A killer whale holds her trainer’s foot and refuses to let go
There are many videos out there of Kasatka, a female killer whale owned by Sea World, doing a surprise attack on trainer Ken Peters. You can watch the long version, the short version, or the one with commentary. But they’re all the same thing, and this is what happens:
Ken Peters tries to ride her rostrum (meaning, literally, he’s standing on what is almost her jaw) up from the bottom of the pool into the sky. Instead of shooting up the happy human for the cheering crowds, she grabs him by the foot, shakes him about and drags him down under. She does this a few times, bringing him up, then taking him down again. She shakes him around, puts her weight on him, and takes him back up. At some point, she spins him, like a top, near the surface. Finally, when she’s up again, and has let him go, and a net has been drawn close to the edge of the pool, he inches along her body, petting her all the way, right until he reaches her tail, making sure she has to take the longest spin to catch him when he runs. And sure enough, the minute he finally lets go and sprint/swims across the net, she spins round and chases after him. He makes it to the edge. She leaps over the net, going straight for him.
He collapses, then gets up and runs again when he realizes he’s not safe. Finally, he can collapse again in peace and is taken to the hospital. As he’s given an oxygen mask and his clothes are cut away, we see one last glimpse of Kasatka, swimming past at a tremendous speed – this is clearly one of many angry circles, and as she passes right by Ken Peters, she blows a great fountain through her spout, like a steam engine.
What happened before the attack, and a very personal theory about the why
They say that before this attack, Kasatka’s daughter had been wailing in the next pool. Knowing that, they think it might have caused a disruption in her mental state, distracted her and stressed her out, making her lash out. I wonder why they never thought that she might actually have been holding Ken Peters to ransom. Maybe she was hoping to do it until the gates were opened. She seemed to know how to keep him alive, going by the number of times she brought him up. She didn’t seriously injure him or dismember him, which she could easily have done. At the same time it was clear that she was deliberately trying to torture him, what with the tossing and the spinning. The whale was communicating. She wanted something.
It seems strange that whenever entertainer-orcas turned on their trainers, the attacks were considered symptoms of unreasoning distress, stress turned to psychosis. They never considered that the attacks might be reasoned, deliberate, a communication, a signal, and that the whales might have been conscious of what they were doing.
How conscious are orcas anyway?
At the same time, there are videos of the orcas held captive in pools hunting birds with lures. A large whale arrives in a friendly, non-threatening way at the edge of the pool, where the birds sit. She regurgitates a small fish onto the edge, and sinks back a little with something like a smile. One bird gets a little closer but hesitates. The whale sinks back a little more, seemingly increasing the distance between them. The bird decides to chance it, goes for the fish and takes off. As she starts to fly up the orca body rises out of the water, the jaws open mid-air, and snap, the bird is down at the bottom of the pool, being shared with two other orcas.
Who taught captive orcas to do this? They tell us that captive orcas don’t know how to hunt because they’ve been fed all their lives. They tell us that orcas are trained in hunting techniques by their pods, and the methods are site-specific, passed on by generations. A video shows a pod in the Antarctic, swimming powerfully together to make a big wave that’ll knock a seal off a floating shelf of ice. In another video, a mother whale beaches herself, catches a seal and thrashes it, before letting it go free. She’s doing this just to teach her daughter how to do it herself. It was a hunting demo. Next, we watch the daughter try. She overshoots and gets stuck on the beach and doesn’t know how to go back into the water. To teach her how to wiggle back, the mother beaches herself again, and finally the two of them swim away.
So, who taught captive orcas how to use bait to hunt birds?
Looking at the range of hunting techniques they’ve invented/discovered, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that orcas have creativity on their side.
The danger of being the one who bells the cat
When I see that parting shot of Kasatka, I think about a desperate orca trying her best to make something happen, and probably knowing that it will come with a sacrifice. Tilikum (famous for being responsible for the death of three humans, one before a live audience) radically changed an entire industry, but he then had to spend seven more years of a long, unhappy and now incredibly lonely life in a near-catatonic state. Who even knows whether he was in depression or they were just drugging him. They paid him back with isolation, a big price for a large prisoner in a tiny prison. I thought about how it must feel if you took that big risk, sacrificed something, put yourself in danger of possible retribution, if you were the labourer who started the walkout – and the terrible frustration that would follow if you failed.
It reminded me of an Isaac Assimov story called Strikebreaker. The loneliest man on the tiny planetoid of Elsevere is Igor Ragusnik, the one who presses the buttons that allows human crap to be recycled. Here, everything is recycled. This man can never interact with normal society. He is provided a woman so he can procreate, and this is the limit of his interaction with the world. But Ragusnik also has a unique power. If he doesn’t press those buttons, the planet won’t survive for very long. It is too small, and the risk of infection, flood and disease is almost immediate. One day, he goes on strike. He demands a normal life. His demands are refused. A visitor from another planet, seeing the stalemate, worrying for everyone, breaks the strike by doing the job himself. He sympathises with Ragusnik, but he tells him, it was too dangerous – but now they heard your voice, maybe in your son’s lifetime things will change. But I wanted it in my lifetime. Is the reply.
Epilogue
I saw a video of Tilikum, the most famous member of the orca resistance, some years after he killed trainer Dawn Brancheau, with his grandson Trua. It was not a show, it was just two killer whales in a fishbowl, being videoed and watched. One big one and one little one. The big one was moving oh-so-slowly but movement with form – sweeps, spins, one real complete slow-motion somersault. The little one was imitating him to perfection, their timing was almost exact, only the energy was different. Tilikum was performing a dance of melancholia. Trua was performing an enthusiastic imitation.
All around them, like a flame burning bright, the question, are they both going to die in this fishbowl? Tilikum already has. So has Kasatka.
