One justification for keeping orcas captive is that it offers opportunities to learn more about the animals, as well as raising public awareness about the species.
Certainly there are lessons to be learned from the life and death of Tilikum, the orca whose public career began at Sealand of the Pacific in Oak Bay, the chief one being that such animals should not be held prisoner and be forced to do tricks for human amusement.
Tilikum “lived a long and enriching life while at SeaWorld and inspired millions of people to care about this amazing species,” says a statement from the Orlando, Florida, amusement park, where the orca died Friday.
Tilikum, could he have communicated in human terms, might have disputed the term “enriching.” Captured near Iceland at the age of two, he lived the rest of his life in miserable, human-scale captivity, rather than being free to enjoy an orca-scale life.
We hope the second part of the park’s statement is correct, that millions of people are inspired to care about this amazing species — to the extent that they will push for an end to keeping and breeding orcas and other marine mammals in captivity.
What was learned from Tilikum was not how orcas behave in the wild, but how they behave in captivity. They can become stressed, bored, frustrated, agitated and angry, as would any intelligent creature subjected to such conditions. Although orcas are also called killer whales, there is no record of an orca ever killing a human in the wild.
Yet Tilikum was literally a killer — he was involved in the deaths of three people, the first being the drowning of a young trainer at Sealand of the Pacific in 1991. Shortly thereafter, he was sold to SeaWorld where in 1999, he apparently killed a man who had slipped into the orca’s pool after hours. And in 2010, he killed a trainer during a SeaWorld show.
In the wake of the Florida trainer’s death, experts speculated about Tilikum’s motives, one even telling the Associated Press the attack was “premeditated.” A New York Times article on the 2010 attack said Tilikum “more than most, has been hard to defend. His record is hardly clean.”
It’s as if a human being were the topic of discussion, as if the district attorney should have been contemplating charges.
And therein lies part of the problem — the desire to see human characteristics in animals, the tendency to interpret the actions of wildlife in human terms.
It’s not hard to understand why orcas are the star attraction at wildlife parks around the world — these animals are magnificent for their sheer size and striking black-and-white colouring. They are known for their intelligence, trainability and playfulness.
But most people flocking to see the orcas are not there to study a species, but to be entertained. They are not there to learn about how orcas interact with each other and their habitat, but to be amused by their interaction with humans.
And let’s be blunt — the orcas are not held for research purposes, but for the profits of park owners. An opportunity to get close to an orca in an aquarium might be a thrill for humans, but the confinement is torture for animals whose natural habitat is the vastness of the ocean.
Holding nature captive is not the way to understand it. It takes more time and patience to study wildlife from a distance, to understand the natural world on its own terms.
Let that be Tilikum’s legacy.
