Free Willy: Seaworld ends its orca captive breeding programme
Orca experts have long observed how separation from their families, confinement and boredom leads the sociable animals to aggression.
After years of intense public scrutiny and backlash over orca and human deaths, US theme-park operator SeaWorld Entertainment announced on Thursday that it was ending its killer whale captive breeding programme. SeaWorld started capturing and breeding the marine mammals in 1964 but the 29 orcas currently at the three SeaWorlds in the US will be the last generation in their care.
Explaining the company’s decision in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby wrote, “We are proud of contributing to the evolving understanding of one of the world's largest marine mammals. Now we need to respond to the attitudinal change that we helped to create.”
Animal rights organisations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, regulators and lawmakers in the US have all been rooting for an end to captive breeding of orcas. SeaWorld, however, announced that it would not release any orcas into the wild saying that they would not survive. Keiko, who was the orca star of the 1993 film Free Willy, died of pneumonia shortly after he was released into the wild in 2002.
While Free Willy threw the spotlight on orcas and their life in captivity, it was the tragic death of SeaWorld’s trainer Dawn Brancheau that amplified the outcry against orca captivity. Brancheau was killed in 2010 by SeaWorld’s largest and best known orca Tilikum. Ironically, SeaWorld is ending its orca breeding programme even as Tilikum, one of its most prolific breeders is dying of an antibiotic bacterial infection in his lungs.
Tilikum was captured in Iceland in 1983 and has lived at the SeaWorld in Florida for most of his life. On February 24, 2010, Tilikum pulled Brancheau into his pool, attacked her brutally and killed her. The episode was the subject of a book Death at Sea World by David Kirby and a documentary film called Blackfish by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, both which showed how Tilikum’s aggression was a result of separation from his family, confinement, boredom and aggressive dynamics with other captive orcas. Tilikum has been responsible for two more human deaths before Brancheau’s.
Orcas are found in every ocean in the world and are highly intelligent animals. In the wild, they live in large families of about 50 members and each family has its own set of vocalizations, methods of hunting and pod behaviour, rather like human societies. There are high levels of social bonding within pods. Orcas have a lifespan of about 50 years and adult offspring never leave their mothers.
In October last year, orca experts John Hargrove and Ingrid Visser visited SeaWorld and saw disturbing, unnatural repetitive behaviour in the killer whales brought on by boredom and stress.
