Once again, I caught a break. In my second year at San Antonio, a manager told me that an associate-level trainer position—the next step up from apprentice—had opened up in San Diego. I got on a conference call interview with several senior managers and got the job. All I really ever knew was Texas. Now I was headed for the original SeaWorld—and the bright lights of California. It was the beginning of a chapter in my life that would permanently shape me as a trainer and as a person.
3
The Education of an Orca Trainer
After I moved to San Diego, I bought a surfboard. Like everyone else who’d heard of the fabled California coast, I thought I had to learn to surf now that I lived there. But surfing would never become a habit with me—not after I began to get into the water to work with the killer whales of SeaWorld San Diego. Why would I want to get up at 6:00 a.m. to catch a wave when I could go to the office and actually ride on the back of a killer whale? There’s no sport that lets you do that. Certainly no other job that I know of.
I arrived in San Diego in 1995 with a kind of smugness. I had finally accomplished what I had longed for since I was six years old. The facilities at the California park were of the same class and quality of a Disney theme park. SeaWorld San Diego is the Yankee Stadium of marine parks—that is, if you like the Yankees.
I drove there solo in my beat-up white Mazda truck with a U-Haul attached, carrying all my belongings. I drove 25 hours from San Antonio because I didn’t have enough money to stay at a motel on the way. I was deliriously happy. I was even getting a pay raise: to $10.50 an hour from my starting apprentice rate of $6.05 in 1993. I couldn’t believe how brilliantly beautiful San Diego was when I finally got there: cloudless sky, no humidity, iconic lines of palm trees. I knew too that, unlike in San Antonio, I could live openly as a gay man in California.
I was even more ecstatic when I got to SeaWorld itself. From the employee parking lot, you can see the bridge over San Diego Bay, connecting to Pacific Beach. And finally, there was Shamu Stadium, the place I had dreamed of working.
After orientation on that first day, I took a lunch break to see the whales. Shamu Stadium in San Diego is bigger than its equivalents in San Antonio and Orlando. It seats 6,500 compared to the 4,500 in Texas. California also had more whales—six at that time compared to the five in San Antonio. The orcas in San Diego were bigger and more impressive. At the age of 22 and standing there in the cool air, free of the sticky heat of Texas, I was as entranced by the killer whales as when I was a child. When I got to the stadium, I caught the tail end of a training session. I got goose bumps at the sight of the trainers—Robbin Sheets, Lisa Hugueley, Ken “Petey” Peters and Curtis Lehman, the very people who would shape the way I pursued my career—calling the whales over to chin-up at the edge of the pool. They were the people I wanted to be.
That day marked the start of two years of learning on the job with sea lions, walruses and otters. After that I was moved to Shamu Stadium, promoted and began to wear the wetsuit of a SeaWorld orca trainer. And when the time finally came for me to get into the water with the orcas, Robbin, Lisa, Petey and Curtis would teach me how to go about doing that with the kind of personal style and professional wisdom that cannot be found in books. They would teach me the rides of my life.
One of the most exhilarating and dangerous of those rides was the hydro hop. Only the most experienced trainers at Shamu Stadium get the opportunity to learn and perform what is considered to be the most challenging and dangerous behavior with whales in the water. In essence, you steer the whale to the bottom of the pool, then turn back toward the surface, where you and the orca explode out of the water and the whale throws you up in the air. The goal is to achieve a perfect dive and not to land on or be hit by the whale. Depending on the size of the whale, you can easily reach almost 30 feet in the air—comparable to the height of a ten-meter diving platform. The consequences of performing this incorrectly are immense. Having done more than a thousand hydros and rocket hops throughout my career, I can say there’s no feeling like it in the world. That is, when everything goes right.
I prepared for the hydro even before I was a high-enough ranked trainer to be eligible for it. In San Diego, I trained with the head diving coach at the University of Southern California (USC). I went off the five-meter and ten-meter platforms just to get used to the heights and to learn how to dive with the correct form. I told the USC coach, “You know, in maybe ten months I’ll be doing this act with the whales and I’d like to start learning to be great at it now.” I was so sure of myself—so sure that I was going to get what I wanted. I was young and still quite naïve.
Every whale is different but by the time you work with an orca on a hydro, both of you will have trained together for months or even years. Trainers have a dominant foot that they use not only for balance but to help send signals to the whale by applying pressure. The dominant foot has to be exactly located on the whale’s rostrum so you don’t slip off. There is no special footwear for this: just black dress socks that provide your feet with no good way to get a grip on the whale’s smooth, glass-slick skin. (There was a period we tried something like a scuba booty but we reverted to socks.)
I happen to be left footed. Most trainers are right footed. You steer the whale by shifting the weight and the direction of your body. You use your feet to indicate the speed you want to go. Two feet firmly on the whale is a signal to swim at normal speed. If you drop one foot and gently tap with pressure three times, the whale knows it is time to swim fast. It’s like power-steering—except that the car is a killer whale and the steering wheel is your body.
