Blackfish (2013) Movie Script
1
Orange County Fire Rescue.
6600 Sea Harbor Drive.
SeaWorld Stadium.
Okay.
We actually have a trainer in the water
with one of our whales--
the whale that they're not supposed
to be in the water with.
Okay.
We'll get somebody en route.
Okay, through gate #3 to Shamu Stadium.
Gate 3.
Orange County Sheriff's Office.
We need SO to respond
for a dead person at SeaWorld.
Uh, a whale has eaten one of the trainers.
A whale ate one of the trainers?
That's correct.
Do you believe?
My parents first brought me to a SeaWorld park
when I was very young.
From that point forward, I was hooked.
It meant everything to me because
I'd never wanted anything more.
I remember being probably
in first or second grade
watching National Geographic specials
or Mutual of Omaha specials
and seeing whales and seeing dolphins
and as a little kid
just being really incredibly inspired by it.
I never went to SeaWorld.
I grew up in New York,
so I went to the Bronx Zoo.
Grew up on a lake with horses.
We'd swim the horses.
I grew up around the ocean.
I came from the middle of the country
in flatland Kansas.
I'm from Virginia.
Traveled down, did the theme park thing
in Orlando when I was 17
and saw the night show at Shamu Stadium.
Very emotional, you know, popular music.
And I was just-- I was very driven
to want to do that.
Then I saw what the trainers did...
and I said,
"That's what I want to do."
One of the trainers there, he goes,
"What are you doing out there?
You should be a trainer."
I go, "I don't know how to train animals.
I've never trained animals
in my life."
How do you prepare yourself for an encounter
with an 8,000-pound Orcinus orca?
I always thought
you needed, like, a master's degree
in marine biology to be a trainer.
It takes years of study and experience
to meet the strict requirements necessary
to interact in the water with Shamu.
Come to find out, it really is more about
your personality and how good you can swim.
I went and tried out, got the job right away.
I'm like, "Yeah!"
So excited, you know.
I was so, so excited.
I really wanted to be there.
I really wanted to do the job.
I couldn't wait to get in the water
with the animals.
I really was proud of being a SeaWorld trainer.
You know, I thought this was
the most amazing job.
I showed up there on my first day,
not really knowing what to expect.
I was told to put on a wetsuit
and get in the water.
Hi, Mom!
Oh, I was scared out of my wits.
First of all, I put my wetsuit on backwards
because I was raised on a farm in Virginia.
- Hi, Dad!
- My first thought
and memory of that time
was that dolphins are a lot bigger...
...heh, than they look
when you get in the water next to them.
Well, I watched the Sea Lion & Otter Show,
and this guy, Mike Morocco,
he comes out during the show
with a dress on as Dorky,
the alter ego of Dorothy--
in a dress with a sea lion,
the Coward Sea Lion, right?
And he's walking along with this little basket,
and I go, "I will never,
ever do that."
You know?
Two months later...
Hi, I'm Dorky!
Walking out onstage with a sea lion.
I was overwhelmed and I was so excited.
I mean, just seeing a killer whale...
is breathtaking.
I was just in awe.
It's shocking to see how large they are
and how beautiful they are.
Being in the presence of the killer whales
was just inspiring and amazing,
and I remember seeing them for the first time,
just not being able to believe
how huge they were.
You're there because you want to train
killer whales and that's your goal.
Yay!
I didn't know it was going to happen,
so I wasn't expecting it.
And one day they say,
"Okay, Sam, you're ready to go."
Come on, you got it.
"You're going to stand on the whale.
You're going to dive off the whale.
The whale's going to swim under you
and pick you up again.
And then you're going to do
a perimeter ride around the pool."
Good!
Keep moving.
Ride him to the slide-out.
They just told me to go do it and I did it.
Wow, I did-- I just rode
a killer whale.
Yay, girly!
When you look into their eyes,
you know somebody is home.
Somebody's looking back.
You form a very personal relationship
with your animal.
