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

by John Hargrove

  At Sea Lion Stadium, I labored alongside some great trainers whom I admired—Greg Stryker, Tasha Bogden and Dawn Otjen—and I learned a great deal from them about their craft. I saw how much they loved the animals and developed good and strong training relationships with them. Even though it wasn’t Shamu Stadium, I was happy. This is where I built my foundations in the theory and practice of behavioral psychology essential to a trainer’s technique and success. Even at Sea Lion Stadium, it was clear that the California park was on much more solid theoretical and practical ground than the Texas park. The trainers in California had a detail-oriented focus on precise behavior and it showed in the way the animals performed. As a result, the repertoire of San Diego’s orcas was much more extensive and the level of difficulty—the quality or criteria—of the behavior was of a much higher standard.

  One of the coolest experiences I had was with Hercules, a surplus sea lion SeaWorld acquired from the US Navy. He had been trained to dive to hundreds of feet beneath the surface to tag warheads on the sea floor so they could be recovered. One day, however, Hercules decided he wasn’t going to dive below a certain depth anymore. He just flat-out refused. The Navy having no further use for him, Hercules was offered to us. Before we could bring him over to SeaWorld, trainers needed to establish a relationship with Hercules. I and one of my colleagues were selected to go to the Navy and work with Hercules. When we arrived, Hercules jumped onto the back of one of the Navy’s Zodiac boats as he had been taught to do and off we went into the open sea where we worked on several behaviors with him over a number of visits. He was finally brought to SeaWorld San Diego, where he was trained for shows. It was an opportunity and a challenge to teach an animal naive to shows.

  Despite the engrossing work, it was no secret to anyone at Sea Lion Stadium that I wanted to be moved to Shamu once I was promoted to Trainer level. Only when you reached that rank could you finally begin to do high-quality, hands-on work with the whales. It was also the level you needed to reach to begin to do waterwork with the whales. I did everything I could to be promoted to Trainer level in the minimum time required. The path was narrowing to my goal, and there were others who wanted to reach it as well. On average, management at SeaWorld transferred trainers to Shamu once every year or two; there were many other trainers ahead of me on the list.

  Some trainers at Sea Lion Stadium waited ten years but never got a chance to work with orcas. Still, I continued to be surprised that not all trainers wanted to go to Shamu. I worked with a couple of them who were excellent behaviorists but were very happy at Sea Lion stadium. Working with killer whales was the proof I needed to show that I had made it, that the promise I made to myself as a child and announced to my relatives and friends had been kept.

  Luckily, a couple of orca trainers unexpectedly left SeaWorld at about the same time and positions suddenly opened at Shamu. I was one of only a few trainers in more than a decade to be moved directly from Sea Lion Stadium to work with the orcas, bypassing Dolphin Stadium. Almost everyone else had to go through Dolphin first. Management had been impressed by my skills at Sea Lion.

  I was moved to Shamu at the same time as my best friend and roommate, Wendy Ramirez, who had been at Dolphin. We were about the same age and had similar upbringings—mine in Texas, hers in Oklahoma. I was happy to be going to Shamu with a friend. It’s very much like going to a new school. It’s good to have a friend when you walk in. There was an intimidating amount of knowledge and practice to be learned at Shamu. But we were there for each other. There was also a lot of danger at Shamu. Despite our love for the whales, we knew we were putting ourselves in harm’s way working with animals that weighed several tons each. As good friends, we became our own mutual support group. There were many days that were tough and if you didn’t have a thick skin before, Shamu Stadium would give you one really fast.

  In the wild, every whale knows its place in its family and in its pod—and who has precedence over the other. But in a marine park, that hierarchical structure is both repressed and supersized. From my experience, the captive killer whale is a massive collection of smarts and emotion—as well as sensitivities and suspicion. They can be divas, needy of attention and jealous of what you do with other whales. While sea lions can be temperamental, they aren’t the apex predators of the sea. Nothing in the ocean hunts killer whales as prey. They know they are at the top of the pyramid.

  The practical reason to begin with sea lions and walruses was that, despite their size, they were still closer to human scale. The work was much more forgiving because even if a sea lion became aggressive, even if it bit you, that wasn’t going to kill you. But if a whale is aggressive and decides it wants to take out its frustrations on you, the potential for catastrophe goes up exponentially.

  Whenever a trainer took a break, going on vacation for example, he or she could not just get back into the water with a whale immediately after returning to work. There would have to be a period of what I would describe as respectful distance, in which the trainer provided enough attention to the whale without getting back into the pool as if he or she had never been away. It is not as if the whale has forgotten the trainer. I don’t think whales ever really forget.

  There are no guarantees that what you have learned will always work. There were some in the Animal Training Department who knew every term in the books, every psychological theory and every behavioral principle. But when they were in front of an animal, they simply couldn’t apply what they’d learned. The animal is constantly changing in front of you. The whale is making a series of sometimes contradictory decisions based on what is happening in the immediate environment, based on diverse stimuli that intrude on the simple scenarios set out in the textbooks. You are making behavioral decisions in a constantly shifting environment with a “free-thinking” animal. By necessity, you have to be able to change and adapt your behavioral decisions as you size up the situation you and the animal are in. A trainer has to watch for every factor the whale might be paying attention to.

