelligence, and cognition. She had studied dolphins both in the ocean and in captivity and, working with colleague Diana Reiss, produced the first definitive data showing that bottlenose dolphins could recognize themselves in a mirror—a rare sign of self-awareness among animals and something even human children do not typically display until they are two.7
Lori had also written or cowritten several peer-reviewed papers presenting data unfavorable to dolphin-assisted therapy and swim-with-the-dolphins programs, and she had worked on some highly critical reviews of educational claims by the zoo and aquarium community.
The scientist had also declared her opposition to captivity for all marine mammals, making her more “radical” than Naomi and HSUS. Lori opposed taking marine mammals even for research purposes, saying that all necessary studies could be conducted in the wild, especially with so-called solitary sociable cetaceans (free-ranging animals that for some reason become friendly with people). That position set Lori quite a bit apart from the majority of her marine mammal colleagues. Most people in the industry disliked her.
The House inquest was shaping up to be a major event. Naomi could not recall a time that industry leaders had been summoned to an oversight hearing in Washington under such unfriendly conditions. “It’s time Congress and the agencies took a critical look at the conventional wisdom that marine mammal live displays serve the animals’ best interests,” Naomi said in a written statement to the media.
Subcommittee chairwoman Madeleine Bordallo, a Democrat and nonvoting representative from the US territory of Guam, chaired the proceedings. A decent number of committee members actually showed up, and the hearing room was filled with industry supporters and critics, and a sprinkling of media, including CSPAN and the Orlando Sentinel.
“As everyone well knows, this topic is not without controversy and can become very emotional,” said Bordallo, a soft-spoken, older woman with carefully coiffed hair. The controversy and emotions, she added, had only intensified after the death of Dawn Brancheau.
Even so, for many of the millions of people who visited US marine mammal parks each year, they were the only source of information about “these iconic creatures and their life history and the many threats that they face,” the chairwoman said. “It is imperative we ensure that conservation and education programs at all captive display facilities meet all of the highest professional standards.” Naomi had evidently done a good job with the briefing paper.
There was one “special appearance” before the first panel of witnesses: Representative Alan Grayson, while not on the committee, reminded his colleagues that central Florida was home to world-famous zoos, aquariums, and amusement parks. “SeaWorld is a shining jewel among them,” he read from a prepared statement. “The economic impact of SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment is tremendous. SeaWorld Orlando alone attracts six million visitors a year, including my five children.”8
As for the Brancheau tragedy, the congressman downplayed its significance: “One unfortunate incident that made us all sad doesn’t prove that SeaWorld acted in any way irresponsibly. In the end, we can’t expect that the rules are going to make people good. In the end, people have to be good themselves.”
The first panel consisted of Lori Marino; Eric Schwaab, assistant administrator at NMFS; Peter Corkeron, PhD, a whale biologist serving as a visiting fellow in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; and Paul Boyle, PhD, senior vice president for conservation and education at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
Schwaab acknowledged that education and conservation standards were being “set by the industry that is being regulated” and stated the 1994 changes to the MMPA (the ones supported by industry and adamantly opposed by HSUS and others) explicitly said that the secretary of commerce, who had ultimate authority over NMFS, lacked the authority to regulate marine park education and conservation programs. There was no need, therefore, for further “clarification” of NMFS’s role—something that industry opponents such as Naomi wanted. “Congress and NMFS have acknowledged that standards used by AZA and the Alliance represent an acceptable industry standard,” Schwaab explained.
Dr. Marino was next. She could not have disagreed more with Schwaab’s sanguine assessment of the industry’s self-imposed standards. All information offered on marine mammal natural history, biology, behavior, and conservation was required to meet two criteria: It had to be accurate; and it had to be based on valid outcome measures demonstrating that a facility was truly serving an educational or conservation purpose.
Industry was not meeting those criteria, she alleged. For example, the Alliance claimed that belugas and killer whales not only lived as long or longer in its facilities than they would in the ocean, but they were also living “happy lives.” But as Lori pointed out, “these two species live much shorter lives in captivity.” And the “emotional” claim that the Alliance’s animals led “happy lives” was pure speculation.
Lori also disputed industry educational materials claiming that captive marine mammals showed no signs of elevated stress. All one need do was open the Marine Mammal Inventory Report to find lists of numerous animals dead from “stress-related disorders” such as ulcerative gastritis, perforating ulcer, and heart failure, “strongly indicating that stress is an important component of captive display.”
That non-peer-reviewed, industry-sponsored research had detected more markers of stress in stranded animals than animals living in accredited display facilities was, essentially, meaningless, she charged. “Stranded animals would be expected to have higher rates of pathologies, including ulcers, as a matter of course.” But the pro-captivity authors had failed to include a control group—a basic tenet of all scientific experiments—therefore rendering their conclusion “uninterpretable at best.”
Lori had coauthored a policy paper on “dolphin-human interaction programs” that reviewed the evidence for stress in captive cetaceans. She said the study had concluded that many captive dolphins showed markers of stress, such as “elevated adrenocortical hormones, stereotypies, self-destruction, self-mutilation, and excessive aggressiveness.” Contrary to Alliance claims in its public education materials that captive animals did not show signs of stress, there was “ample scientific evidence to the contrary,” Lori asserted, adding that marine mammals were “often very seriously affected by it.”
Another area where display industry materials shaded the truth was the question of cetacean intelligence, she continued. The industry clearly thought the animals were intelligent enough to take part in human activities, but it simultaneously downplayed that same intelligence “so as to undermine concerns about keeping these intelligent animals in captivity. Like the last bowl of porridge in the Goldilocks fairy tale, dolphin intelligence is just right.”
As for SeaWorld, its materials we
re “littered with inaccuracies,” deliberately designed to bias the perception of cetaceans as “interesting but rather ordinary animals” and therefore suitable for captivity. SeaWorld claimed that dolphins were “large” animals with “proportionately sized brains,” a statement that was “patently false.” In science, brain size was evaluated by taking body size into account. Many species’ brains are proportionate to body size. But a few have much larger brains compared to their bodies. Human brains are seven times larger than they should be for our body size. Dolphin brains, “contrary to industry assertions,” are proportionately large as well, Lori said. Many have brains three to five times larger than normally expected.
Species with larger-than-expected brains “tend to show exceptional intelligence in many ways,” Lori said. The relative size of a dolphin brain is second only to that of people. The average killer whale brain, at more than twelve pounds, is about four times heavier than the average human brain and second only to that of sperm whales, at seventeen pounds. “The Alliance apparently wishes to hide this similarity along with any concerns that dolphin sensitivities may be too similar to that of humans for them to be in captivity.” The Alliance claimed that brain size did not equate with intelligence, and that comparing intelligence between species was “impossible and inappropriate.” As for dolphin brains being associated with high intellect, the Alliance called this an “untested and disputed” hypothesis and said there was no “consistent intelligence test” for humans.
All of those statements “range from false to misleading,” Lori countered. “It is neither impossible nor inappropriate to compare different aspects of intelligence, such as learning, memory, problem solving, or behavioral flexibility, across species.” There were also, of course, several reliable and cross-cultural intelligence tests for humans.
