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

by John Hargrove

  Her mother, meanwhile, continued to take signals from Petey, responding to cues and sticking with the sequence in the show. We decided to close the gate to separate the front and back pools. Hopefully that would give Takara a chance to calm down and prevent the situation from escalating. We also didn’t want Kasatka to rake her daughter. With luck, we’d be able to reopen the gate at the end of the performance and mother and daughter could be reunited and work out whatever problem they might be having—once Takara was calm.

  Lisa Hugueley, who had the same rank and seniority as Petey, walked up to him and said, “You’re not still going to swim with Kasatka, are you?”

  “Yes,” Petey said. “She looks great. She’s been 100%.”

  As his spotter—the guy ready to hit the emergency underwater recall tone—I thought the same thing. I was on stage listening to the discussion right behind them and watching Kasatka at the same time. She appeared to be completely unaffected by what was happening with her daughter, who was still swimming agitated laps in the back pool.

  Petey eased into the pool. He began rubbing Kasatka down, waiting for the moment when the music cue came and they’d begin the sequence. At that moment, however, Kasatka abruptly took off and began swimming in fast circles underwater while emitting upset vocalizations. You could see how distressed she was, her back muscles tightening up. With every lap she made at that intense speed, she created a current that pulled Petey closer to the middle of the pool. He quickly realized what was happening. Hoping to position himself at a spot from which he could safely get out when an opportunity arose, he made one slight skulling motion, a small underwater stroke with his hand. Kasatka saw it. She immediately swam at and over him. Petey did his best to deflect her but, even though she wasn’t the biggest whale in the park, she was still 17 feet long and weighed more than 5,000 pounds. Every time she disappeared underwater, Petey put his face in the pool. He needed to find her to make eye contact and reestablish control. Eye contact is important in all situations when you deal with whales. During an incident of aggression, it is critical.

  Kasatka came up underneath him, her mouth open, lifting him out of the water violently by his butt. The ferocity of her attack carried them both up against the stage. She once again vanished but then turned around. Her mouth was open and she was beginning to try to grab his feet. Petey tried to push away from her. He put his face back in the water, trying to determine where she was before she could rush at him again. I hadn’t been overly worried until then. Now, I watched helplessly, fear pumping through me as I imagined Petey being crushed against the concrete stage.

  With one lucky move, however, Petey got his right arm on stage and Robbin grabbed it and yanked him out before Kasatka could get at him again. She then started swimming fast laps around the pool. The show was canceled. No one was allowed to get into the water with Kasatka for the next six months.

  I learned a valuable lesson that day. Your whales may appear to be completely fine—even when they are not. As the incident involving Takara and Kasatka showed, you need to read the wider context. You should never get into the water with a whale you suspect is involved, in even the slightest way, in an altercation with another whale—even if that whale appears calm and unaffected, as Kasatka did to all of us that day.

  (The summer of 1999 made a deep impression on all of us, not just because of the incident involving Kasatka and Petey. During the same period, the body of Daniel Dukes, a 27-year-old park guest, was found lifeless and draped on Tilikum’s back in SeaWorld Orlando. The young man had apparently evaded the facility’s security to stay overnight, somehow finding his way into Tilikum’s pool. The autopsy showed that Dukes suffered a multitude of injuries to head, chest and limbs before he died; and that Tilikum had continued to mutilate the body after Dukes was dead, partially castrating him. In 1991, Tilikum had killed a trainer at Sealand of the Pacific, a marine park in British Columbia, Canada, which owned him until 1992, when the orca was moved to SeaWorld.)

  When we were once again allowed to do waterwork with Kasatka in the fall of 1999, I was officially added to her waterwork team. I was honored and excited. She was a difficult and challenging whale, and for my managers to include me in her waterwork team was a testament to their belief that I had the skill and ability to make the right decisions with her and be safe. It was a huge promotion in my eyes. I am prouder of it than almost any other achievement in my career. I loved Kasatka already because I had put so much energy and thought into developing a relationship with her even without being in the water. I had learned what she liked and what she didn’t like. I knew how to listen to the sounds she emitted and could tell from them what mood she was in. But having seen how she turned against Petey—a trainer she was close to and with whom she had a long and entwined history—I was also realistic. A lot goes on inside these whales because they are inmates of SeaWorld.