  Almost everything I had to know at SeaWorld I was taught by other trainers. It is lore that has been passed down from one generation to another. We like to think of it as behaviorist knowledge, just to give it a scientific patina; and what we do in planning out training is as meticulous and as complicated as any engineering flowchart or the diagram of a chemical reaction. But, when it works, it is sometimes like magic.

  As trainers, we are adherents of behaviorist principles, believers in slowly teaching the animals one “trick” or behavior after another and stitching them together into an act they then perform when show time comes around. The principles have proven to work again and again—and thus have the sheen of science. Because behaviorism delivers both practical results and has a powerful philosophy behind it, I still find it nearly impossible to use the word “trick” instead of behavior. It goes against my core programming.

  Each step in training an orca is mapped out in detail, long before we get to the pool and the whales. We establish the criteria that must be met for the training to be considered successful: how high must the whales leap up into the air; where should they look when we ask them to pop their head above the surface of the water? We also plot out how we do the training itself. Everything is taken into account: how we stand; where our hands are; eye contact; the way we point at the whales so they know which pool to head toward. The whales notice everything, so we have to make sure that our signals have nothing extraneous to them each time we ask the whales for a behavior. For example, the whales can figure out whether a bucket has fish in it or not—and whether or not you are worth listening to because you may not have food to reward them with. So don’t shake out your only bucket in front of the whales, making it obvious that it’s empty.

  With patience and a detailed understanding of each whale, you can train an orca to do almost anything. When the orcas went after and killed seagulls that strayed into the park, we figured out how to train
them so that the killer whales would, first, fish out the carcass from the pool for us; then learn not to tear the carcass apart after they killed the bird; finally, we managed to get them to give up a seagull—alive and intact—if we got to the whales in time, just as they were about to set upon the visitor.

  As a trainer, I never liked being described as an entertainer and resented the policy at SeaWorld that required us to go through dance steps and do choreography as part of the Shamu show. I thought we should really be keeping our eyes on the whales. Nevertheless, I cannot deny that there is an artistry that comes with the work of the best trainers. Every act at SeaWorld—even the simplest ones—is composed of a number of behaviors. Putting them together is an art. Over and over again, I’ve studied videos of my favorite colleagues—men and women who have not only done the hard work but who are also able to combine those signals into one smooth, seamless performance.

  Whales are assiduous about following instructions and the initial lessons are ingrained deeply—including whatever miscues might have occurred in training. If you lead them astray, the mistake will be difficult to undo; you will only frustrate them by trying to dial back the instructions. Every step in teaching a new behavior must be planned out and executed carefully. Kasatka—the mother of my favorite whale Takara, whom I worked with at both San Diego and San Antonio—was quite intolerant of human failure. If you caused her to fail, she’d let you know it. A few whales—like Kasatka, Takara and Orkid—were so unforgiving that only the most experienced trainers were entrusted with them, particularly in the water.

  For waterwork, the most experienced trainers, who work in teams, are typically assigned to no more than three whales. That is already difficult because the animals have such complicated personalities and have idiosyncratic needs. But whoever was on Kasatka’s team, for example, definitely had to focus more of their time and attention on her because, as a dominant female guarding her social position, she was considered the most dangerous whale at SeaWorld during waterwork. I had to make sure I spent a lot of quality time with her to ensure my relationship with her was sound and we trusted each other.

  Fortunately, the very first whale I was assigned to in San Diego was Corky. She was a bit of a celebrity, having been the stunt whale in Orca. She was always in high gear, always wanting to go fast. I was the trainer but, essentially, Corky trained me. And I am eternally grateful for her patience. At 8,200 pounds and in her early 30s, she was the largest female in captivity in the world and every bit a legend.

  Corky already knew every trick in the book. She had also worked with enough neophyte trainers that she had her own special way to treat them: gently. It was as if she could sense our confidence—or lack of it—from the way we touched her. If you were a new trainer performing a hydro on Corky, she would take you down only about 20 feet before stopping and pulling back up to complete the performance, throwing you more gently above the surface.

  Only after your confidence registered with her, perhaps with the firmness of the touch of your hand or foot—or the position of your body—would she take you all the way to the bottom of the pool, 36 feet below the surface. Then she’d use her enormous flukes to kick into high gear, swimming at an incredible speed and exploding through the surface with a dramatic flourish, launching both you and her into the air. She made trainers look good.

