Forty-three years in a room not high enough for her to stand, and only big enough to walk a few paces back and forth. While being violently kidnapped when she was four years old, she saw family members also taken, some killed, and heard their screams.
Highly intelligent, she quickly learned that if she didn’t comply with her captors’ demands, she would not eat. Her cousin, who had been targeted and confined in this room two years previously, was her companion until he killed himself in his teens by repeatedly bashing himself into the cement wall in 1980. She has had no one to talk to since then.
If this were a description of a middle-aged woman kidnapped as a child, the woman would have her day in court and celebrate her freedom as she was able. But fill the room with water and call it a tank: This is the life of Lolita Tokitae, a southern resident orca who remains an entertainment object in a marine circus in Florida, in the smallest orca tank, substandard in every way, in the U.S.
Lolita’s family is L pod, part of the endangered southern resident orca clan made up of three extended family groups, J, K and L pods, that frequently swim by Victoria. Her mother, Ocean Sun, is still out there, in her 80s. Orca society is matriarchal, and Granny, also known as J2, at 102 is the keeper of the history and knowledge, and still leads her pod. There are only 82 southern resident orcas left here in the Salish Sea.
Acknowledgement of the complex cultural aspects of orcas’ lives, their family-bonded societies, their dialects and communicative abilities and their high intelligence and self-awareness is not anthropomorphism. The research is in and the conclusions are unarguable.
Orcas’ brains contain structures that human brains do not have. Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research states that the part of the orca brain that integrates information is much greater proportionally than that of humans, and that “the recent discovery that cetaceans have a special type of cell (called a spindle cell) previously found only in humans and the great apes implies that they aren’t just intelligent: Those cells are associated with our deeper emotions and social bonds.”
Recent publications by Tim Zimmerman (The Killer in the Pool) and David Kirby (Death at Sea World), and the just-released documentary film Blackfish in theatres internationally, are increasing recognition of the great wrong being done to the mind in the waters by continuing live captures and captive breeding of orcas.
Some orcas in captivity do attack and kill or injure their captors. Tilikum, once captive at the former Sealand in Oak Bay, has killed three people. Blackfish is an examination of the circumstances of the last death, which took place on Feb. 24, 2010. There has never been an orca attack on a human in the wild.
Orca Network has a well-thought-out plan to bring Lolita home to live the rest of her life at least close to her family, and perhaps able to rejoin them, as Springer, the sick and orphaned northern resident, was able to rejoin her relatives after a period of human care.
Lolita, after 43 years of mindless routine and isolation from her own species, would be placed in a sea pen in the San Juan Islands with human care for as long as she needs it.
The median age of death for orcas in captivity is 8.5 years. On Aug. 8, I will hand out information downtown along with a few copies of Death at Sea World, and will invite people to sign a hard-copy petition to the owners of Lolita’s prison, asking them to work with us to let Lolita come home, as a representative of the 41 orcas captive worldwide.
Diane McNally completed the Whale Museum’s Naturalist Training Program in 1995, and has been reading orca-related research and reports since 1968. She is a volunteer with Orca Network, and has been active in anti-captivity and in efforts to end captive breeding of orcas for many years. She is also a Greater Victoria School District trustee.
