I'm a Millennial, born in central Texas at the tail-end of the Reagan era, and as long as I can remember, SeaWorld was the best theme park around. Sure, you could go to Fiesta Texas (we still called it that even after Six Flags bought the park), but they only had roller coasters and funnel cake. SeaWorld was infinitely better, because they had killer whales!
A lot of my love for killer whales comes from seeing Free Willy at the age of five. It's hard to look at an animal that big and beautiful and smart and not be totally enchanted. All whales and dolphins have an ethereal grace, but for my money, killer whales are easily the most beautiful and compelling of the bunch.
SeaWorld feared the movie Free Willy would hurt their business model, but as a child I perceived things with rose-colored glasses - the whale in the movie was clearly in a bad park, but SeaWorld was a good park, and anyway, they didn't capture whales, they were born there. For years, I let my joy at seeing the animals in person blind me to the reality of whales and dolphins in captivity.
This is the story of how, after almost twenty years, the blinders finally came off.
It all started with a killer whale named Keet.
The first show I can remember at Shamu Stadium featured the park's new pride and joy, "Grandbaby Shamu," so nicknamed because his mother, Kalina, had been the first killer whale to be successfully born and raised in captivity. Afterwards, I went down to the side of the tank to watch the whales swimming, and I couldn't have been there for more than a minute before the baby whale, Keet, came right up to the glass.
Even as an adult such an experience with an animal could be magical, but for me, as a child, it was almost transcendent. Here I was, just like the kid in the movie, standing in front of a baby animal that was simultaneously adorable and majestic, and he was interested in me. Being only seven at the time, the obvious conclusion was that the whale liked me back. He bobbed in front of me for a long time, a half-hour at least, until finally another whale swam quietly up and promptly doused me in tank water with a kick of their tail.
I was in love. Every time we visited SeaWorld, I would stand in the same spot, and though nothing quite matched that first encounter, Keet and the other whales would occasionally linger near me. As a child, it was an utterly thrilling experience. I got every book about whales I could get my hands on and watched every ocean-themed documentary I could find. I was determined that I would grow up to be a marine biologist and one day swim with these magnificent creatures as trainer, a dream discarded only when I realized after a frog dissection that I would never survive as a biology major.
I noticed, however, that after a few years the whales seemed different. Killer whales look generally very similar, but you could still often tell them apart by their dorsal fins because they would bend one way or the other, and I could swear I wasn't looking at the same whales on every visit.
So deep was my love for these animals that my parents signed me up for a Dolphin Interaction for my thirteenth birthday. After an orientation with the trainers, I zipped into a wetsuit and climbed into the frigid waters of a tank to swim with a bottlenose dolphin. They didn't respond to me the way Keet did, but I didn't care; I was a hair's breadth from my ultimate dream to swim with killer whales. If that wasn't heaven, I didn't know what was.
Later in this visit, I made the mandatory stop at Shamu Stadium between shows and mentioned that Keet was my favorite whale to a SeaWorld staff member. She casually informed me that he had been moved to Ohio.
I was taken completely by surprise. Even at that age, I knew that killer whales spend their lives with their mother - the idea of moving a whale away from their family to Ohio was utterly bizarre. But I trusted SeaWorld, and decided that there must be some reason for the move I just wasn't aware of. In fact, knowing how much the trainers love the animals, Keet had probably been moved with his mom.
By high school I had moved to Pennsylvania, but despite the nearness of SeaWorld Ohio, we never went. As I got older I heard more and more objections to keeping whales and dolphins in captivity, and even though I understood and to an extent agreed with them intellectually, deep down I still believed in SeaWorld.
When I heard a trainer had died at SeaWorld, I assumed at first it was an accident - an animal that weighs several thousand pounds can easily hurt a person by mistake. But then the rumor started that Dawn Brancheau had been pulled in by her ponytail because the whale mistakenly thought it was a toy, and I knew that couldn't be right. Killer Whales are very intelligent and have spectacular senses - there is no way a whale could fail to notice if a trainer was attached to something or in physical distress. The only conclusion could be that the whale in question, Tilikum, had deliberately attacked his trainer.
