But three whales were particularly accommodating in the quest for orca sperm: Ulises, Keet and Tilikum. Of the three, Tilikum has been the most prodigious. He has produced 17 calves in less than 20 years, through both natural breeding and artificial insemination. Five have died. SeaWorld probably got 25 to 50 semen samples from Keet that are totally viable and could produce offspring. They remain frozen in storage. Though he was amenable to the procedure, Ulises did not produce viable sperm, according to lab results shared with the trainers. At least in the beginning. After Tilikum killed Dawn Brancheau in 2010, SeaWorld claimed that Ulises’ sperm was successfully used to impregnate eight-year-old Kalia in 2013. I’d like to see DNA proof of that.
Let’s get back to Kasatka.
For much of the six months of training Kasatka for the procedure, I stood at her genital region to condition her to the tube. But most often my role was to be in control of her, asking her to roll over, line up parallel to the wall and give me her pectoral flipper so I could help keep her calm and reassured. On the day of the procedure in April 2000, her hormone levels indicated she was about to ovulate. All of us on her team were present as she lined up parallel and laterally to the wall. Then she was given the hand signal to roll over, which she did while looking at her trainer, taking a deep breath. A simple finger point underwater at her eye level toward her tail flukes let her know that we wanted her to place her tail on the water-covered ledge of the pool. Then, just as in training, we grabbed her pectoral flipper, waiting for her to be completely relaxed. Part of her tail was by the pool wall to keep her steady, in a straight ventral line, her head upside down in the water, pointing toward the middle of the pool. Nearby was her daughter Takara, under the guidance of other trainers so she remained a calming presence but not a disturbance to her mother.
All the conditions were optimal. When I rehearsed Kasatka for the procedure, my job was to hold her pectoral flipper. If her tail flukes began to come off the ledge, I could put my hand underwater next to her eye so she could see me point down to her tail flukes. She’d know to readjust and make sure her flukes remained steady. If she closed her eyes (as she often did during practice), I would run my finger down the side of her body for about a foot’s length, beginning at her head and trailing toward her flukes. That would be a signal to make the same adjustment and to stay steady.
During the actual procedure itself, it was the call of the trainer in control of Kasatka when to signal for the other trainers and the vet, Todd Robeck, to step over the wall, and whether they should proceed or get back behind the wall for their safety if something in Kasatka reflected a change in her behavior, that she wasn’t comfortable, or perhaps some precursor to aggression.
Meanwhile, the trainers and the vets were tracking the ovum via ultrasound equipment on her lateral side, on the area of her body known as the peduncle, in the genital area. When the egg was on the point of dropping, the trainers spread open her vaginal walls. And up over the wall that separated us from the public areas of the stadium stepped Dr. Todd Robeck, SeaWorld’s no-nonsense “reproductive specialist.” He was responsible for impregnating Kasatka with Tilikum’s sperm. No one messed with Dr. Robeck. And, if you did, he would let you know loudly that you were in his way. The tube would be inserted as Robeck had instructed.
Every now and then, Kasatka would lift her head to try to get a better look at what was happening but she remained calm otherwise. Still, every time she moved while Dr. Robeck was at work watching the monitor, he’d shout, “Get her to stop.”
The large lubricated tube that would deliver the seminal fluid was inserted. It wasn’t as big as a male orca’s penis but it had the same shape. Air was also injected via the tube to open up Kasatka’s cervix, expanding it even as the tube pushed forward to the best position to get the semen to the ovum when the egg sac burst. That happened moments after we injected the sperm into her. The tube was carefully pulled out of her and most everyone stepped back behind the wall. We were still holding on to Kasatka’s pec and trainers were at her tail flukes.
As Dr. Robeck packed up his equipment, I and the other trainers turned our attention to Kasatka, who had rolled right-side up and was breathing normally as she was bridged for being correct over the entire procedure. We praised her, reinforcing her for being a good girl. We wanted to make sure she knew this was a big deal for her and for us. We got her food, we rubbed her down, we played with her, we made sure she was fine. The vets could do what they wanted. I wanted to make sure Kasatka was feeling good about herself and that she was physically okay.
We had to wait a month for the results. But the procedure proved successful. After a gestation period of 18 months, Kasatka gave birth to the calf, Nakai, in 2001. It was the beginning of a whole new and lucrative enterprise for SeaWorld. They called it Genetic Management.
I was very proud at the time of my part in pioneering the artificial insemination (AI) program at SeaWorld. Diversifying the gene pool of the whales was a lofty and scientific goal. The AI program certainly seemed to be a way to do it.
But I soon found out that the welfare of the whales was hardly uppermost on SeaWorld’s agenda. According to the newspaper U-T San Diego, Dennis Spiegel, president of International Theme Park Services, a Cincinnati-based leisure consultancy, said a study by his company put a price of about $15 million to $20 million on each of SeaWorld’s killer whales. The AI program has produced at least five calves in the 15 years it’s been in place—and the sperm trade between SeaWorld and at least two other parks around the world must bring in an unknown but large sum of money as well.