I float on my stomach, my feet on the whale’s rostrum, the orca propelling me forward in what trainers call a “foot push.” The whale is so sensitive to the way my body is positioned that the moment I arch my back skyward, expanding my chest in a forward motion with my arms spread, the orca knows that it is time to go underwater. I am foot-pushed down into the pool. I direct the whale as far as we can go—36 feet in San Diego, 40 feet in San Antonio. The whale descends at an angle so that I am upside down underwater, heading straight toward the drain at the bottom of the pool, propelled at huge speeds by tons of killer whale.
The force of the water as you descend is a tremendous gush. It is both physical and aural. The sound is almost overpowering. There is nothing gentle about it. You feel it press hard against your body. You feel the energy of the water in your ears. And every now and then, the thought flashes through your mind, “What if I don’t pull this off? What if I get hurt?”
The force of the water against your body flushes those questions out of your brain because you are now descending head first into the depths. You have to remember to be precisely positioned in the pool for the moment when the two of you turn upward. If you are not, it could result in being too close to the glass or stage, which would turn the dive into a bone-shattering catastrophe. There is no margin for error. You think of other trainers who have ended up with broken necks or backs or have had their careers ended by injuries. The adrenalin goes thrilling through your body with fear and anticipation. This is happening whether you want it to or not. There’s no bailing.
Your concentration goes back to your foot. The dominant foot has to stay in the perfect spot or your foot will slip off with potentially disabling consequences. If the water pressure going down was harsh, the journey up comes at you with the power of an onrushing train. You can’t see a thing because there is so much salt water flowing against your face, at your eyes. That sound and the fury are like a massive action movie sound effect. Imagine being in an underground subway platform with a passing train directly overhead as the ceiling shakes and you can’t hear anything else—that’s the best way I can describe it.
You hit the air, rising faster than thought. It’s now all in the timing. You push off the whale’s rostrum at the same instant the whale throws you off it. You loop into space and hit the
arc, flying through the air, as the whale dives in. You both return to the surface.
The hydro—along with the rocket hop (which is almost like the hydro except you are positioned before emerging from the pool on the orca’s pectorals, not on the rostrum)—is the pinnacle of whale-and-trainer interaction at the shows staged at Shamu Stadium. They are the culmination of decades of hard work and fine-tuning by generations of trainers—as well as the scores of whales, many now dead, who have been the denizens of SeaWorld’s empire. I was fortunate to be part of those amazing years, when human and cetacean could mingle in the water. I would discover as I grew in the job and as a person, however, that all this spectacle was built on shallow reasoning. Tragedy has since curtailed acts like the hydro. What I have just described—the exhilaration and the danger—are no longer part of the trainer’s repertoire. I look back at what I was able to do with much nostalgia but also much wisdom.
What I do not want to be lost is the ingenuity that allowed humans and whales to perform together so magnificently. I do not want people to forget that we were once able to swim with killer whales—to forget the almost magical knowledge we accumulated in our quest to know them, to convince them to work with us.
So, how do you begin to train a killer whale?
First, a slap of the water.
Slapping the water is a call-over, and training an orca to respond to that signal is the foundation of the thousands of small steps and behaviors that, paired with reinforcement and the whale’s recognition of the sound of a whistle as a sign of correct behavior, form the intricate choreography of SeaWorld’s shows. Before you can work with an orca, the whale has to learn to come to you. The whales are so perceptive that they can tell trainer from trainer even if the humans aren’t in the water; they can detect strangers on the perimeter of the pool; they know whom they have to please to get what they want; and they play favorites. It is always advisable to be on the good side of a whale. And if they are to work with you, they must know who you are and why you matter.
You and the whale—even an adult whale that already has a repertoire of behaviors—need to form a strong relationship, with a lot of give-and-take and reciprocity, knowing where both of your limits are. The whales know you as well as you know them: for example, they are aware of how long humans can stay underwater on a single breath and often adjust for that. Most importantly, the whales must realize that a specific trainer will be someone who is a positive part of their life, not just in terms of rewards of fish. Nothing about training orcas is easy. You have to be patient. You need the whale to buy into the relationship.
Slapping the water to call the whales over appears simple but it is a trained behavior. And it is only the first step. Through training, conditioning and the process of association, you and your hand—in the eyes of the whale—can be extended into a pole that you use to guide the animal as you shape behaviors. Again by extension, the whale can respond to a small cube of ice that you toss into the water, its ripples becoming the spot where you would have slapped the surface. You shape what you want the whale to do through positive reinforcement. The behavior you want is paired with food or something else the whale enjoys. You can pair the desired behavior with any signal you choose: visual, tactile or audible. Through careful, slow steps, whatever type of signal you choose will ultimately elicit the behavior you have trained the whale to perform.
This training—approximating behavior by way of a gradual approach—essentially takes the whale forward step by step toward a goal, with the trainer psychologically reinforcing all the correct moves along the way, with food mostly but not always. You can use a variety of reinforcers—what might in ordinary language be called “rewards”—that a particular whale enjoys. Each animal is unique and a good trainer discovers what it is that each orca finds rewarding.
By the time you are in sync with each other, the signs become not just a way of getting a whale to do what you want him or her to do—to spin through the air, to bow, to swim fast along the perimeter of the pool. They also become portals into their souls, a way to fathom their ancient intelligence.