  The complexities of life in the close confines of SeaWorld’s parks impose what must be something like paranoia on the orcas. And small things can suddenly become egregious insults to them. They are smart enough to plot their revenge quietly, waiting for the right moment to show you exactly how they feel.

  Petey taught me some of the most important lessons I learned about Kasatka. It was completely counterintuitive. He said that “you gotta show her you’re willing to put yourself in a vulnerable position with her because you trust her.” That doesn’t mean being irresponsible about your safety. You’re always at the mercy of an orca, whether you are on the edge of a pool or in the water. What Petey meant was to focus on the small things that these huge but sensitive creatures notice. Once I figured out what these little touches were, he told me, my relationship with Kasatka would grow exponentially. When I fed her, I would do it slowly, taking my time to make sure she knew I wasn’t rushing her. I wouldn’t just throw the fish in her mouth. I’d reach in so that her teeth touched the bones of my hands as I put the food in the back of her throat. All she had to do was shut her mouth and my hands would be gone. But she responded well to situations like that. More than anything, it was about slowing things down when you were with her, not rushing her.

  As much as you try to read the signs, it may sometimes be impossible to tell when a whale is slipping into the dark side. A strong relationship with an orca is the best way to survive that kind of reversal. Petey would prove that when, in 2006, Kasatka went after him again during a show.

  In that incident, she grabbed him by the foot and dragged him underwater multiple times. It was one of the most severe cases of orca aggression against a trainer in which the trainer survived. Only his ability to remain calm and wait for opportunities to try and calm her down—combined with his relationship with her—got Petey out of a potentially catastrophic situation. He was only able to swim out of the pool because Kasatka allowed him to. Petey was fortunate to have the time to give her the opportunity to make the right choice. She could have overwhelmed him but she chose not to go completely over to the dark side. She broke bones in Petey’s foot and he suffered ligament damage that required hospitalization and the insertion of bolts and screws to put him back together. But he recovered.

  He would always love Kasatka. And I learned to love her myself, for all her difficulty. When I returned to work in Texas and other trainers there who’d never worked with her called her a psycho whale, I would be deeply offended and ferociously defend her. I reminded them that she had chosen not to kill Petey, when she could easily have done so. It is a choice by an orca that deserves human respect.

  Like Freya, Kasatka was born in the wild. I imagined that she too must remember what it was like to swim in the boundless seas. I was awed by that fact that she allowed herself to be put under human control. The matriarch of a group of killer whales permits you to tell her what to do, permits you to reward her, allows you to know what makes her happy, what she enjoys. It takes time to build a relationship like that. It is a reciprocal one. You can’t do
anything with these whales—especially the most dangerous ones—without a relationship that both you and the orca realize is truly give-and-take. Each relationship is different and unique. The whales realize this as much as the trainer does. No two trainers are alike in the eyes of the whale, just as no two whales are alike in the eyes of a trainer.

  Petey was there for me when I left SeaWorld San Diego in 2001 to work as a supervisor in France. It was an enormous opportunity: I would be working with whales who had never performed in the water with trainers before. The trainers of the marine park in Antibes had always worked from the sides of the pools, not swimming with the orcas. I would be training both them and the whales.

  But taking the job in France would mean leaving the whales that I loved—Corky, Splash, Takara, Orkid, Ulises and Kasatka.