There's something absolutely amazing
about working with an animal.
You are a team.
You build a relationship together.
You both understand the goal
and you help each other.
I've been with this whale
since I was 18 years old
and I've seen her have all four of her babies.
We've grown up together. Huh?
That's the joy I got out of it.
It's a relationship like I've never had.
Bro,
I have to know-- are you nervous?
I'm scared.
- Oh, no.
- Nice hair, Jeff.
Did you see anything?
Projection for the future of Jeff Ventre.
Jeff Ventre is going to go over there,
he's going to shine.
- You're going to notice...
- Dawn.
- Oh, that's Dawn.
- Wow.
He's going to be my supervisor one day.
There you go.
I knew Dawn when she was new.
She was a great person to work with
and she obviously blossomed
into one of SeaWorld's best trainers.
This is Dawn Brancheau.
Dawn is the senior trainer
here at Shamu Stadium.
I guess you could say
I kind of knew Dawn in a past life.
It's a tough job, isn't it?
Yeah, we really do go through
a lot of physical exertion.
You can see in the show
we do a lot of deepwater work,
breath holds, very high-energy
behaviors with animals.
Obviously they're giving out
a lot of energy too,
but we're working together
and having a lot of fun as well.
She's beautiful, she's blonde,
she's athletic, she's friendly.
You know, everybody loves Dawn.
And I mean this so sincerely,
watching you perform yesterday--
you're amazing.
- Thank you.
- You really are.
She captured what it means
to be a SeaWorld trainer.
She had so much experience
that it made me realize
what happened to her
really could have happened to anyone.
This is Detective Revere
with the Orange County Sheriff's Office.
Today's date is February 24, 2010.
The time is 4:16.
In the room with me right now
is a Thomas George Tobin.
- Is that correct?
- Correct.
- So the arm is nowhere...
- Right.
OSHA, on behalf of the federal government,
is basically suggesting that swimming with orcas
is inherently dangerous
and that you can't completely predict
the outcome when you enter the water
or enter their environment.
That's the crux of the OSHA case.
Stay out of proximity with the animals
and you won't get killed.
It will have a ripple effect
through the whole industry.
This was national headline news.
SeaWorld's whale performances
may never be the same.
Right now the theme park is arguing in court
to keep whale trainers in the water,
something OSHA says is extremely dangerous.
These are wild animals,
and they are unpredictable
because we don't speak whale.
We don't speak whale, we don't speak tiger,
we don't speak monkey.
And tempers flared between the two sides today
when OSHA's attorney suggested
that SeaWorld only made changes
after trainer Dawn Brancheau's death
outraged the public.
OSHA doesn't want
the trainers going back in the water
without a physical barrier
between them and the whales.
Being in close proximity
to these top predators is too dangerous.
They won't then be getting in the water
riding on the whales, things like that.
If you were in a bathtub for 25 years,
don't you think you'd get
a little irritated, aggravated,
maybe a little psychotic?
The situation with Dawn Brancheau--
it didn't just happen.
It's not a singular event.
You have to go back over 20 years
to understand this.
It was a really exciting thing to do
and so everybody wanted to do it.
What were they telling you you were going to do?
Mm, capture orcas.
Whoo-hoo!
They had aircraft,
they had spotters, they had speedboats,
they had bombs they were throwing in the water.
They were lighting their bombs
with acetylene torches in their boats
and throwing them as fast as they could
to herd the whales into coves.
Whoo!
But the orcas had been caught before
and they knew what was going on
and they knew their young ones
would be taken from them.
So the adults without young
went east into a cul-de-sac
and the boats followed them,
thinking they were all going that way,
while the mothers with babies went north.
But the capture teams had aircraft.
And they have to come up for air eventually.
And when they did,
the capture teams alerted the boats
and said, "Oh, no, they're going north--
the ones with babies."
So the boats-- the speedboats
caught them there
and herded them in.
And then they had fishing boats with seine nets
that they would stretch across
so none could leave
and then they could just pick out
the young ones.
