Long-range Vocalizations and Why I'll Never Go Back to SeaWorld

We're sneaking up on the 100th anniversary of the death of Murderous Mary, whose life has become a cautionary tale on the abuse of animals for entertainment.  If you don't know the story, here it goes: Mary was an circus elephant who, after years in captivity, flew into a rage and crushed a handler.  The details of the death are vague, but in the days following the "murder" people in the nearby eastern Tennessee towns demanded her execution.  After attempting to shoot Mary, and seeing that the bullets had no effect on her massive body, the circus owner realized it's hard to kill a six-ton elephant.  He and the other handlers brainstormed numerous inventive and gruesome ways to kill Mary, finally settling on a public hanging with an industrial crane.  After breaking the first chain, Mary was successfully executed by hanging on September 13, 1916.

I thought about Mary last night as I left the Tennessee movie theater close to my house and seven hours from the place of her death.  I was there to see Blackfish, which tells the story of Tilikum, a 12,000 pound bull orca whale who was captured off the coast of Washington in the 1980s, and since has spent his entire life in captivity, most of it at Florida's SeaWorld.  Since then, he has been involved in the deaths of three people, most recently an experienced SeaWorld trainer in 2010.  Tilikum is not a murderous monster, but rather the product of industry that has damaged him physically and psychologically, rendering him dangerous.  After all, Tilikum is not the only orca in captivity known to be unpredictable.  The film describes some of the 33 other recorded incidents of orcas acting violently toward humans in zoos, yet there is no record of these whales doing intentional harm in the wild.  By the end of the film, the message is clear: orcas are brilliant, complicated creatures with full emotional and relational lives we do not understand, and to keep them in captivity is physical and psychological abuse.


According to Blackfish, one of the consequences of commodifying orca whales is the breakup of their family units, which have unique languages and cultures when left intact in the wild.  This film shows two scenes of baby whales being taken from their parents, and they are as gut-wrenching and disturbing as if it had shown a human child separated from her mother.  During Tilikum's capture from the wild, drag nets pull him and three other baby whales into a pen away from their mothers, where cranes then hoist them into boats.  The whole excruciating process is captured on camera, while the mother whales wait in a line on the other side of the drag net, their heads out of the water, screaming back and forth to the babies trapped in the nets.  The sound of grief and terror transcends all languages; even the boat's crew members cry in interviews years later when they recount the event.  The whole incident leaves three of the baby orcas dead, whose bodies are cut open, filled with rocks, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.  Apparently this brutal separation of families takes place in captivity as well.  Years later, when Florida's SeaWorld sells one of Tilikum's offspring to another park, the mother whale goes into mourning for her child.  She goes to the corner of her pool, refusing to eat or move, and then begins screaming.  When SeaWorld calls on a marine biologist to explain the cries, she reports the whale is making "long-range vocalizations," trying to get in touch with her lost child, wherever she was.

I watched both of these scenes with open-mouthed horror.  One of the critiques I've read about this movie is that it is one-sided, and at times emotionally manipulative, but this isn't a movie that is trying to give you both sides of a debate on animals in captivity.  This is a movie that wants to leave you in awe of the mind and power of these animals, and in awe of the evil we do against them when we act in ignorance and motivated by profit.  And does Blackfish ever accomplish this goal.  In another scene, an orca attacks his trainer by pulling him under water for as deep and as long as his body can withstand, then releases him to the surface, only to pull him back again.  Two things jarred me in this scene.  First, the whale seemed to know exactly how long he could show his frustration without killing the trainer, and second, that all the trainers left on shore did nothing.  This isn't to their shame.  After all, what could they do?  How do you stop a 12,000 pound orca whale from doing anything?  Could you even kill it if you wanted to?  These are the images that bring Murderous Mary to mind, another intelligent, relational animal whose story leaves us wondering what to do when you've captured and damaged an animal you can't control.

Go see this movie.  Yes, it's content is political; this is a movie with a clear platform against the captivity of orca whales and it makes no attempt to balance that message.  But it's also a cautionary tale that is deeply resonate in the years of the global warming debate: what happens when humans insist on asserting their dominance over nature, in all its complexity and intricacy that we do not understand and for which we lack the proper reverence.

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