I will always remember the excitement I felt waiting for the big splash at Shamu Stadium at SeaWorld Orlando. Commercials on TV depicted majestic, black and white creatures sparkling in the Florida sun playing with joyful trainers. Seeing the whales interact with the trainers in real life was even more captivating than the advertisements showed, and they seemed to share a real bond with one another. Children and adults alike are in awe of the experience.
But things are changing at SeaWorld. A few years after my visit to the park, I remember hearing on the news that trainers would no longer be featured in shows with the whales because of a fatal accident. The horrifying representation the media painted of the orca didn’t fit the images in the commercials nor those from my memory. Within the last several years, many Americans have finally begun to understand the profound changes SeaWorld is undergoing, and why.
In 2010, the death of 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau stunned Americans of all ages. A performance whale at SeaWorld dragged one of the park’s most experienced trainers into its tank, maiming and drowning her. The story sparked investigations on SeaWorld as reporters and animal activists attempted to provide answers for the tragedy. Could the attack have been prevented? How could a trained whale that had lived in captivity for most of his life suddenly lash out?
The public soon began to realize that attacks like the one on Brancheau were not foreign to marine theme parks. Investigations revealed that the whale Tilikum, who attacked Brancheau, didn’t have a sparkling track record. In 1991, Tilikum along with two other female whales drowned trainer Keltie Byrne at Sealand of the Pacific in Victoria, Canada. The park promptly closed after the incident, and Tilikum was sold to SeaWorld Orlando. At SeaWorld in 1999, the body of a naked homeless man was found draped over Tilikum’s back. While SeaWorld insisted that the man jumped into the tank and died of hypothermia, he still maintained heavy bruising and scratching likely inflicted by Tilikum.
Bringing these two previous incidents to life was just the beginning of what would soon turn into a movement against SeaWorld. Three years after the attack on Brancheau, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite produced Blackfish (2013), a documentary tracing Tilikum’s history leading up to the 2010 attack, at the Sundance Film Festival. CNN picked up the documentary and collaborated with Cowperthwaite to air it on CNN in January. The film shows emotional interviews with whale catchers, former SeaWorld trainers, and animal rights activists.
Blackfish also educates people on the psychological makeup of orca whales. A brain scan of an orca shows that the mammals’ limbic area—the part of the brain that processes emotions—is far larger than those of other mammals. This neurological observation supports scientists’ theories that orca whales experience emotion in far greater depth than humans, and are thus extra sensitive to mistreatment from humans and other whales. Animal activists featured in Blackfish offer two potential reasons for why Tilikum became violent: his claustrophobic living conditions; and the abusive training methods used against him in his youth at Sealand of the Pacific.
But perhaps the most illuminating and shocking element of Blackfish is former SeaWorld trainer Samantha Berg’s testimony. She says that after retiring from SeaWorld, she discovered over seventy recorded whale-to-trainer accidents at the park, thirty of which occurred before she was hired. She had known of none of them.
In the summer of 2013, SeaWorld issued a statement through several prominent film and media outlets that refuted some of Blackfish’s major assertions. SeaWorld maintains that it invests millions of dollars in the care of its whales, does not separate mothers from calves, and that it no longer captures whales from the wild. The park also released a letter to the public that summer describing the organization as composed of “true animal activists.” The letter included overlapping refutations to those outlined in the other press release. But Blackfish producers and supporters stand now accuse SeaWorld of not watching the film attentively. And despite the park’s efforts to reclaim its place as animal activists, major singers such as Willie Nelson and The Barenaked Ladies have pulled their concerts from SeaWorld’s list of performances.
So what is being done now to ensure that an attack like Brancheau’s is never repeated? In 2012, a judge ordered SeaWorld to change its performance dynamics entirely—trainers can no longer perform alongside the orca whales. But the new ruling has essentially left Tilikum confined to a life of solidarity and for breeding purposes within the park. Most frightening is that since 2001 Tilikum has fathered twenty-two offspring. Will the young whales be privy to Tilikum’s violent behaviors? Will the recent court order truly keep trainers safe? Only time will tell the future of SeaWorld and its trainers and whales.