Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish Read online

  BENEATH THE SURFACE

  Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth beyond Blackfish

  John Hargrove

  with

  Howard Chua-Eoan

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  To all the killer whales that I had the privilege of building relationships with and swimming with for so many years—you gave me everything. But most especially to Takara, who taught me so much and whom I loved the most.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1: Monsters and Other People

  2: The Fantasy Kingdom of SeaWorld

  3: The Education of an Orca Trainer

  4: “In the Care of Man”

  5: Elegy of the Killer Whale

  6: The Natural and Unnatural History of the Orca

  7: Treasure

  8: Getting with the Artificial Program

  9: The Dark Side

  10: Losing My Religion

  11: Leap of Faith

  12: A Vision for the Future

  Epilogue: Life without Takara

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Freya was refusing to follow any of the signals I had taught her. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what I wanted. She just wouldn’t cooperate—nor did she want any of the fish I had in my hand. She pushed at my torso with her head, propelling me with her mouth, which remained obstinately shut. Her nearly 7,000 pounds of orca muscle directed me farther into the middle of the pool, farther from the safety of the perimeter.

  I dropped the fish, letting the food that would have been her reward sink to the bottom of the pool; I then used my freed hands and my body to try to deflect myself away from Freya, to get out of her way. But that didn’t work. She countered every move I made like a skilled soccer player—and I became the ball she was so nimbly positioning in her game. With her shut mouth and the beak-like tip of her rostrum—the anterior tip of her head—she pushed me right to where she wanted me, the center of the pool, as far as possible from solid ground and from the help of the other trainers who were watching in horror from the sidelines. With a sudden slide, she looped beneath the surface, vanishing from my sight.

  But only for a moment. She came back at me from beneath, slowly and deliberately, turning sideways to make contact with the left side of my body, first with her chest, then her stomach, her genitals, and her flukes, the huge fins that make up her tail. She stopped. Her right fluke was submerged; but her left fluke stuck out into the air, just a foot or two away from my head. Was she going to strike me in the face? If she did, the force and weight could easily break my neck and kill me. But she decided to tease me some more, swirling around to face me, her blue eyes bulging, wide and strained.

  Outwardly, I appeared calm but I knew that Freya, with her hyperacute sense of hearing, could detect that my heart was beating faster with anxiety. The rush of blood through my veins only increased as she continued to refuse to respond to every signal, including an attempt to draw her to the other side of the pool by way of a five-syllable emergency underwater tone set off by trainers on land. She was in charge now—and my fate was of her choosing. I was desperate for some inkling that she might still be willing to cooperate with me and the other trainers. But Freya wasn’t playing. I could see it in her wide-open, upset eyes, the red veins showing around the blue irises. The muscles of her back were tight. I recognized the sounds she was emitting. They were signs of an oncoming episode of aggression.

  She submerged in front of me to about three feet. The water was murky but it was midday so I could still make her out from where I floated in the pool. I kept eye contact with her even as she was underwater. She was still upset.

  I knew what was coming. As calmly as possible, I told the trainer positioned closest to me on land to get ready to call the paramedics.

  Just then, I felt a suction beneath me. Freya had rolled sideways and finally opened her mouth. The underwater vacuum pulled me down even as she moved toward me. I felt her teeth pressing on my hip bones, just over the wetsuit; the entire width of the middle of my body was in her jaws, like a twig in a dog’s mouth, one that could snap with just the wrong amount of pressure. To give some perspective: the largest great white shark ever caught weighed 5,085 pounds; Freya was more than 1,000 pounds bigger.

  She pulled me underwater but chose not to puncture me before releasing the grip of her jaw. I floated back to the surface, facing her. I had both hands on her but she went under and rolled again. She came at me once more, grasping me in her jaws, pulling me under a second time before releasing me, allowing me to float upward. I knew that this could well become a pattern—I’d seen it happen before when orcas would toy with birds that had strayed into their pools—or when they turned on their trainers. She might come back to drag me under again and again until I became unconscious in the water from the repeated dunking. But I was determined not to die.

  At the surface, I kept my cool and asked one of the trainers on land to once again produce the emergency recall tone. Originally devised for emergencies, it was a signal for the whale to stop everything, leave behind the trainer in the water, head toward and focus on a trainer on land, and put their chin up on the pool’s rim to await the next set of instructions. Freya had ignored the tone when we first tried it. But this time, she chose to follow it. I instructed the trainer to be ready to use her whistle—which Freya would recognize as a positive sign that she was doing the right thing—and to put a hand into the water, a behavioral stimulus and powerful message to Freya to stay at the perimeter so she wouldn’t head back for me. I told the trainer to have a bucket of fish beside her so that she could immediately reward Freya when she heeded those signals. Whales are zealously aware of the rituals of reward—and we had trained them to recognize a whistle as a precursor to a reward and the human hand as a symbol that had to be heeded. This time, Freya accepted the food. She had finally deigned to be rewarded.

