I find some of the discussion about the killer whale that killed a trainer at SeaWorld in Orlando misses a major point.
No matter what method of training has been used on the animal, it is still a wild animal.
Dogs can be trained using all sorts of methods. They will put up with our shit.
Most wild animals will not.
If you think for one minute that you can train a six ton animal with electric goads and whips, I guess you haven’t seen what happens with a lot of elephants that are kept this way. Something like this happens:
The elephant had been shocked and beaten all its life. It decided it that it had had enough.
Because elephants are somewhat prone to these “rampages,” I’m not so sure elephants belong in captivity either. They are just as intelligent and complex as orcas. Unlike orcas, they don’t leave us alone in the wild. They have a reason to hate us. We kill them for their tusks. We kill them if they raid our crops. We kill them to steal their babies. If an elephant encounters a person on foot in its natural habitat, it is more than likely going to charge. A captive elephant is very likely to go off.
As I noted earlier, wild orcas, for some reason, don’t consider humans to be prey. There is no documented case of a wild orca attacking anyone. If I read the following statement again, I am going to scream: “Well they don’t call them killer whales for nothing.” Actually, they don’t kill people in the wild.
I can’t say the same for captive ones. These animals might be trained very differently from the way elephants are.
But their lives are so unnatural that their behavior is fundamentally changed. Their lives and their very being are simply out of their normal context.
These animals have much shorter lives in captivity than they do in the wild. I don’t think an an animal whose life is so caught up in sound can live very well in a concrete tank that is has a water filtration system running at full blast.
For an animal that is known to travel 100 miles a day at 3o miles per hour over the open ocean, the tank is little more than a very cruel prison.
In this prison, the animals are going to do things that they wouldn’t normally do.
Do I think for a minute that changing the methods for training killer whales would make them safer?
Absolutely not.
That is because we’re not getting to a question raised by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. In his work Love and Hate, Eibl-Eibesfeldt discusses a badger that he raised in captivity. The badger misbehaves in the house, but every time that Eibl-Eibesfeldt disciplines it, the badger attacks him. However, whenever he did the same to his dogs, the dog s “quickly [learned] to obey.”
Now as I noted a while ago, Eibl-Eibsfeldt believed that the reason that dogs were so much easier to train is because they are social and form a social rank. European badgers are solitary.
This is nonsense. European badgers are not solitary at all. They live in family groups. Indeed, a typical badger sett has 6 to 8 individuals living in it. However, some family groups may contain as many as 35 badgers. These social groups are know as clans, and these clans have very complex social hierarchies. Eibl-Eibsfeldt was simply wrong about these animals being solitary.
Now, if that part of the argument is wrong, then another part is also at least somewhat dubious. Dogs are not obeying because of their natural history of strict social hierarchy.
If you’ll remember the dog documentary I linked to earlier this week, you’ll recall that the researchers at Eötvös Loránd University kept wolf puppies in the same manner that you’d keep domestic dogs.
The wolves eventually became like Eibl-Eibsfeldt’s badger. They were unruly. They couldn’t learn the rules of the house. They became possessive of objects.
Now, we all know that wolves have something like a social organization. It is very well studied, although the original framework has been modified a bit.
You’d think that wolves would be very easily trained to not do things.
But they were just like Eibl-Eibsfeldt’s badger.
So it has to be another factor that allows dogs to learn rules and to put up with all of our training methods.
And that other factor is domestication.
Through domestication, dogs have developed certain cognitive skills that allow them to learn rules. They can learn to cooperate with us, and many dogs really want to cooperate with people.
Dogs are also not nearly as likely to respond with aggression when they are challenged as wild animals are.
If you start using some of these dog training methods on wild animals, the chances are much higher that these animals will respond with aggression.
That’s one reason why elephant handling is such a hazardous profession.
Virtually all elephant training methods are based upon confrontation and force. Yes, they may be like this to each other, but I really don’t think you want an elephant asserting itself over you. My guess is that it won’t be pretty.
And if we adopted these methods for training orcas, I’m absolutely certain that it would do little to curb aggression in this species. In fact, it probably could make things worse.
The reason why orcas are trained using those positive reinforcement methods is really quite simple. There is no other way. You cannot make them do things.
It really doesn’t matter what training methods are being used on these animals. Captivity just isn’t the best place for them.
They’ve not been domesticated. They don’t have the social cognition skills or the desire to cooperate that domestic dogs have.
Even social wild animals can’t be expected to be like dogs. To get to that same level of domestication, we’d need extensive selective breeding programs. We might be able to produce some genetically tame animals like the Soviets did wit their silver foxes, but if your goal is to produce animals that could one day augment wild populations, breeding for these traits is actually quite detrimental. (I suspect that this may be one reason why Mexican wolves have had such a hard time being reintroduced.)
Of course, orcas aren’t endangered. These animals are being kept in captivity for our entertainment purposes only. Now, that might be fine if these animals remained docile in their captive situation.
But it seems that killer whales don’t.
The best way to prevent killer whale attacks is to ban keeping them in captivity. It really serves no purpose. The education argument is a giant red herring.
We already know that these animals are amazing. I don’t think we have to watch them perform circus tricks to understand that.
Maybe it really is time to Free Willy.