We were only after the little ones.
And a little one is, you know,
a big animal still.
But I was told because of shipping costs
that's why they only take the little ones.
They had the young ones
that they wanted in the corrals,
so they dropped the seine nets.
And all the others could have left,
but they stayed.
We're there, trying to get
the young orca into the stretcher,
and the whole famn damily is out here,
25 yards away maybe,
in a big line...
...and they're communicating
back and forth.
Well...
you understand then what you're doing, you know.
I-- I lost it.
I mean, I just started crying.
I didn't stop working,
but I...
you know, I just couldn't handle it.
Just like kidnapping a little kid
away from their mother.
Everybody's watching.
What can you do?
It's the worst thing I can think of, you know?
I can't think of anything worse than that.
Now, and this really sounds bad,
but when the whole hunt was over,
there were three dead whales in the net.
And...
so they had Peter and Brian and I...
cut the whales open, fill them with rocks,
put anchors on their tail, and sink them.
Well...
you know...
really, I didn't even think about it
being illegal at that point.
I thought it was a PR thing.
They were finally ejected
from the State of Washington
by a court order in 1976.
It was SeaWorld by name that was told,
"Do not come back to Washington
to capture whales."
Without missing a beat, they went
from Washington to Iceland
and began capturing there.
I've been part of a revolution
and two change of presidents
in Central and South America...
and seen some things that's hard to believe,
but this is the worst thing
that I've ever done--
is hunt that whale.
Sealand has been
a part of Victoria for over 20 years.
We specialize in the care
and display of killer whales.
By the time I started, when he was four,
he was up to 16 feet long
and weighed 4,000 pounds.
Tilikum, up again.
Thank you.
I had actually seen Tilikum
quite a number of times.
He was right across the street here in Victoria.
Now, this show
can get a little bit soggy at times.
All Sealand was was a net hanging in a marina
with a float around it.
Tilikum was the one
we really loved to work with.
He was very well behaved
and he was always eager to please.
When he was first introduced,
everything just went fine and dandy,
but the previous head trainer
used techniques that involved punishment.
He would team a trained orca up
with Tilikum who was untrained.
He would send them both off
to do the same behavior.
If Tilikum didn't do it,
then both animals were punished.
Deprived of food to keep them hungry,
this caused a lot of frustration
with the larger animal,
the established animal,
and would in turn get frustrated with Tilikum
and would rake him with his teeth.
There would be times during certain seasons
that Tilikum would be covered
head to toe with rakes.
Rakes are teeth on teeth and raking the skin.
And from head to toe you could see blood
and you could see scratches,
and he would just be raked up.
Both females would gang up on him.
Tilikum was the one we trusted.
We never were concerned about Tilikum.
The issue was really that we stored
these whales at night
in what we call a module,
which was 20 feet across
and probably 30 feet deep as a safety precaution
because we were worried about people
cutting the net and letting them go.
And the lights were all turned out,
so there was really no stimulation.
They're just in this dark,
metal 20x30-foot pool
for two-thirds of their life.
When we first started,
they were quite small and quite young.
So they fit in there quite nicely,
but they were immobile for the most part.
It didn't feel good.
It just didn't.
And it was just wrong.
We started having difficulty getting them all
into this one small steel box, to be honest.
That's what it was.
It was a floating steel box.
That's where food deprivation would come in.
We would hold back food,
and they would know if they went in the module
that they would get their food.
So if they're hungry enough,
they're going to go in there.
And during the winter that would be
from 5:00 at night
till 7:00 in the morning.
When you let them out,
you'd see these new tooth rakes
and sometimes you'd see blood.
Closing that door on him
and knowing that he's locked in there
for the whole night is like...
it's a stab, it's a "whoa."
If that is true, it's not only inhumane,
and I'll tell them so...
but it probably led to what I think
is a psychosis that...
he was on a hair trigger.
He'd kill.
An employee is dead after an encounter...