I read, with mounting horror, the whale's involvement in the deaths of others. But even then, my belief in SeaWorld persisted, and I made excuses. The first incident had taken place in Canada, not SeaWorld, and they had obviously inherited a whale that was a psychopath. The other whales were nothing like him. My whale, Keet, was nothing like him.
It wasn't until 2012 before I thought to look up whether Keet was still in Ohio. I might even go see him. In the process, I found his biography, and the biographies of his family.
And that's when I finally accepted the truth.
Keet was separated from his mother as a baby, not as an adult, when SeaWorld moved her to their Florida park. I had never even seen them together - the female whale with him on my first trip was his aunt, Katerina. Despite the fact that killer whales normally calve every five years, Kalina was pregnant with her second calf before her first was even two years old and before she herself was even ten (the normal age at which wild killer whales begin to breed averages at thirteen). She died in Orlando in 2010 of a septic infection. Keet never saw her again.
Kotar, his father, had an even worse fate. He liked to play with the gates that separate the pools, and one night this resulted in a gate lethally crushing his skull.
His brother, Keto, was loaned to a park in the Canary Islands where he killed his trainer a few months before the death of Dawn Brancheau in Orlando.
Keet, meanwhile, had been moved to California to Ohio to California to Texas to California again. His SeaWorld profile claims he is always the lowest among the whales he is placed with - the dominant female and her son in Texas would bully him to the point that he vomited up his fish when trainers tried to place him with higher-ranking whales. The profile says, "He has on occasion been raked by other animals to the point that he will shiver."
This not some overblown report from an environmental extremist or an account from an animal welfare advocate - this is SeaWorld stating clearly that one of their whales has been so traumatized by their companions that they literally shake in fear.
Keet was a father by this time, but while one of his calves enjoyed the attention and protection of her very dominant mother, the other had been rejected and died. The only bright spot was that SeaWorld's oldest whale, Corky, had become a surrogate mother for him in San Diego, but it was small comfort after knowing that my whale, my Keet, had suffered so badly.
A news report on Keet's return to SeaWorld San Diego - you can see Corky watching in the tank adjacent to the med pool.
And the stories of the other whales were no better. Over and over, I learned of whales fighting each other, of whales chewing their tanks and floating listlessly, of whales pregnant too young and too often, of whales unnecessarily separated from their mothers... on and on it went. One whale was actually killed in a fight with another. It was clear that what had happened to Keet was not the exception to how whales are treated at SeaWorld, but the rule, and the realization was heartbreaking.
SeaWorld is not without its defenders, and I can understand why. Not one wants to be made a fool of, and when you love killer whales, you'd rather believe that they're all healthy and happy in their tanks. But they're not. It's not a question of how much the trainers care for them or how good the vets are - I honestly have no doubt that both do their very best at their jobs. Even so, the simple fact is that captivity as we currently practice it is inherently detrimental to dolphins and whales, and no amount of love can negate that.
San Diego is not far from where I currently live, but I can't bring myself to give money to the organization that put Keet through all of this until there is genuine change. Not just a slightly bigger tank, but true prioritization of the needs of the animals. Today, SeaWorld San Diego made a step in the right direction by announcing a cessation of circus-type shows, but it remains to be seen what SeaWorld will do about its captive breeding program, whether the animals will be moved to a more natural setting such as a sea pen, or if the other parks will follow suit and end their performances. I may never see Keet in person again, because once you know the truth about marine parks like SeaWorld, once that curtain of fun and magic is gone, there is simply no going back.
Author’s Note: This is the first of a planned series on killer whale/dolphin captivity, with the intention of collecting a lot of the information that is scattered around the internet into a single coherent, fact-based place that does not indulge in the histrionics of PETA or the misinformation of SeaWorld. Please stay tuned.
Wednesday, Nov 11, 2015 · 7:06:13 AM +00:00
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The Katwoman
Many thanks for the Community Spotlight and Rec List! I’m very grateful for the response from this has gotten, especially since this is my first diary (blogpost?), and I’m still rather new here. Hopefully in the days to come, we’ll see more progress on towards better lives for all the whales and dolphins still in captivity.