"At least in Cowperthwaite’s telling, Tilikum is just a symbol of the numerous problems involved with keeping these large and intensely social predators in artificial groups and artificial environments, where they’re trained to perform a variety of unnatural stunts. (In the email sent to film critics by SeaWorld’s P.R. firm, we are assured that the actions seen in a killer whale show – jumping out of the water to touch a ball, giving a wetsuit-clad trainer a ride on its back, and so on — are within the animal’s “natural range of behaviors,” whatever that means.) There are only believed to be 46 orcas living in captivity – 22 of them in SeaWorld’s parks in Orlando, San Antonio and San Diego – but even beyond Tilikum, there have been numerous incidents of whales attacking and injuring trainers and visitors at marine parks. (You’ll see some hair-raising home video scenes in “Blackfish,” but none depicting actual death.) Despite the species’ name, there are no documented cases of a killer whale ever killing or seriously injuring a human being in the wild. Orcas in captivity have also attacked, gouged, raked and sometimes killed each other with distressing frequency. In SeaWorld’s response, this is described as natural and perhaps unavoidable behavior, the establishment of dominance hierarchies. Hierarchy enforcement definitely occurs in the wild, but in that context a whale who loses a fight can always retreat into the endless ocean instead of being subjected to repeated injury, as Tilikum apparently was by the female whales who arrayed themselves against him. According to Cowperthwaite, no whale expert has ever seen or reported evidence of one orca killing or seriously injuring another in the wild, either when observing living animals or examining dead ones. READ MORE: salon/2013/07/20/free_willy_for_real_seaworld_has_got_to_go/
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 07:46:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015