  I kept looking at her eyes. They were still bulging, clearly a precursor to incidents of aggression. Even though she was facing the perimeter, she kept looking at me as she headed toward the trainer on dry land. The eye muscles of orcas allow them to look backward—or anywhere they want—no matter in which direction they are swimming.

  The incident was not over yet. Freya was taking the prize but was not yet prepared to give me up. I knew that the moment I made a move to swim to safety, she’d turn around and, with the stunning speeds orcas can achieve instantaneously, catch up with me in no time and grab me once again. She would be furious that I was trying to escape. In that case, she might no longer toy with me.

  I chose to gamble. I asked the trainer on land to use her hand to point Freya back toward me, a basic signal the whales are taught early on. “What?” she asked in disbelief. I shouted back, repeating that she should send Freya
to me right away. Timing was of the essence. If the trainer didn’t point the whale back fast enough, while Freya was still feeling rewarded for behaving well, still feeling that this episode was turning out positively for her, then Freya was going to become aggressive again. If she did choose to return to that state, her behavior would most likely escalate into something I couldn’t get out of. I knew all too well what she was capable of doing to me. I swam to position myself exactly in the middle of the pool to make it clear to her that I wasn’t trying to get away.

  Freya followed the trainer’s direction and swam back to me. She was calm. I asked her to complete three simple behaviors we had taught her and she performed them perfectly. Then, at my request—and as she had learned in earlier sessions—she propelled me through the water, my torso beneath her head, my arms wrapping up around her lower jaw up onto her rostrum, my feet resting on her pectoral flippers. She pushed me forward to the edge of the pool where another trainer waited with a bucket. Once I was by the rim, I stepped up and out, quickly took all the fish available—about 15 pounds’ worth—and fed Freya all of it to reward her for cooperating, for letting me go, for performing the pec-push that had brought me back to land. The encounter had taken less than 15 minutes. I looked back at the water, at what could have been the end of my life at the age of 27. My knees were shaking.

  Dread and wonderment both are at the heart of my relationship with killer whales. More than a dozen years have passed since that encounter with Freya. Before and since, I have had other experiences—both fearsome and wonderful—with many orcas. These experiences were what I had hoped for in my life. The whales were my passion.

  By the time I ended my orca training career in 2012, I was one of the most experienced orca trainers on the planet. I had started as an apprentice at SeaWorld San Antonio in 1993 at the age of 20, becoming a trainer in the corporation’s premier facility in San Diego two years later. From 2001 to 2003, in the south of France, I took up the challenge of training orcas that had never worked with humans in the water before. After spending the next five years trying to transfer my passion to other careers, I returned in March 2008 to the one I loved the most, heading back to SeaWorld San Antonio, where I worked until I resigned in August 2012.

  I worked with 20 different whales, swimming with 17 of them across two decades. Most are still alive. I loved those charismatic and complex beings. I can’t quite call them animals; the whales are beings just as we are beings. And these orcas have been a more intimate part of my life than most humans. Dr. Ingrid Visser, who has spent many years studying the killer whales of New Zealand, told me, “If you have a question about orcas, frame it as if you were asking about people.” The answer, she said, would often be surprisingly similar.

  I had worked hard to get in peak physical form to be able to qualify to work and swim with killer whales, and the years I spent with the whales were a privilege. I will treasure them forever. It is a sentiment that I share with almost every person who has ever reached the highest ranks of SeaWorld’s orca trainers. We were dedicated to working and performing with the whales; and we steadfastly believed we were doing what was best for the orcas. Our lives were so intertwined that we felt as if we could channel what the whales were feeling. We had a special kind of language, having developed a rigorous though imperfect form of communication based on the scientific notions of behavioral psychology to condition the whales to perform for the thousands who showed up for each show at SeaWorld’s Shamu Stadium. No one else on earth could even pretend to read a whale’s mind. We did. And we all knew what a great privilege it was—because it was extended to us by the whales themselves. Each day, each captive whale had the choice to allow us in—or to shut us out.

  We were a small band of brothers and sisters: there have been perhaps no more than 20 top-ranked trainers at any one given time across the three SeaWorld parks during the company’s half-century of existence. We spent as much time with each other as we did with the whales—competing with each other as we tried to push our careers ahead but also collaborating for the good of the orcas in our charge. I am not a scientist and, while this book will delve into the natural history of killer whales—into how they live in the wild—my story involves the lives of orcas seen through the eyes of the men and women who trained them to perform at SeaWorld. We swam with them. We kept them healthy. We saw them give birth. We watched them suffer. We suffered with them. We looked them in the eye and caught a glimpse into their souls. Sometimes, we saw joy. Sometimes, we saw things that were terrifying.