  Trainers are indoctrinated to believe that whales behave the way they do because of the mosaic of psychological reinforcements we have constructed for them, reinforcements that are ultimately based on one primary object: food. This unsentimental perspective stems from the tenets of behaviorism, which declares that what matters is the performance elicited from a stimulus, from what can be observed and quantified. This materialist perspective, of course, eliminates the interior life of a whale, which, being left to our imaginations, is not properly the subject of science. Without the step-by-step, painstaking choreography we practice with them—and reinforce with food as well as other things—the spectacles of SeaWorld would be impossible.

  However, a good trainer has to be able to look into the interior life of an orca to figure out how the animal will behave. Corky’s caution with newbie trainers was completely untaught. What kind of tangible reward would she have had for modifying her behavior in a way that humans can only interpret as being “nice” to a newcomer? Is it just the mystery of her “personality”—even if she isn’t a person?

  I sense this quality about Corky because I have dealt with other whales that don’t behave the same way. Take Keet, a much-traveled orca. Now in San Diego, he spent most of his life at the Texas park and lived for a while in SeaWorld’s Ohio facility, which closed in December 2000. Like Corky, he was a “learner whale.” But he was a badly conditioned one. New trainers would work with him, and because of their inexperience, often reinforced poor effort or criteria. As a result, he became lazy. He’d do things that were just a little less than right, enough to get by—and then was fed fish as a reward for that imperfection. Imprecision is not a virtue in a theme park where a wrong move or a swerve a few inches off could have disastrous results. That is what happened to me.

  While completing the hydro, most orcas almost instinctively dive the other way to avoid hitting the trainer. But Keet didn’t when I performed with him in San Antonio during a night show in 2009. All 7,500 pounds of him drilled me in the middle of my back directly on my spine upon reentry into the water. I heard my back crack—it was the kind of sound a chiropractor would make when he worked on your vertebrae. I was literally stunned.

  Still underwater, I put both my hands on him, making sure that his jaw was closed. I grabbed his rostrum, which was the signal for him to haul me onto the stage. I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to move as I surfaced on his back. Fortunately, I had full range of motion. But I could feel my back was tight and getting tighter by the moment. After the show, I asked a trainer to unzip my suit and look at my back. There was already a perfectly round circle on my spine, the impression of the tip of his rostrum. It was as if someone had traced the rim of a large drinking glass on top of a couple of my vertebrae.

  I went to the SeaWorld doctor the next day thinking my back could be fractured. It wasn’t. But by then I was into my second decade as a trainer and my body, which had taken other batterings before Keet’s, was being worn down. (On another occasion, Keet and I were almost in a catastrophic collision when another trainer sent him breaching into an area of the pool unaware that I was in the water. I managed to get out of the way. Barely.)

  Being hit by a whale was a constant hazard for trainers doing waterwork. I knew Keet was not being aggressive. He was just a lazy whale and wasn’t paying attention because he had been poorly reinforced through the years. If a whale wanted to be bad, there would be no question of intent to do harm.

  Trainers talk about “the bridge” all the time. For us, it is a technical term. But the bridge also has poetic resonance. For those of us who worked the orcas day-to-day at SeaWorld, the bridge is the period of time between the correct response by a whale from a signal for a behavior and the orca getting his or her reward—be it fish or a rubdown or something else that the whale enjoys. There are many different ways you can “bridge” a whale. The most obvious is the sound of the whistle we hang around our necks. But you can also use a tactile bridge—touching them—or visually get their attention by pointing or putting your hand up. The underwater computer-generated “emergency” tone is also used as a bridge, a signal of approval and the advent of reward. Following the signal, the whale would then return to its trainer. Any type of tactility would be interpreted by the orca as a “bridge”—even something as subtle as kissing the whale. The whales would understand that they were correct and had been bridged and rewarded.

  For a trainer, the bridge is symbolized by the whistle around his or her neck. It is not only a tool but a mark of status: it’s a sign that you have reached a level of competence, proving yourse
lf worthy of being part of the small coterie of people in the world who know how to handle and read the ways of the orcas. I earned mine when I first started in Texas as an apprentice, though that was really for surviving a hazing as I did not rank high enough at all to work directly with the whales yet. But the whistle I treasured most I received in San Diego, when I was deep into the principles and practice of behaviorist science—and seeing the results of it in my interactions with the orcas themselves. There was no ceremony, just someone handing me a box and saying, “This is your bridge.”

  During a career spanning three different killer whale parks, I had two different whistles. The whistle has helped me get out of life-or-death situations. That’s because it is a manifestation of the bridge and encapsulates that moment when you tell the whale “job well done.” Because there is always the potential for a killer whale to grab your whistle and drag you underwater by it (and it has happened), the whistle hangs around our necks on a lanyard connected to a rubber o-ring that will break if it is pulled with any force. It would certainly snap with the power of an orca grab—and not take you into the water.

  Whistle, lanyard and o-ring form a kind of rosary, a subtle reminder of how suddenly the hour of death may come upon you when working with orcas.

  Orcas need food, so fish will always be a primary form of reward. The trainers will always be figures of authority because the animals know human beings are their only source of fish. But the whales understand and appreciate more than mackerel and salmon.