...at a Canadian park
called Sealand of the Pacific.
The victim, Keltie Byrne,
was a championship swimmer
and a part-time worker at Sealand.
As seen in this home video,
rescuers used a huge net to try...
...rescue workers' efforts
were hindered by the agitated whales.
I'd like to make
the Pan Pacific team this summer,
but my more immediate goal
is just to swim fast at nationals.
It was sort of a cloudy, gray day
and we were looking for something to do,
so we thought,
"Why not go to Sealand?"
It was kind of like this dingy pool
with these whales and--
it just felt a little bit like an amusement park
that was kind of on its last legs
and everything was a bit gray.
Yeah. It was like
a swimming pool.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You know,
three whales in a swimming pool.
Yeah.
And they would come up
and touch the ball and there was--
I think there was some tail splashing
and there was some--
- Some jumping.
- The fish. And--
They hold the fish and the whales jump up.
I remember saying, "Oh, what a fun job.
You know, she's so lucky."
And then I saw her walking with her rubber boots
and she tripped and her foot
just dipped into the edge of the pool
and she lost her balance and fell in.
And then she was pushing her way up
to get out of the pool
and the whale zoomed over, grabbed her boot,
and pulled her back in.
At first, I didn't think it was that serious
because you see the trainer
in the pool with the whale
and you think, "Oh, well,
the whales are used to that."
And then all of a sudden,
it started getting--
there was more swimming,
more activity, more thrashing,
and she was starting to get panicked.
And then as it progressed,
you started to realize,
"Whoa, something's not right here."
She started to scream
and she started looking around
and her eyes were, like, bigger and bigger
and realizing that,
"I really am in trouble here."
And then they would pull her under.
And then they would come up
and then when she--
they came up, she'd be,
"Help me, help me."
And then they'd take her down again.
And she would be submerged for several seconds
up to, I don't know, maybe a minute.
You're not keeping track.
So it was harder and harder
for her to get the air in
because she was screaming.
And my sister remembers
her saying, "I don't want to die."
Well, condolences to Keltie's family.
Yeah.
That we couldn't help her
was pretty wretched.
Sealand closed.
Well, it's probably a good thing.
I mean, it was a little pond.
And I think the owner,
you know, made the right decision
for whatever reasons.
I don't believe he's a bad guy, a bad man.
I think he was shocked by the whole affair, too.
The blush was gone from the business
and he decided that that was it.
We should shut down.
No one ever contacted us.
There was an inquest.
No one ever asked us to say what happened.
- Yeah.
- You know, we just left.
There was no big lawsuits afterwards
and there was no memorial.
And the only thing remaining
of Keltie Byrne is--
is what's left in the folks' minds
who recall the case.
So in the newspaper articles,
the cause of death
was that she drowned accidentally,
but she was pulled under by the whale.
Well, there's a bit of smoke
and mirrors going on.
I mean, one of the fundamental facts is
is that none of the witnesses
were clear about which whale pulled Keltie in.
Yes. Yeah, it was the large whale.
Tilikum, the male, is the one
that went after her.
And the other two just kind of circled around.
But he was definitely the instigator.
And we knew it was that whale
because he had the flopped-over fin.
Like, it was very easy to tell.
Sealand of the Pacific closed
its doors and was looking, I guess,
to make a buck on the way out
and these whales are worth millions of dollars.
When SeaWorld heard that Tilikum was available
after this accident at Sealand of the Pacific,
they really wanted Tilikum
because they needed a breeder.
So I don't even think that anybody
even was questioning,
like, is this a good idea?
My understanding of the situation
was that Tilikum and the others
would not be used in shows.
They would not be performance animals.
Our understanding of their behavior
was that it was such
a highly stimulating event for them
that they were likely to repeat it.
Sealand was-- we were all young
and bit of sea cowboys
and we weren't so technical
and scientific as SeaWorld,
so we all had this vision
that they knew more than us
and they were better than us
and Tilikum would have
a bigger pool and he'd have a better life
and he would have better care
and he'd have better food
and it'd be a great life for him.
