Maybe Killer Whales are Just Smart?

This fellow is a bit math challenged. It's 2010. If the first Killer Whales were captured in the mid 1960s, then it's 45 years they they have been in captivity, not 60 or 70 years. It's a small point, I know, but this kind of stuff bugs me.

Also, his core thesis is not on the money either.

Very few Killer Whales have ever been in captivity. Only 47 are in captivity right now. Depite the low numbers, however, these animals have a pretty good track record of injuring, scaring, intimidating and even killing their trainers. Five trainers have been killed so far.

So, NO, it's NOT "a surprising thing that this thing would happen."

And for the record, for the trainers working with this particular animal, this should have been no suprise at all. After all this one whale had already killed three other people.

Come on people! We are dealing with an apex pack predator here -- one that weighs between three and six tons as an adult. One that is called a "Killer Whale."

It is smarter that a fifth grader and we keep them in a concrete tank.

We rip them from the ocean when they are a year or two old, and long before they are properly socialized.

And yet we wonder why a few might go crazy?

Yes, someone is out of their minds, but most of the time I do not think it is the whales!

As for the reference to Namu, the back story as to how Killer Whales ended up in American "curiosity aquariums" is worth telling.

As the old web site for the Center for Whale Research notes:

The first killer whale capture was in 1961 by Marineland of the Pacific in California. They captured a sick, disoriented mature female in Newport Harbor, California. Two days after the introduction into her tank, she smashed her rostrum head-on into the tanks' wall and died.

The next captive killer whale was in 1964. This did not start out as a live capture, but eventually ended up as the first whale to be kept in captivity for a period of time. A sculptor by the name of Samuel Burich was commissioned in 1964 by the Vancouver Aquarium to go out and kill a killer whale and fashion a life-sized model of it for the aquariums' new British Columbia hall. Burich harpooned a 15-foot long, 1-ton whale near East Point, Saturna Island in British Columbia. When the whale did not die immediately, even after being shot, the aquarium director, Murray Newman, decided to keep the killer whale alive and tow the whale back to Vancouver, British Columbia - a 20-mile journey. He used the harpoon line attached to the base of the whales dorsal fin as the tow line. The harpooned whale that was towed to Vancouver was named Moby Doll (although later they found out it was male). People were surprised by Moby Dolls docility. Moby Doll was kept in captivity for 87 days until he died from a skin disease caused by the harbors' low salinity water.

For the first time, newspapers and magazines including Reader's Digest, Life, The Times of London, and the Victoria Times gave some positive press about killer whales. Moby Doll's captivity started a new era for killer whales.

Killer whale captures for exhibition purposes began in the Northwest in 1965. The second capture in the Northwest was an accidental catch of a 24-foot long, 5-ton male who got snared in a fishing net off Namu, British Columbia. The two fishermen who owned the net decided to sell him alive to the first person who gave them a bid.

Ted Griffin, owner of the Seattle Public Aquarium, had dreamed for many years of befriending a killer whale. Killer whales are the largest of the dolphin family, and he was convinced that such a relationship was possible. When Griffin heard of the captured killer whale, he jumped at the opportunity and bought the whale for 8,000 dollars, the cost of replacing the net. He named the whale Namu, after the town if its capture.

And so the adventure began ....
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