From CNN:
A killer whale killed a trainer Wednesday afternoon at SeaWorld’s Shamu Stadium in Orlando, Florida, a public information officer for the Orange County Sheriff’s Office said.
The 40-year-old woman, identified by sheriff’s spokesman Jim Solomons as Dawn Brancheau, was in the whale holding area about 2 p.m. when “she apparently slipped or fell into the tank and was fatally injured by one of the whales,” he said.
But a witness told CNN affiliate WKMG-TV that the whale approached the glass side of the 35-foot-deep tank at Shamu Stadium, jumped up and grabbed the trainer by the waist, shaking her so violently that her shoe came off.
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A SeaWorld employee who asked not to be identified confirmed the description of the attack and added that the whale involved is named Tillikum.
In 2006, a trainer at the adventure park was hospitalized after a killer whale grabbed him and twice held him underwater during a show at Shamu Stadium. In 1999, Tillikum was blamed for the death of a 27-year-old man whose body was found floating on his back in a tank at SeaWorld, the apparent victim of a whale’s “horseplay,” authorities said then.***
The whale involved in the attack had killed before. That in itself should have been a warning. This isn’t a golden retriever.
I’m also not going to go anywhere near the training technique stuff.
That’s talking around the edges of the problem. We need to cut to the heart of the matter.
And to get to the heart of the matter, we have only a simple question:
Should we even be keeping these cetaceans in captivity in the first place?
At one time I would have answered in the affirmative.
Those parks do provide funds for conservation and research on marine life.
They also provided awareness about how amazingly intelligent cetaceans are. At one time, whales and dolphins were blamed for reducing the productivity of fisheries, and there were regular culls.
But those days are long gone.
We now have the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and only aboriginal whalers can take them.
Now, I must admit that I enjoyed going to SeaWorld in Orlando when I was a boy.
I really liked watching the orcas do their behaviors. It was fun.
I really didn’t see the negative side of captive cetaceans.
Later on, I got to go to an animal training seminar in Hawaii that used live dolphins.(The seminar also included a dog that I later saw on Dogs with Jobs! I wish Nat Geo would bring that show back!)
I appreciate the animals. They are brilliant animals. They live in complex societies. They care for each other. They bond very closely with their families.
I get that.
However, I’m not now sure that the captive lifestyle is really the best for them.
They live in a world of acoustics.
But in captivity, their echolocation sounds bounce off the concrete walls of their tanks.
The tanks are all they know.
In the wild, they travel hundreds of miles.
In captivity, they are stuck in a concrete tank.
With such complex animals, I don’t think we can provide them the ideal lifestyle in such an environment.
That’s why I don’t think it is appropriate to keep them in captivity anymore.
I saw this animal rightsish documentary a few years ago, and although it has that agenda, it really did change my perspective on this issue:
I don’t think there is a good reason to keep these animals in captivity. Keeping them in a tank is like putting me in a concrete box on Mars. I might be able to survive if I am given adequate food, oxygen, and water.
But would I thrive? Hell no.
It took me two trips to Arizona before I was able to consider it beautiful. I’m accustomed to densely forested hills that are covered in dense forests. Dry places remind me of the summers when the grass wouldn’t grow and the rivers ran slow and black.
I can only imagine what it’s like for an orca in a tank. What does this animal feel in such a weird environment?
If we think about that question for a minute, the following conclusion is all but obvious:
Some animals just shouldn’t be in captivity. And this is one of them.
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I should be taken to task for calling these things killer whales. It seems only captive ones have any interest in killing us. Those famous ones that beach themselves to catch sea lions in Patagonia will allow people to swim near them entirely unmolested.
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I really don’t care that PeTA agrees with me on this issue. They got something right for once.
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The animal rights people are going to like that one.
I don’t know about the next post, which is on tail docking.
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Finally, I don’t know if you knew this or not, but the white shark has one natural predator.
And that’s the orca.
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I don’t know if you’ve noticed from this post, but the issue of killer whales in captivity really grinds my gears.