  The last day turned out to be tough. I had dissected and rationalized my feelings about leaving the whales of California behind, telling myself that I would form new relationships with new whales in France. I was moved by the support of my colleagues. Many trainers, even those who had the day off, showed up to watch my final show—including many who worked at Dolphin and Sea Lion stadiums, even trainers who had left SeaWorld. Wendy Ramirez, my one-time roommate and fellow trainer, and I did a sequence with Kasatka and Orkid—which can be tricky because historically we’d seen a lot of aggression between them. Petey and Robbin and I did all the bigger waterwork behaviors with Corky and Takara during the final sequence called the “fast action,” which included spy hops, the surf ride and, of course, the hydro at the end. I was nervous. With so many fellow trainers watching, the last thing I wanted was to crash on my hydro or fall on my surf ride. But, thankfully, everything went smoothly.

  After the show, I still had two hours left on my shift when Petey told me, “Why don’t you just hit the showers, man. Just go.” When Petey told me that, I realized it was over. I had to walk away from the whales. I tried to buy myself some time and told him I didn’t mind staying. But my voice wavered and I began to tear up. “It’s ok,” he said again, “You’re done. Hit the showers.”

  At this point I had to get out of there because I was losing control quickly and I didn’t want anyone to see it. I took off for the locker room and as soon as my back was turned, the tears began streaming down my face. But I heard Petey’s footsteps behind me. The faster I walked, the faster he followed. As soon as I got in the locker room I locked the door behind me. Petey was right behind me. I ran to the second door to jam it closed because I could hear him running. But within seconds, he had opened the door. I stood staring in the mirror seeing Petey behind me and I just lost it. I couldn’t stop crying; I could barely breathe.

  Petey could be rough around the edges and he was not known for being sensitive to other people’s feelings. But he locked eyes with me, he put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “‘I’m not going to tell you it’s okay or try to stop you from crying. I just want to be here with you while you cry.” It was one of the most moving and profound things anyone ever said to me. At that time, it was hard to imagine I was going to be okay, because this separation from the whales hurt like hell.

  Petey knew what it was like to love the orcas in all their complexity. He knew how much of your life you had to give and how much you received in return for the sacrifice. We loved the same whales. I cried in that locker room until there were no more tears to cry. I accepted it as a death.

  After I left San Diego, Kasatka would be put through a separation that would have broken any human heart.

  In the ocean, killer whale mothers and daughters typically stay close for life. Kasatka, having been separated from her own mother in the ocean, was especially attached to Takara, her first calf. But as powerful as Kasatka was in the hierarchy of orcas in San Diego, she was powerless against the will of SeaWorld the corporation.

  In 2004, senior management decided to move Takara and her daughter Kohana to Florida for breeding and entertainment purposes. On the day of the transport, the trainers first made sure Takara (with Kohana) and Kasatka were in separate pools. They then put Takara and her daughter into the shallow med pool and slowly raised the floor. As the water levels came down, Takara and Kohana were asked to swim into huge stretchers; they were then lifted by cranes out of the pool and onto the truck that would take them to the airport. However, as Takara was hoisted up and out of the pool and loaded into the box on the back of an 18-wheeler, her mother began to emit continuous vocalizations, sounds that had never been heard from her in the three decades of her captivity.

  I would learn later that Kasatka’s vocalizations continued long after the younger female had been taken away. SeaWorld brought in Ann Bowles, a senior research scientist for Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute to record and analyze the vocalizations. She concluded they were long-range vocals. Unable to sense her daughter’s presence in any of the adjoining pools, Kasatka was sending sounds far into the world, as far as she could, to see if they would bounce back or elicit a response. It was heartbreaking for all who heard what could easily be interpreted as crying.

  Kasatka never got over the separation from her first offspring. Three years after they were separated, trainers recorded Takara’s vocalizations in Florida and played them back in California for Kasatka. The sound of Takara, however, caused immediate consternation in the older whale, who became extremely agitated, swimming rapidly around the pool and emitting vocalizations that were tight and fast, with rapid breaths.

  Long before all trainers were forbidden to do waterwork with SeaWorld’s orcas, Kasatka was put off limits, beginning in November 2006. She had become too dangerous for trainers to swim with, as was evident by her incidents with Petey.