So it was like, "Okay, Tilly.
You're going to Disneyland.
Lucky you."
The orcas' intelligence
may be even superior to man's.
As parents, they are exemplary,
better than many human beings.
And like human beings, they have
a profound instinct for vengeance.
Dino De Laurentiis presents...
..."Orca."
If you go back only 35 years, we knew nothing.
In fact, less than nothing.
What the public had was superstition and fear.
A fight to the death...
between the two most dangerous animals on Earth.
What in hell are you?!
These were the vicious killer whales
that, you know, had 48 sharp teeth
that would rip you to shreds
if they got a chance.
What we learned is that
they're amazingly friendly
and understanding and intuitively
want to be your companion.
Are you recording this?
And to this day there is no record
of an orca doing any harm
to any human in the wild.
They live in these big families.
And they have life spans
very similar to human life spans.
The females can live to about 100, maybe more,
males to about 50 or 60.
But the adult offspring never leave
their mother's side.
Each community has a completely
different set of behaviors.
Each has a complete repertoire of vocalizations
with no overlap.
You could call them languages.
The scientific community is reluctant to say
any other animal but humans uses languages,
but there's every indication
that they use languages.
The orca brain just screams out
intelligence, awareness.
We took this tremendous brain
and we put it in a magnetic
resonance imaging scanner.
What we found was just astounding.
They've got a part of the brain
that humans don't have.
A part of their brain has extended out
right adjacent to their limbic system.
The system processes emotions.
The safest inference would be these are animals
that have highly elaborated emotional lives.
It's becoming clear that dolphins and whales
have a sense of self, a sense of social bonding
that they've taken to another level--
much stronger, much more complex
than in other mammals, including humans.
We look at mass strandings,
the fact that they stand by each other.
Everything about them
is social-- everything.
It's been suggested
that their whole sense of self
is distributed among
the individuals in their group.
There are five of them.
These orca are going
to attack this seal on--
they've been breaking the ice off
and swimming around him.
Oh, here they come, two of them.
Lookit, underneath there.
You can see them underneath.
They made a big wave.
Look at that, a big wave.
- Oh, yeah.
- Whoa.
- Oh, God.
- Oh, God. No, no, no.
Oh!
Oh, I can't stand it.
If you can't watch
the bullfight, you'd better leave.
Oh, yeah, here they go.
Look at this-- three of them.
Look at this. Look at this.
Oh, God. Oh, no!
- Oh, God!
- It's all over.
Nope, not quite.
Yeah, it's all over.
It's all over.
The First Nations people
and the old fishermen on the coast,
they call them "blackfish."
They're an animal that possesses
great spiritual power
and they're not to be meddled with.
I've spent a lot of time around killer whales
and they're always in charge.
I never get out of the boat,
I never mess with them.
The speed and the power is quite amazing.
Rules are the same
as the pool hall--
keep one foot on the floor at all times.
Even after seeing them thousands of times...
you see them and you still--
you know, wake up.
He arrived, I think, in 1992.
I was at Whale and Dolphin Stadium
when he arrived.
And he's twice as large
as the next animal in the facility.
Yay!
The guy is right at about 12,000 pounds.
That's incredible.
He looks fantastic.
When Tilikum arrived at SeaWorld,
he was attacked viciously,
repeatedly by Katina and others.
In the wild, it's a very matriarchal society.
Male whales are kept at the perimeter.
In captivity,
the animals are squeezed
into very close proximity.
Tilikum-- the poor guy
is so large,
he couldn't get away
because he just is not as mobile
relative to the smaller and more agile females.
And where was he going to run?
There's no place to run.
I think he spent a lot of time in isolation.
SeaWorld claims that, "Oh, no,
he's always in with the other--
with the females," but from what I saw,
he was mostly put with the females
for breeding purposes
and he didn't spend a lot of time,
you know, with the other whales.
