Slaves of Entertainment

For years humans have been vandalizing wildlife for leisure. From monkeys dancing on ropes to lions pouncing through rings on fire, our needs have caused a havoc for animals. Our judgements about an animal are based on the tricks the animals are performing and we don’t realize that how miserable life they have to spend behind the stage. Cramped up in small cages and forced to perform tricks for food. How ignorant are we!

Sea World is a theme park headquartered in Orlando, Florida with two other branches in San Diego, California and San Antonia, Texas in US. It started on 21st March, 1964. Sea World features Orcas, Dolphins, Sea Lions and tons of other marine animals. Its main attraction is its famed Orca or Killer Whale show. Everyone enjoys watching massive killer whales doing astonishing tricks and having an amazing relation with their trainers.

What we see is not always the truth. Soon it was noticed that the Orcas were showing weird behaviours, not seen in the wild and the chain of incidents that started taking place were an indication of it.

Orcas (Orcinus orca) or commonly known as the Killer Whales are the largest members of the dolphin family. They are highly intelligent and social animals. Killer whales live in groups called Pods of up to 40 individuals and hunt and share together in a group. The male Orcas can grow up to 32 feet and the females can grow up to a size of 28 feet. Male Orcas can live up to 50-60 years and the females can live up to a 100 years but in captivity their lifespan is much smaller as it is very difficult to provide them with right space and conditions like they have in the wild.

It has now been realized that Orcas do not thrive in captivity. In the wild they swim up to a 100 miles every day for food, exercising and exploring. They dive up to 500 feet several times a day. But in captivity, concrete enclosures do not offer them the same opportunities. Even if they are born in captivity, they have a natural instinct to hunt for food in pods, swim far, exercise and dive deep down. Concrete enclosures deprive them of such activities which leads to stereotypical behaviours called zoochosis. Zoochosis refers to performing repetitive and unusual activities that are not natural.

Each Orca family in the wild shares a very close social bonding and each family has their own culture which is passed from one generation to the other. In captivity Orcas are forced to form groups which often leads to conflicts and stress. One of the prime example of this was Tilikum, the Orca.

At the age of two in 1983 Tilikum was abducted from his pod. The video footage in the documentary Blackfish shows how inspite of not running away the other Orcas tried to rescue him and cried. That moment of separation and the exigency to be together gave me a horripilation. It was also seen how people killed some adult Orcas who tried to throw stones in their way. To ensure that their inhumane deeds remain hidden, they used to cut open the Orcas and fill them up with stones so their bodies would sink down and no one would know about this brutal act.

For an initial year Tilikum was kept in Hafnarfjörður Marine Zoo, near Reykjavík, Iceland before he was shifted to Sealand of the Pacific, in Oak Bay, a suburb in the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island, Canada. Imagine the trauma faced by an animal that has just been forcibly separated from his mother and put in a foreign surrounding. No one ever realised that just like humans, Orcas are also vulnerable to social and emotional stress. The social bonding and emotions in dolphins and Orcas are highly complex than any other mammal including humans.

At Sealand of the Pacific Tilikum was forced to form a group with two other females. Since, Orcas live in a matriarchal society, Tilikum was physically and mentally abused. In the small metal containers Tilikum couldn’t even run away. This made Tilikum behave aggressively towards trainers. In the wild it has been found that Orcas are very social to humans and do not attack them but in captivity Killer Whales stress out due to inappropriate conditions. In his lifetime Tilikum had killed three people.

The first one to die was Keltie Lee Byrne, a marine biology student and a competitive swimmer who was also a part time trainer at Sealand of the Pacific. Eye witnesses Corinne Cowell and Nadine Kallen in the documentary Blackfish (2013) said that after she fell into the tank, Tilikum dragged her deep below the surface a few times. The reports on the other hand claimed that all the three whales were involved but the eyewitnesses said that it was only Tilikum who did it and the other two females were just circling around the pool. The reason why they were able to identify Tilikum was because of his collapsed dorsal fin. Orcas in the wild have a straight dorsal fin like a shark but in captivity because of stress, inadequate space, unnatural diet, unnatural exposure of sunlight and water pressure their dorsal fin collapses. In the wild only 1% population experiences it but in captivity 100% male Orcas experience dorsal fin collapse. Even after the incident the owner of Sealand of the Pacific didn’t blame the Orcas and said ,“They were just playing with their favourite trainer and of course, they didn’t realize she couldn’t stay under water like they could”.

After this incident Tilikum and the other two whales were sold to SeaWorld and Sealand of the Pacific was shutdown.