I have problems with whales an dolphins in captivity. I don’t know if they still do this, but many are captures as young animals from the wild, which is very traumatic to such intelligent, family-group oriented animals.
And really, I don’t see any difference between this incident and the many other that happen each year where a ‘trained’ wild animal turns on it’s owners.
I also don’t think whale sharks or elephants belong in captivity either. Elephants for the same reason as whales and dolphins.
Whale sharks because they tend to die early in captivity.
I used to love zoos, until I moved to a small town in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Here I’ve seen moose, caribou, river otters, beavers, musk rats, bison, black bears, lynx, and wolves walking around freely. I even saw a grizzly bear with two cubs one time on the Dempster Highway. Six years later I went back to the Calgary Zoo. I was all excited to see the new baby giraffe. I used to visit the giraffe summer and winter when I lived in Calgary – I’ve had a fondness for them since I was little.
Well… The giraffe at the zoo are sad. Once in a while they do a little loop around their tiny pen, and that’s about it. They’re some of the world’s fastest herbivores, but in Calgary (not a bad zoo, all in all), they can’t run. They have no enrichment activities in their pen. They don’t even have their own native foods.
The tigers are really bored, too.
And the monkeys and apes.
Actually, none of the creatures seem to be enjoying themselves. I wouldn’t either if I was in a zoo.
I don’t think I’m ever going back to a zoo. Nothing should have to live like that.
I think few zoos truly serve as a vital tool for preserving species.
SeaWorld has many neat programs. Their live animals ones are not so neat.
There is no reason why people should be getting into tanks with large, wild predators. It is amazing, to me, that more people aren’t harmed by these animals.
Orcas are weird about us. I think wolves are the same way. They have some aversion to attacking us. I don’t know what it is.
You’d think the ones in Argentina that jump up on the beach to catch sea lions would be dangerous to people, but I saw a documentary where people were getting in the water with these animals.
Pretty much the attempts to reintroduce captive bred orcas back into the wild have failed because the orcas don’t join up with existing pods. I expect that such would entail having to re-educate the animals as to how to hunt, etc, just as had to be done for wolves. The red wolf reintroduction had several failed attempts before they finally succeeded. Most tigers and lions in zoos have the same problems and in addition many are “mixed” in terms of their subspecies/race and so again, placing such animals into the wild presents a problem. This whale has apparently sired almost a dozen offspring which might well make him important if there were a method developed for successful reintroduction.
Zoos can be important places of preserving wild animals and even reintroducing them into the wild (the California Condor being one of the success stories). Many are being reconfigured to give the animals better “homes” and some are changed into “wild animal parks”. I don’t believe zoos should have wild-caught animals other than as an attempt to save a species (as was done with the Condor and is being done with Pandas), but I think the keeping of the existing animals is reasonable on the basis of the education and even preservation of some of them. I’m not likely to be able to afford to go to Africa, but I can get to someplace like the San Diego Wild Animal Park & zoo.
The shows are the means by which most aquariums raise the money they spend on research and preserving the animals. Accidents happen. But they happen in the Olympics too. I don’t think luge should be banned, although that particular track needed to be made safer. I don’t think keeping orcas or shows should be banned although perhaps this particular animal may simply be too dangerous.
vr, Peggy Richter
I’m not anti-zoo.
I’m just against certain animals being in captivity. I have issues with elephants in captivity, too. I don’t think they thrive.
Same with whale sharks. When I see whale sharks displayed in aquaria, I just wince. Those animals almost always die young in captivity.
Orcas don’t thrive in captivity at all. Their lifespans are shortened considerably, and the acoustic environment in which they live has got to be very hard on them.
I think you can make a case about education with pandas and Amur tigers and other animals of that sort.
But virtually everyone on this country loves orcas. We already know about them from films. If we hated them, who would go to see those shows? The captive animals have served their purpose. There is no reason to keep these animals in captivity anymore. We already have the Marine Mammal Protection Act. No one is going to hunt them.
I think they are far better off in the wild, and people will pay to go on whale watching tours if they want to see them.
Call me crazy, but I wonder if there might be another earthquake getting ready to happen…
Not crazy at all, actually.