  No SeaWorld trainer has been allowed into a pool to perform with a killer whale since February 24, 2010, when Dawn Brancheau, one of the most skillful and experienced of our small club, was killed by the 12,000-pound male orca Tilikum in Orlando. This horrific and tragic incident was the focus of the 2013 documentary Blackfish. Immediately after Dawn’s death, SeaWorld pulled its trainers out of the water in all three of its facilities—not just in Florida where the death occurred but also in San Antonio, Texas, and in its premier park in San Diego, California. Soon after, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency in charge of safeguarding Americans in the workplace, cited the corporation for violating safety codes and said that, in order to avoid a penalty, trainers and killer whales should never be as close to each other as Dawn and Tilikum were—and Dawn wasn’t even swimming with Tilikum when she was attacked. OSHA’s August 2010 citation cited SeaWorld Florida for a “willful” violation of safety codes and said that a remedy would be to “prohibit animal trainers from working with killer whales . . . unless the trainers are protected through the use of physical barriers or through the use of decking systems, oxygen supply systems or other engineering or administrative controls . . .”

  Being in the water had always been an integral part of the trainer’s relationship with the whale—and a central part of the public spectacles in Shamu Stadium. But in 2014, after four years of fighting the OSHA citation in court and voluntarily pulling its trainers out of the orca pools, SeaWorld was forced to accept that trainers would never do “waterwork” again. All interaction with whales would be from the perimeters of the pools—known as dry-work—or from very shallow water on ledges built into the pools. The trainers were effectively grounded.

  Along with my former colleagues at SeaWorld who have been landlocked since, I may be one of the last of a generation of human beings who can say that they performed with orcas in the water. To be part of such a historic and exclusive club fills me with conflicting emotions. I enjoyed those moments and so did the whales. It gave them something to do in captivity. But in the broader perspective, it was unsettling because our experiences were just a part of a rapacious corporate scheme that exploited both the orcas and their human trainers.

  SeaWorld’s corporate marketing strategy turned the orcas into the pandas of the sea, commercial and cuddly, with little hint of the complexities of killer whales and the effects of confinement on them. The terrifying monsters were domesticated and tamed through public relations and entertainment, transformed into performers appropriate for family-friendly theatrical settings. Backstage, the corporate ideology was paradoxically the reverse: unemotional, matter-of-fact and driven by dollars and cents. In the eyes of management, the animals perform as they do because they are trained to respond to behavioral cues imposed after repetitive psychological reinforcement. The company’s official dogma for the trainers: Don’t anthropomorphize those animals; don’t give them human emotions. It’s okay to love the whales, but don’t let sentiment get in the way of your job. The whales are a company asset on the ledgers—difficult to replace, of course, but ultimately a matter for spreadsheets.

  I believe in something greater and deeper about orcas. Every time a killer whale looked me in the eye, I saw intelligence shine through and felt his or her emotions. I sensed a presence in the orcas that is closer to the power of the myths surrounding their species, a consciousness that is b
oth approachable and beyond human probing. They are both compelling and unfathomable.

  The orcas are only memory to me now. All I have are photos and video footage of my life with the killer whales. I left SeaWorld in August 2012. My body was a painful wreck after years pursuing my hazardous occupation. It was no longer physically possible for me to go on. But I had also had an intellectual conversion. I had been a SeaWorld loyalist since I was a child—a true believer in the company’s vision of cross-species interaction as a way to teach the virtues of nature conservation. But though I was thrilled to be part of the orcas’ lives for so long, I finally came to the realization that if I had to live their lives, it would be hell. Captivity is always captivity, no matter how gentle the jailer.

  My human colleagues are part of a more complicated legacy for me. After I ended my career and began to speak out against SeaWorld, I lost most of my trainer friends who remained working at SeaWorld. I understand their predicament and why they have abandoned me. It took me years to make my decision to speak out. It wasn’t easy. SeaWorld is a gigantic entity, with a corporation’s access to many levers of power: lawyers, politicians, the media. Against that behemoth, you can feel utterly alone and powerless. When you are trapped by a whale that has gone over to the dark side, you still can hope that you can look the orca in the eye and redirect him or her. But in SeaWorld the corporation, there is no soul to peer into.

  I can never walk back into a marine park where any of the whales I worked with live—not into the three SeaWorld facilities in the United States, not into the one in Spain that the corporation helps to manage, nor into the one in France where I worked for two years and which does business with the multibillion-dollar American theme park empire. It’s not just because of my conviction that SeaWorld’s treatment of its orcas is wrong—though that is what I now believe. What prevents me from returning is my awareness of the emotional distance—the knowledge that even if I did enter the park, I would never truly be near the whales. I was so close to them, physically and spiritually. Of the 30 living whales that SeaWorld currently owns, I’ve worked with 12 of them. Of the 12, I did waterwork with 10. To return as a visitor to a theme park, to see them presented in a show as if I had never been part of their lives, would be too painful to endure.