  Whales do remember. Are they able to forgive?

  6

  The Natural and Unnatural History of the Orca

  The orcas of SeaWorld have beautiful names, often adopted from the language of cultures that have had centuries of contact with the species. Some project our own romantic notions about the orca onto the whales. Takara is Japanese for “treasure.” Unna is Icelandic for “love.” Tilikum is Chinook for “friend.” Some are matter-of-fact. Kasatka means “orca” in Russian. Some were intended to be fun: Splash, for example. He was born in a non-SeaWorld park that did not have the company’s penchant for the poetic and the exotic.

  Names are sometimes recycled: Corky is the oldest whale at SeaWorld (as well as the oldest orca in captivity in the world) but the name first belonged to an orca from the early days of the marine park, one that died in 1970. Corky would not get to SeaWorld till 1987, along with her companion, friend and sometime mate Orky. The rhyming pair would produce no viable offspring; Corky became pregnant seven times but all her calves died, the longest-lived lasting only 46 days. Orky, however, would sire a calf with another female, Kandu. Their child was Orkid, not named for a flower but for her father.

  Kandu was the dominant female of SeaWorld San Diego in the 1980s, but she died in a horrific incident when she charged Corky in the middle of a show, perhaps in an attempt to emphasize her role as matriarch. As Corky attempted to get out of her way, Kandu suffered a bilateral fracture to her jaw when she engaged with the other whale’s massive 8,200 pounds. The impact ruptured one of Kandu’s arteries and she hemorrhaged to death on the bottom of the pool. Corky would adopt the motherless and traumatized Orkid—not quite one year old when she swam around her dying mother on the bottom of the pool—and raise her as her own. Corky would never attempt to become the dominant whale; and Kasatka assumed that role in 1990. But in Orkid’s name, you can hear the echo of Orky and Corky and a SeaWorld melodrama.

  The names we give the whales are solely for human consumption, memory and our need to organize and categorize. Whales cannot really recognize the sounds of the words by which we call them: their vocal and hearing systems, as sophisticated as they may be, are much more attuned to vowel than to consonant sounds. Orcas in nature li
ve in a different cosmos than ours.

  Humans have given the species of Orcinus orca different appellations through the centuries. At the start of the twentieth century, the Encyclopaedia Britannica cited one scientific name for the species as Orca gladiator, a reference to the ancient Roman swordsman-slaves that imposed an even more bellicose embellishment to the image of the whales than the ogre-ish orcus given to them by the Roman historian Pliny almost 2,000 years ago. The same gladiatorial connotation can be heard in a French word for orca, épaulard—with its whisper of épeé—a reference to the sharp, blade-like dorsal fins of the orca, visible as they race at the surface of the ocean toward their prey. The Finns, Dutch and Germans also embed swords in their names for the orca: miekkavalas, zwaardwalvis and Schwertwal.

  The French were responsible for a word that was, until the early twentieth century, widely used in English for orcas: grampus. It is a strange concoction that devolved from medieval Latin (Crassus Piscis or Fat Fish) to old French Grapois—with the syllable “pois” linked to the word now used for fish in France, poisson. The English further corrupted the sound of the word into Grampus. Herman Melville used it in his classic novel Moby Dick, published in 1851, to refer to orcas.

  It was not until the twentieth century that the word “killer” began to receive wider usage in connection with orcas. It had always been a nickname, originating with Spanish sailors who called it asesina-ballenas, “killer of whales,” for the murderousness of the species when it attacked larger cetaceans. The Danish word for orca also reflects that voracious nature: spaekhugger, the one who cuts into the blubber (spaek) before the whalers can get to it. In Japan, the kanji ideogram for orca, pronounced “shachi,” is particularly telling: it is a combination of the character for fish with the one for tiger. It is also the name given to a mythical creature, with a vaguely tiger-like head and the torso and tail of a fish, that can be seen decorating some of the more elaborate traditional temples of Japan.