Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish

by John Hargrove

  In Houston, I proceeded to check off all the things I needed to do to get a job at SeaWorld. I got my scuba certification. I enrolled at the University of Texas in Houston to study psychology, just as Dan Blasko had recommended. I took classes full-time at night school and worked full-time during the day. I picked up extra money as a lifeguard.

  I also drove down to Galveston to volunteer with the Marine Mammal Stranding Network, where I helped with beached animal recovery on the weekends. That was heartbreaking labor, particularly one animal necropsy that I got to assist in. A mother dolphin and her calf had been caught in a gillnet—the kind that hangs vertically, its bottom edge anchored by weights. Suddenly, the element that was their home and refuge became the very substance that threatened them. The mother dolphin realized that she and her calf were running out of oxygen and that they had to make it to the surface immediately or drown. In desperation, she plunged deeper into the water, driving herself against the sea floor to try to get under the net and scoop her offspring to safety. It was all in vain. Mother and calf died. She had been nursing the baby till the end. We found fresh milk in the calf’s stomach. The mud in the mother’s mouth was evidence of how hard she was ramming herself against the bottom to get out from the net.

  I kept up my swim training. I knew that one element of the swim test was diving to the bottom of the pool on a single breath. It wasn’t quite the epic immersions depicted in The Big Blue but the pool was more than 25 feet deep at Dolphin Stadium and 40 feet deep at Shamu Stadium. You don’t learn to go deep—and stay deep—just by being a good swimmer and leaping off a diving board.

  I prepared for the dive portion of the test by every so often taking a wave runner out into the Gulf of Mexico, jumping into the water and going down as far as I could—about 30 feet. The objective of each dive was to grab mud, bringing up proof that you had touched bottom. The deeper you go down into the water, the greater the pressure and the compression on your lungs, resulting in a smaller capacity to retain oxygen.

  Later in my career and after years of swimming with killer whales at Shamu Stadium, I would learn the benefits of having gone repeatedly down to such depths: your eardrums become more flexible the more often you are in deep water. Most other trainers had to pinch their noses to equalize their eardrums during a deep dive. Fortunately for me, that was something I never had to do. I would feel my eardrums readjusting on their own. Equalizing was easy and effortless.

  Even as I did all the prep work to qualify for a potential job opening at SeaWorld, I planned to plow through college for the next four years. The degree was a requirement—or so Blasko had said. Then, something unexpected happened. The pestering I had been doing for years paid off.

  In 1993, management at SeaWorld San Antonio had an apprentice trainer position to fill and asked the experienced senior trainers if they knew anyone who might qualify. Several said, “That kid who keeps coming to ask us questions,” explaining that I met all the criteria. One of them got word to me. My chance had come—earlier than I expected. I was not going to let it pass, even if I was nowhere close to college graduation.

  I would not be the only one trying out for the job at the Animal Training Department of SeaWorld. Twenty-seven of us, all with scuba certifications, showed up for the swim test that September.

  It took place at Dolphin Stadium. The temperature of the water there is warmer than at Shamu—though it is still chilled to about 60 degrees and much colder than a backyard swimming pool. First, we had to swim 125 feet underwater in a single breath and then dive 25 feet down to retrieve a weight from the pool floor. The challenge was not to surface prematurely during the dive to the bottom or the underwater swim. There was also a timed freestyle swim element in the test.

  On the day of the swim test, I woke up with a sinus infection—a result, I think, of too much practicing in the Gulf of Mexico. That kind of blockage can be dangerous when diving deep, with the possibility of more infection and the perforation of the eardrums because of your inability to equalize pressure. It had the potential to end my career before it started. That did little to improve my stress levels. But I would rather have died during the swim test than pass up the opportunity.

  Only three of us made it to the final round. We would go through a battery of interviews with the top trainers (including the star of the show, Mark McHugh); we would all go on stage to prove we had the presence and confidence to speak on a microphone in front of a crowd; also our diving form would be carefully scrutinized by the judges.

  Then they sent us home to wait. It would take a month before a decision was made. It was agonizing. After the first week without news, I was convinced I didn’t get the job and that they wouldn’t even bother to tell me. But finally Human Resources called me. They had picked one apprentice out of the three finalists: and it was me! My dream was coming true. I was going to be a SeaWorld trainer.

  2

  The Fantasy Kingdom of SeaWorld

  I have absolutely no doubt that SeaWorld will go down in history as a legendary enterprise. Since its founding in 1965, the theme park has provided Americans and the rest of the world with a compelling model of a particular kind of modern mythology: that of apparent harmony between animals and human beings. In the SeaWorld cosmos, the paradise that has been the dream of many cultures throughout history is finally at hand.

  To people hoping for a world in tune with nature, SeaWorld could well have been the peaceable kingdom predicted by the prophet Isaiah, except instead of the wolf living in friendship with the lamb, the earth’s two most dangerous apex predators—Orcinus orca and Homo sapiens—swam and played together as God meant it to be at creation. If you had any doubt, all you had to do was buy a ticket for a show at Shamu Stadium in San Diego or San Antonio or Orlando and you could see the miracle for yourself. After being hired as an apprentice trainer at SeaWorld, it was now my job to help maintain and enhance that myth of perfect interspecies co-existence.