The second one to die a brutal death was Daniel P. Dukes, a visitor at SeaWorld who had managed to stay at SeaWorld after the theme park was closed. Surprisingly Daniel managed to jump in Tilikum’s tank naked. In the morning the officials found his body floating on the surface. His body was full of wounds and his genital was also bitten off. Inspite of having a number of underwater cameras the SeaWorld officials said that the event wasn’t recorded.

Now, the most suspicious thing is that a former SeaWorld trainer in a documentary named Blackfish(2013) which laid emphasis on the malpractices of SeaWorld and the behaviours of the Orcas said that SeaWorld has night guards around the pool, many cameras around and within the enclosure, even then no one heard him calling for help or any splashes of water and after his death no one saw his body floating on the surface.

The third to die by the hands of Tilikum was a former SeaWorld senior animal trainer named Dawn Brancheau. On 10th February 2010 at the end of one of her ‘Dine with the Shamu’ shows she was lying by the side of Tilikum on a slide-out, a platform with about a foot of water, when suddenly Tilikum grabbed Dawn by her arm and dragged her into the water. He held her under water for 45 minutes and even after the constant efforts of the trainers and visitors to distract him, he didn’t pay heed to it. Dawn’s corpse was full of wounds, she had multiple fractures in her ribs, spine, jaws and cervical vertebra, her scalp was completely torn off her head and left elbow and left knee were dislocated.

In the Blackfish Documentary (2013) it can be seen that inspite of performing perfectly he was not fed well that day and was signaled that he didn’t do well. This along with the poor housing conditions he had been living in added onto his unexpected aggressive behaviour.

I couldn’t even imagine the level of trauma and mental pressure Tilikum was going through that made a harmless animal like him kill someone this ferociously.

After Dawn’s death Tilikum was transferred to a tiny concrete enclosure which reduced his ability to swim and to interact with other Orcas and now even humans. After this he used to be seen floating lifelessly in water, a behaviour never seen among Orcas in the wild.

Tilikum was also forced to perform eight shows a day and seven days a week. He was forcibly masturbated to collect his valuable sperm for breeding projects and use him as a sperm bank. Tilikum had suffered a lot. Marine experts even said that the conditions he had been living in and the way he was treated made him an unrecoverable psychotic. Finally on 6th January, 2016 Tilikum died of bacterial infection at the age of 33 which according to SeaWorld is very old. Tilikum was the largest Orca in captivity. He measured 22.5 feet and weighed 5700 kg (12500 lb).

The Blackfish Documentary (2013) exposed the dark secrets of SeaWorld and opened the eyes of millions people and many of the trainers working at SeaWorld who had joined SeaWorld to work with animals and care for them. SeaWorld dragged everyone working for them in their nasty and inhumane activities.

Like Tilikum, SeaWorld has not only threatened Orcas but hundreds of other marine animals. Tilikum became an ambassador for all the marine animals trapped and abused in SeaWorld.

In 2016 SeaWorld had to stop all its captive breeding projects and temporarily stop all shows. Currently SeaWorld holds 20 Orcas in its three parks in US. It has now planned to use them only for “educational purposes” and showcase their “natural behaviour” but it’s ludicrous that how can they exhibit natural behaviours of Orcas in an enclosure which is only 350 feet wide and 50 feet deep and by making them perform tricks.

A US appeals court panel upheld an OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) ruling that SeaWorld violated its duties by exposing trainers to “recognized hazards” when working with Killer Whales and must limit whale-human contact during the show.

The United States Court of Appeals’ 2–1 ruling means SeaWorld trainers will continue to be prohibited from entering the water with whales during shows, eliminating the dives, jumps, and many other tricks. OSHA imposed the ban following an investigation into a Feb. 24, 2010, incident in which a killer whale named Tilikum pulled Dawn Brancheau underwater, drowning her at the Orlando theme park. The court’s administrative law judge ruled that SeaWorld’s “safety program is inadequate”. OSHA also recommended that SeaWorld forbid its workers from coming in direct contact with whales without supervision and physical barriers present.

SeaWorld still continues to hold Orcas and many other marine animals to make a fortune for themselves. Even after promising to stop Orca shows they are trying to rebrand it. We need to realize that it is our urges and lack of knowledge that emboldens to abuse Orcas and make them perform some foolish tricks. We need to stop going to these places and stop donating to such organizations to make them realize that not only Orcas but any wild animal does not belong to confined spaces. Their natural habitat is the only place to observe and appreciate their natural behaviour.