Little has been done to improve the facilities for the same whales that are worth tens of millions to the corporation. I was acutely aware of this in SeaWorld of Texas, where I spent the last four-and-a-half years of my career. Despite a constant clamor from trainers, the pools there remained the same, unchanged except for the sets that came and went with each more expensive Shamu spectacular. Instead of more space, the whales had to endure the cacophony of construction mandated by the entertainment division.
In that period, SeaWorld of Texas did not repaint the front show pool after the whales pulled the paint off the walls out of boredom. SeaWorld says it put back $70 million into the killer whale pools in all its parks. Very little or nothing of which went toward improving the living conditions of the whales. The company did not enlarge or build additional pools for the whales. Most of the money has been spent on adding emergency equipment and a lifting floor to a back pool in each park. In fact, the lifting floors took up three feet of space from the bottom of each of those pools, further shrinking the orcas’ environment.
According to SeaWorld’s public financial disclosures, it is a $2.5-billion company making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit annually. So why was it that the pools had not been improved since the 1980s? Florida and California got additional close-up pools in the early 1990s—Texas never did—but those were mostly to drum up more revenue by attracting Dine with Shamu customers who would be able to see the whales through glass. It was not meant to give the orcas more space. Only in August 2014 did SeaWorld declare it would expand its pools, an announcement that occurred after its stock price plunged 33 percent in one day in the prolonged public furor in the wake of the Blackfish controversy.
Through the 2000s, the AI program moved forward. Immediately after Tilikum killed Dawn Brancheau in February 2010, we were told of a corporate directive that all viable orca females were to be impregnated via artificial insemination, as fast as we could, and again and again. Some of us began to have doubts about the ethics of it all but kept quiet. We complained but management knew that they had a certain power over us: we loved working with the whales.
The breeding program—both artificial and not—was cruel. In the wild, mothers and their calves—even as adult offspring—are never far apart. Mothers and daughters are especially close—as I learned with Kasatka and Takara. I was in Fra
nce pursuing my career in Antibes when SeaWorld separated them, but I heard of the trauma.
The company denies separating mothers and calves, and when a mother and her offspring are assigned to separate parks, SeaWorld explains that the calf has been weaned. But orcas are unlike other animals. A calf is always a calf, no matter how old the whale becomes, it is always its mother’s son or daughter. An entire social hierarchy is built around this parental relationship.
However, to diversify their orca gene pool and repopulate their parks, SeaWorld moved its fertile female orcas around in a country-spanning breeding program. Worst of all, they would impregnate—whether through artificial means or natural breeding—females that in the wild would be too young to breed. Or just as bad, they would impregnate the females so soon after they had given birth that the orcas—already young and not yet fully developed—would have little time to physically recover from the difficulties of pregnancy. In the wild, female orcas calve only every four to five years. They do not usually start to breed until they are about 13–15 years old. SeaWorld exacerbates the conditions of captivity by rushing and telescoping the orca’s rhythm of reproduction. In the wild, motherhood is not just a biological function; it is a highly socialized one as well. As Dr. Rose and others have shown in their studies, mother orcas teach their daughters how to parent. In SeaWorld, there are only a few free-born females to remind the younger born-in-captivity generation what to do when they calve.
Takara again helped me to see this horrific aspect of captivity and unnatural breeding for what it is. She was the second female orca at SeaWorld to be artificially inseminated, becoming the mother of Kohana, a female, also via Tilikum’s sperm. In 2004, as I described, SeaWorld sent Takara and Kohana from San Diego to Florida, separating them from Kasatka and what was left of their natural matrilineal grouping. In 2006, the corporation took three-year-old Kohana from Takara and sent her to the SeaWorld-associated Loro Parque in Spain’s Canary Islands. Takara and Tilikum were then bred to produce a male calf named Trua. Takara was separated from Trua when she was reassigned to the Texas park in San Antonio. At that time, Trua was just three years old. Takara was seven months pregnant again when she was transported to Texas in early February 2009. That was when I caught up with her.
I was ecstatic to see her. But I knew what she had been through. She had been taken from her mother, then she had her first calf taken from her and then she herself was removed from the side of her second calf. By the time I was reunited with her in 2009, she had been impregnated three times.
Takara’s life was one of serial separations from her mother and her children, and the fate of her daughter Kohana in the Canary Islands was an ugly, dysfunctional mess. Within five years of her stay in Loro Parque, Kohana had given birth twice—and twice had rejected her calves. Her second rejected calf died within its first year. Kohana was too young when she was separated from Takara to have fully learned what orca motherhood entails. She was still a child herself.
At first, I thought the news and the stories were merely sad. I continued to believe they were an aberrant part of a well-meaning program. That changed when I was reunited with Takara in San Antonio.
Takara reminded me of what I considered some of the best years of my career: working in San Diego with her mother Kasatka. When she arrived in Texas, I saw how hard she was laboring. She came heavily pregnant from Florida yet knew how to adjust to the conditions immediately. She was resilient and showed her take-charge attitude right away, slamming her authority into those two males who tried to intimidate her. When she gave birth, she was a great mother to Sakari, her calf, as well—protecting her from the walls as she exhausted herself swimming protective circles around the pool.