  I joined as a true believer. And, even when there were inconsistencies in the SeaWorld doctrine, I chose to believe—most of the time, happily—in the watery cosmic vision I was becoming part of. Like all successful organizations—be they businesses or religions—SeaWorld had its holy writ, a kind of theology at the heart of its existence.

  And, thus, in the beginning there was Shamu.

  Shamu was the first superstar of SeaWorld, the primordial orca goddess of the marine park, making her appearance in the second half of 1965 to capture the imaginations of park goers. She was the first killer whale in SeaWorld’s collection and her name would live on and on, as if Shamu herself was immortal. Every show was about Shamu; every whale at the center of the spectacle was called Shamu; any companion to the principal whale in the show was somehow explained away as Baby Shamu or Grandbaby Shamu or Great-Grandbaby Shamu. Shamu would never die. At least, not in name.

  The original Shamu died in 1971. But every whale that starred in the shows staged in the central stadium named in her honor would be called Shamu. It was so important to SeaWorld that her memory live on like that of a legend beyond compare that, for a long time, the actual names we gave the whales were secret. The public never really knew that Takara was called Takara, or that her nickname was Tiki; or that her mother’s name was Kasatka. Or that the whale we called Corky was the same animal with a cameo in the movie Orca. Few members of the public knew who Keet was; or Ulises; or Katina. That’s because SeaWorld felt the need to keep the fantasy of Shamu going. She was to be adored forever.

  SeaWorld may have set itself up as a kind of paradise—all theme parks do—but even the Garden of Eden was part of a morality tale.

  The original Shamu was the first killer whale to be intentionally captured from the wild and made part of a show. Three other orcas had previously been put on display elsewhere, but they had been caught while tangled in fishing nets or had survived harpoon attacks or had been ill when they fell i
nto human hands. Those orcas were exhibited in aquariums or in the low-budget marine parks that dotted the Pacific coast of North America in the mid-1960s.

  The most popular of the initial trio was a male who had swum into a salmon net off the town of Namu on the coast of British Columbia in June 1965. The fishermen who found the orca sold him for $8,000 to Ted Griffin, an aquarium owner from Seattle who had dreamed for years of capturing and swimming with orcas. Griffin would become the key figure in the creation of the half-century-old industry of performing orcas. He named the orca Namu for the town near the waters where the whale was found.

  Until then, orcas had been considered extremely dangerous. But the brief life and death in captivity of an orca named Moby Doll had changed all that. Moby Doll was male but when he was harpooned during capture, people at first thought he was female. He wasn’t supposed to have survived in the first place. The Vancouver aquarium wanted to create a life-size replica of a killer whale and sent hunters out to kill one on July 16, 1964 and bring its corpse back to use as a model. The sculptor Sam Burich recounted to local newspapers the moment of the harpooning: “It looked me right in the eye, and I looked right back. I just let him have it.” The wounded whale struggled for over two hours, with members of his pod repeatedly pushing Moby Doll up to the surface to breathe. Burich attempted to finish him off from a small boat but after several rifle shots, the whale would not die, the paper stated. Since they couldn’t kill the whale, they took him into captivity. After partially recovering from the shock of the harpooning, Moby Doll proved that orcas, despite their popular murderous name, could be friendly, even docile. Moby Doll, however, would not survive long; after less than three months, he developed a skin disease and, more fatally, a fungal infection to his lungs. He lived just 87 days in captivity.

  It was Griffin’s thunderbolt of enterprise to turn the discovery that orcas could be gentle with human beings into a business model. Within a month of transporting Namu from Canada, he was swimming with the orca at the Seattle aquarium he owned. He made a movie with Namu as well, further transforming the image of the “killer” into that of a giant black-and-white dolphin, reminding Americans that orcas are classified as the largest of delphinids and related to a bottlenose celebrity then on television. This was the time of the hit NBC show Flipper, about the heroic and lovable dolphin friend of a human family in Florida. With Griffin’s help, the once-feared orcas slowly became lovable too. It was a welcome change from a reputation that, at one point, was so malevolent that the US military slaughtered killer whales as potential security risks to American bases in the northern Atlantic.

  Namu’s demeanor and popularity drew crowds to Griffin’s aquarium. And so Griffin went into the orca-capturing business. His next prize was a young female orca from Puget Sound captured on October 31, 1965. Envisioned as a companion to Namu, she was named Shamu. Almost immediately Griffin leased and eventually sold Shamu to a year-old theme park that had opened on Mission Bay down the Pacific coast in San Diego, California. That park was SeaWorld.