I’m kind of baffled at the people who are using this tragedy to attack “positive/operant” training methods, as if it were the training method that is at issue.
It’s a big “units of analysis” problem here. Whales aren’t dogs!
BTW, the origin of the term “killer whale” has nothing to do with their aggressive habits towards people.
They were originally called “whale killers.”
Then the term was reversed.
Another term for them was “grampus,” but that term now refers to either Risso’s dolphin or the hellbender salamander, which I actually know pretty well.
I found the roots to this argument. It seems Dr. Ian Dunbar has written a piece in the current Dogs Today about why positive reinforcement methods work for orcas.
It’s an old argument.
The thing that bothers me is that there have only been 3 deaths by captive orcas. All 3 deaths were by this same male. SeaWorld dropped the ball in letting trainers get close to him.
I agree that orcas (or any large wild animal, really) should not be kept in aquariums and used in shows. The problem is that I don’t know if the already-captive whales would be able to live on their own in the wild. I’m sure part of it would have to do with how old they were when captured.
Either way, I’m sorry this trainer lost their life. It has nothing to do with training. I feel bad for this orca as well.
I think other whales have attacked or acted out.
This isn’t something they do in the wild.
You can swim with these animals. They will not go after you.
I wouldn’t get in the water with a captive one. It’s just like going into the SHU. Just the inmates are a lot bigger than you are!
Whatever happened to that ‘Free Willy’ whale that they were trying to reintroduce into the wild? They built that special outdoor enclosure for him and everything.
Keiko died:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiko_(orca)
I don’t think they can be “freed.” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17039-why-freeing-willy-was-the-wrong-thing-to-do.html
But I do think they can live out their lives with dignity, after we ban their private ownership.
Kind of like that elephant sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee (and yes, someone also got killed there: http://www.elephants.com/joanna/tributes.php)
http://www.elephants.com/
I think some of them can be freed. In Keiko’s case, he was captured young, and they had no idea where his family was. They just chose a random area of ocean and hoped a pod would eventually invite him in.
There are some orcas in captivity right now who were captured after they were already adults, AND we know exactly where their families are. The orca pods in the San Juan islands are well-known, and any orca originally from there would be a much better candidate for reintroduction to the wild.
But ‘freeing Willy’ wasn’t about actually freeing a whale. It was about feel-good politics.
Though I am glad that Keiko made it out of his tiny pen in Mexico (if nothing else, his health improved while at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and he got to swim in open ocean again), the amount of money spent on his doomed-from-the-start reintroduction probably could have funded the release of multiple cetaceans.
There have been 6 since 1991, three by the same animal. The list of injuries by orcas and other marine mammals is incomplete, but it is estimated that it numbers in the hundreds within the same time frame.
Considering that the number of orcas in captivity (as recently as February 10, 2010) is only 42, that’s a pretty high ratio of fatalities per population.
I agree that they should be repatriated if possible and the practice of keeping them be terminated.
How sad. At least he lived out his last days in a better place than that tiny fishbowl he was kept in in Mexico.
oh using the example of cetaceans certainly has been a mantra of clicker trainers to prove.. something. And clearly it works to the extent that wild animals can be trained to certain behaviors (especially in a confined area in the absence of any other way to get rewards). But this incident has nothing to do with any form of training.. I can’t quite believe the people using it to beat up on positive training really mean that force training is a better alternative, but that’s pretty much an inevitable conclusion from the ranting. Large strong animals can kill people pretty much any time they might want to, regardless of training.
I don’t think these animals are really meant to be in captivity.
I don’t think everyone who is bringing up the training aspect misses the point.
I’m not bringing up that aspect, because you know where I stand on this issue (You’ve seen the posts from the past few days.)
I guess I’m stupid because I completely fail to see the relevance of the training issue (the basic subject of Houlahan’s post that you link to in another post) to this incident.
All I see is that the averso trainers accuse the poso’s of ranting and see themselves as purely correct, and the poso’s accuse the averso’s of ranting and see themselves as purely correct. And that each can refer to some author who actually opposes their philosophy as supporting them.
meh.
I think though that everyone agrees that cetaceans don’t belong in captivity. Nor do most other wild animals.
I’m okay with zoos, but when you’re trying to confine higher animals that have really specific and very complex requirements, it really isn’t such a good thing.
I’m not a big fan of circuses.
If only some of these animals were harder to breed in captivity. Tigers are so easy to raise that virtually any numbskull can do it.
And that’s why Texas has more tigers than India.
I’d like to understand a comment above,
“No matter what method of training has been used on the animal, it is still a wild animal.”
What the “it’s a wild animal” is supposed to mean in the discussions one comes across in everyday’s talk – even the ones more biology-specialized?
Usually the argument tries so clearly to suggest that the animal is something dangerous.
Much more seldom we see arguments that would suggest it’s wrong to capture a big sea mammal or hate wolves.
That is very sad, for it seems to be the only thought left of the knowlwdge the aboriginals once had about the nature and its animals. When once, there were nothing but aboriginals.
But then the modern human occurred – the type who loves to capture animals, and judges some animals too wild to live on, even in the wilderness.
This is especially true with the gray wolf of Scandinavia.
In Spain,
and also there in States you are doing so much better with it.