Apprentices at Shamu Stadium aren’t expected to fully absorb the principles of behavioral psychology until they have successfully completed two years of training. Even after two years as a trainer, it would still be some time before they would be allowed in the water with the whales and many more years after that before they could do everything with the whales.
There is so much technical information to learn that you sometimes feel you will never absorb it all. But with hard work and continuous observation of how trainers work, your knowledge grows and the theories become comprehensible. Until then, apprentices can have no interaction with the orcas—not even as they are dashing by the glass cutaway into the pools with buckets of fish and the whales are peering at them longingly. Peering at the fish, to be exact. Every human interaction with orcas can potentially reinforce an unwanted behavior. The trainers reminded the apprentices of this again and again. It was hard not to want to interact when the whales were right there but we couldn’t afford to have the orcas feel rewarded for things they shouldn’t be doing.
The whales are opportunistic and will take advantage of situations when people or trainers with whom they have no day-to-day relationship come into the picture. They can sense who the apprentices are—or at least have a good idea which humans have less authority—and can take advantage of those scenarios, often in malevolent ways. One night, after I swam with Takara for an entire show, ending with a surf ride on her, she and I headed to the back pools of the stadium, where an apprentice was waiting to help gate Takara in one of the pools. She appeared to be calm, chinning up at the perimeter in front of me as the gate closed behind her. The apprentice had to walk across the gate to the other side to chain and secure it. As soon as the young woman took her first large step across the top of the gate, Takara split from my control. The orca turned and slammed her 5,000-pound body into the unchained gate. The force completely knocked the apprentice trainer’s feet and legs off the gate. Fortunately, the young woman had tremendous upper body strength and she was able to grab the railings to keep from falling into the pool. When Takara realized she had not gotten her way, she swam back to where I was and chinned up at the perimeter again, right in front of me, as if she did not have a care in the world. The apprentice, however, was in tears. The incident was a perfect example of the opportunistic nature of a predator—and how instantly an orca can choose to go to the dark side and back again. While she had a relationship with me that she wanted to preserve, she had none with the apprentice crossing the gate. I do not want to imagine what might have happened if she had succeeded in knocking the woman into the pool.
Moving to SeaWorld San Diego was the big career break in my quest to work directly with orcas. However, before I could qualify to handle killer whales, I had to learn the basics of behavioral psychology—in practice, not just theory—and to prove it to my bosses by working with sea lions and walruses. I had to show that I not only knew the principles of animal training and the basic tricks of the trade but that I could use them in an enterprising way to make animals impress a crowd with what they could do. I had to show my supervisors that I could accomplish what was expected of me but also prove to them that I had the talent to do much more. Every animal species has its quirks; and each one teaches you to be patient in different ways. I learned valuable lessons from the sea lions and walruses.
You can’t just go from filling buckets of fish to surfing on the back of a killer whale, much less jumping into a pool with an 8,000-pound orca older and wiser than you are. Hands-on experience with other, smaller animals is essential to moving on to dealing with an enormous and dangerous predator like a killer whale. Even so, sea lions, weighing up to 500 pounds or more each, can be formidable. With their large canines and substantial weight, they are more imposing and much bigger than seals, which are rotund and slow. Sea lions are also temp
eramental when unhappy and can deliver nasty bites with those sharp canines.
Walruses are even bigger, reaching up to 1,000 pounds. When I got to San Diego, trainers had been banned from waterwork with walruses because of a near-fatal drowning a decade earlier after one animal, perhaps too playfully or aggressively (no one seems to have ascertained) grabbed on and held a trainer under water for a prolonged period. I believed we could—and should—go back into the water with the walruses and decided to petition to be allowed to do so. It was a daunting process. I had to argue my case before SeaWorld’s all-powerful Behavioral Review Committee—which oversees training policies and micro-manages all trainer activity. I told them that walruses had to be desensitized to having trainers in the water with them so that, in case someone slipped and fell into the pool, there would be much less of a chance of another grab-and-hold incident. They were convinced. And so, just as I turned 23, I had made it into the SeaWorld books as a trainer who was able to revive a risky act. It was the kind of enterprise and forethought the corporation was looking for in trainers they would assign to Shamu Stadium.
The sea lions and walruses also taught me a more subtle skill, one I appreciated after much day-to-day, practical experience. Every sea lion or walrus was different; each one required a relationship specially tailored by the trainer. As I made progress with the sea lions and walruses, I could sense where each one was in his or her head. Within two years, I was at the point where my ability to judge how an animal would behave was instinctive.
I paid my dues for about two years at Sea Lion stadium, and more than just that, I enjoyed the experience. I loved the animals I worked with. As time passed, I noticed the effects of captivity on them—arthritis from having to live and perform on hard concrete instead of the sandy beaches that were their natural habitat; blindness from the chlorinated salt water they swam in because of outdated filtration systems. The facilities were practically unchanged since the 1960s. It would take many years for the significance of these observations to sink into my consciousness. At the time I just thought they were part of the inevitability of age and the passage of time. I was not yet at a point where I could question SeaWorld’s mission.
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish Page 5