  Marine parks had existed in the United States since the late 1930s; and some began to feature performing dolphins by the 1950s. In the early 1960s, the founders of SeaWorld took the concept of marine mammals performing for audiences to the scale of Disneyland (which had opened in Anaheim in 1955). Milton Shedd, an investment banker, and three partners proposed a phantasmagorical park to the San Diego officials in charge of vetting projects for a large property on Mission Bay. The journalist Conor Friedersdorf has described the original pitch, which included an underground amphitheater that would allow the audience to peer into an enormous, illuminated aquarium, where a man in scuba gear would reveal the wonders of the sea—and the exotic, sometimes frightening examples of marine life—captured behind the glass. There would also be a lagoon around which visitors could dine while enjoying shows stocked with elephant seals, walruses, Sniffles the pilot whale and penguins trained to march like soldiers.

  Much of the proposal—at least architecturally—became reality when SeaWorld opened on March 21, 1964. The park also included hydrofoil rides and other kinds of entertainment. The partners wanted to make money even as Shedd pursued higher aspirations. As Friedersdorf relates, the SeaWorld founder would tell potential financial backers, “Your investment in SeaWorld is a means by which you can participate in the public’s ever-growing fascination and curiosity about the marine environment.” In other words, the success of Shedd’s business model required the park to cultivate the visitors’ curiosity about and concern for the animal life of the oceans—a perfect balance of environmentalism and capitalism. SeaWorld also had one of the foremost whale experts among its founding fathers. Says Howard Garrett of the Orca Network, a nonprofit opposed to killer whales in captivity, “Dr. Ken Norris gave SeaWorld immunity from criticism and an aura of ultimate scientific authority among those who questioned the effects of captivity on marine mammals or the ethics of holding them for attendance revenues. The company has continued to promote his rationale of education and conservation as a cornerstone of its operating principles long after his departure in 1976, even as SeaWorld went in a completely different direction.”

  The park attracted about 400,000 visitors in its first year of operation—though its transformative star would not arrive till almost a year later. Shamu was dramatically flown in on December 20, 1965. The prospect of a performing killer whale proved not only irresistible but a stroke of inspiration. With the legendary sea beast in its midst, SeaWorld became an even greater success story. As the company closes in on its half-century, each of its parks is attracting more than four million visitors a year.

  To this day, the centerpiece of any visit to SeaWorld is the show in Shamu Stadium that was developed to showcase its original star cetacean. There has been one significant change: since the death of Dawn Brancheau in February 2010, trainers no longer swim with the orcas during performances. Otherwise, though the sets have become glitzier through the decades, the basic elements and story line remain the same. There is an initial segment of wonderment in which a human being—represented by a star trainer—discovers the existence of whales and is awed by their strength and size, and more importantly by the mammal’s seeming willingness and eagerness to be friends with people. That is impressed upon the audience by a bang-up opening number with multiple aerial leaps and splashes to show off the skills and athleticism of the whale as it responds to signals from trainers. The emotions deepen in the middle of the 25- to 30-minute show as the trainer puts the whale through several acts, offering proof of how whale and trainer can cooperate—and how gentle and loving that relationship is. The trainer appears to be in an affectionate relationship with the whale; the whale appears to be enjoying playing with its human colleague. The third segment and grand finale showcases the most spectacular waterworks behaviors, including breaches, bows and breathtaking gyrations through the air by the whale at the behest of human trainers. The members of the audience are splashed with water so they can feel that they have become part of the relationship. Trainers who have swum with the whales feel that the show has become less exciting because of the restricted contact and the ban on waterwork. But even as the company tries to promote other zoological wonders and forms of entertainment in its facilities the show and the killer whales remain the focal point of the park.

  I still remember the first show in which I participated. I had just been hired as an apprentice trainer and I knew my parents were coming up from Orange, proud to see me finally part of the show to which they had taken me summer after summer. At barely 20 years old, I wasn’t as muscular then as I would become. I recall being uncomfortable in my wetsuit, which I felt was too big and had too much slack in it. But I felt a sense of accomplishment: it was a Shamu Stadium wetsuit, after all.

  I didn’t really do much that was show-worthy. I had a couple of simple scripted lines on a microphone like “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Shamu Stadium.” Otherwise, my princip
al job was to set up buckets full of fish around the pool for the trainers to reward the whales with or to open and close the gates when the experienced trainers working the whales asked for that to happen. I contentedly absorbed the glamor. Or what I thought at the time was glamor. After all, the people in the audience probably thought I was a trainer working with the whales.

  My key responsibility that day was spotting. I was positioned on the porch, a shallow shelf that projected on to the main show pool where I could watch what was happening in the water. Whenever a trainer was in the water during the show, spotters kneeling on the two porches on each of the long sides of the main pool looked out for him or her, providing visual or verbal communication in case of an emergency, passing along alerts between a trainer in the water with the whale and an experienced trainer at another location in the stadium.

  As an apprentice trainer, it wasn’t my job or in fact within my abilities to interpret what was going on around the whale or how it would affect the orca’s behavior. Apprentices acted strictly as a means of communication between two trainers working the whales. Still, it was important for apprentices to convey the information to trainers so that they could figure out whether small things—maybe a member of the audience throwing an object into the water—might lead to big bad events. It was important to know whether the orcas were annoyed with all the possible repercussions of multiton animals showing 5,000 people how unhappy they were.

  The orcas were watched carefully and closely at all times. That should have been an early clue to me that the ideal of perfect harmony between man and beast could unravel.