But SeaWorld saw Takara as a baby machine. Within one year of giving birth to Sakari, we started preparing to artificially inseminate her again, this time with the sperm from Kshamenk, who lived alone in a marine park in Argentina. We monitored Takara’s urine after she gave birth to Sakari to track when she was ovulating once again. That happened, as expected, 18 months after Sakari was born. There is usually a six week interval between ovulations so we had that amount of time to fly staff, equipment and semen to Texas to be part of the procedure to impregnate her once again. I winced. She had just been through a difficult gestation. And now SeaWorld wanted her to endure another 18-month pregnancy? What if we lost her the same way we lost Taima, who died in 2010 at the age of 20 of placental hemorrhaging as she was trying to give birth to her fourth calf?
Nevertheless, everyone in Texas went into overdrive so we could catch the ovum in six weeks. I was the trainer who was to be in charge of her—in control, in behaviorist terms, to make sure she stayed calm and the procedure went like clockwork. I wanted to make sure she got through the procedure as safely and as comfortably as possible.
In late July 2011, we put her through the same procedure that we first used on her mother more than a decade earlier. As with Kasatka, I held Takara’s pectoral flipper, rubbing her down and talking to her in barely a whisper. It was a near carbon copy of what I had done with her mother. But the difference this time was instead of the praise I whispered to Kasatka—what a good girl she was for making history for SeaWorld and all that—I just kept telling Takara, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Except for my emotional reversal, everything was the same. Once again, Dr. Robeck—who flew in from San Diego—was on hand to perform the actual insemination. Once again, we had to wait a month to see if she had become pregnant. She did. But by March 2012, her progesterone levels had dropped to the point where the veterinarians were certain she was no longer carrying a calf. No one could explain what happened. Takara was less than halfway through the gestation period but the fetus had vanished, reabsorbed, it seemed, into her body.
I told everyone how happy I was that she was not going to have another calf. Management was upset with me and did not want me to go around undermining company policies, especially with younger staffers. But I couldn’t keep my feelings to myself. I was also incensed because I knew they were soon going to want to put Takara through the process again—and that they were eventually going to take Sakari away from her.
Julie Sigman, a SeaWorld supervisor whom I greatly respected at the time, took me aside. “John,” she said, “you are a leader at Shamu Stadium. I cannot have you telling everyone that you’re glad she’s not pregnant and we shouldn’t be doing this to her. We have a moral responsibility to diversify their gene pool.” That was the gist of her long talk with me. It put a spell on me and I was once again a loyalist. Her words took my anger away and I reverted to my old self as an obedient subject of the SeaWorld kingdom. I even thanked her for reminding me of the mission, telling her that no one had ever explained the situation to me that way before.
Within 24 hours, however, the spell was broken. “What the hell just happened to me?” I said to myself. I realized what my responsibility really was.
I’ve been around this industry for a long time and I have strong views shaped by experiences with these whales, experiences that few other people share. I began sputtering. Our moral responsibility is not to diversify the gene pool of these orcas. We took these whales from the ocean and put them in a captive situation and now we are breeding them because we want more whales in our collection in order to make more money. Our responsibility is to make their lives better, not to impregnate them again and again in an abnormal way.
I was angry at myself. I had finally realized what the corporation was going to put Takara through and had converted from a true believer in SeaWorld into a rebel with a powerful cause. Yet, Julie Sigman turned me around. If I could allow myself to be re-brainwashed so quickly, how much easier would it be to fool the public?
“We recognize the importance of the family bond,” Chuck Tompkins, the corporate vice president of animal training, told the press. But I have done the math: 19 calves were taken from their mothers
in SeaWorld’s history, including Kasatka and Katina, who were captured from the wild and thus, wrested from their mothers. Only two of the 19 separations were medically necessary, most likely because the mothers—abnormally young themselves—became excessively aggressive toward their calves. SeaWorld likes to point out that Kasatka is now living with three of her offspring. They do not care to say that Takara (and her daughter Kohana, Kasatka’s granddaughter) were taken from her and shipped to Florida. And that Kohana was subsequently taken from her mother Takara and shipped to Spain and then bred unnaturally young. Kasatka’s daughter Kalia was artificially inseminated at the age of eight. That would have never happened in the wild.
My anger over this treatment of the whales as baby-making factories would become a big factor in my decision to leave SeaWorld for good in August 2012. There were more reasons. My body was exhausted from the many times I’d physically been injured by the whales. And my soul was battered because I was coming to the difficult realization that as much as I loved the whales, love alone was not going to save them.
Even before all that, I—and everyone else at SeaWorld—had to deal with the terrible events of December 24, 2009, and February 24, 2010.
9
The Dark Side
You have been abducted by aliens. You have some memory of the world you were born into but it is all a haze. There are others like you nearby and no one knows how to get away. No one has any power. Authority is wielded by the strange little creatures who dart in and around you. They are in command. You do not understand their language and they do not understand yours. They communicate with you in signals. They are your sole source of food and they only feed you when you obey. They prick and prod you. They take your fluids. Or they insert fluids into you. They breed you. But you don’t ever see your progeny. At least not for long. And you have no say in the matter.
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish Page 15