It's for his own protection
that he gets beat up.
And so by segregating him,
it provides a physical barrier
so the females can't kick his butt.
Tilikum is pretty much kept in the back,
and then brought out at the very end
as, like, the big splash.
He was always happy to see you in the morning.
- Hi!
- There we go.
- You're the boy.
- Look at his chompers.
Maybe because he was alone,
maybe because he was hungry,
maybe because he just liked you--
who knows what was going on in his head.
You want to whistle?
-- All right, so he can talk to us.
- Yes.
- You don't say.
He's precious.
Yes?
That was really loud.
Terrific.
- Come on, big boy.
- Show the pecs.
He seemed to like to work.
He seemed to be interested.
He seemed to want to learn new things.
He seemed to be enjoying
working with the trainers.
He, for me, was a joy.
He really responded to me and I--
you know, every day I went to work,
I was happy to see Tilly.
- Boop!
- That's cute.
You're being too cute.
I never got the impression
of him while I was there
that, oh, my God, he's the scary whale.
Not at all.
Maybe some of it's just our naivet or whatever,
you know, because we weren't given
the full details of Keltie's situation.
Turn around.
Smile, buddy.
- Cheese.
- Yay!
I was under the impression
that Tilikum had nothing to do
with her death specifically,
that it was the female whales
who were responsible for her death.
What I found really odd at first
was the way they were acting
around this whale and what they had told us
seemed to me to be two different things.
The first day he arrived, I remember
one of the senior trainers
at SeaWorld, she--
Tilikum was in a pool
and she was walking over a gate,
and she had her wetsuit unzipped
and it was tied around her waist.
And she was making cooing noises and going,
"Hey, Tilikum,
what a cute little whale."
And she was, like,
just kind of play-talking at him,
and one of the supervisors said,
"Get her out of there!"
And just screamed at her,
like, "Get her away from there,"
like they were so worried
that something was going to happen.
And I remember thinking,
"Why are you guys making
such a big deal out of this
when he didn't actually kill her?"
Well, clearly management thought
there was some reason
to exercise caution around him.
You know, clearly they knew more
than they were telling us.
Ladies and gentlemen, the next two
behaviors you're going to be seeing,
you can only see right here at SeaWorld.
Jeff was out in the audience
filming one of the Shamu shows.
It was a perfect show.
All of the hot dog sequences,
the water works sequences went off great.
I was really excited just to be capturing this
because it was kind of turning out
to be a great show.
A show that's kind of complete--
it doesn't-- it probably only happens
a few times a week.
At the very end of the show,
Liz was working Tilikum
and apparently Tilikum
lunged out of the water at her.
And I had captured Tilikum
coming out of the water
kind of turning sideways and appeared to me
to try to grab Liz.
And at that moment,
the tape became unusable.
I was just kind of basically instructed
to get rid of the tape.
Wanting to kind of preserve the tape,
I actually used the editing equipment
and snipped out
that little half-second or second
when he did that and stitched it back together
so it just kind of looked like
a glitch in the tape.
And I'm like, "Look at this."
And it was like, "No.
This is no longer usable."
You know, and so we had to destroy the tape.
It's pretty outrageous that SeaWorld would claim
there was no expecting Tilikum
to come out of the water
because they had witnessed him
coming out of the water,
and it's written into his profile.
He lunges at trainers.
When we visit SeaWorld,
we tend to take advantage of the fact
that Shamu has been provided
with a safe and comfortable habitat.
And everything trained is an extension
of the killer whale's natural behavior.
I spewed out the party line during shows.
I'm totally mortified now.
There was like-- something like,
"Look at Namu.
Namu's not doing that
because she has to."
Namu is doing this because she really wants to.
Oh, my gosh.
Like, some of the things I'm embarrassed by,
so embarrassed by.
At the time, I think
I could have convinced myself
that the relationships that we had
were built on something
stronger than the fact
that I'm giving them fish.
You know, I like to think that...
but I don't know that that's the truth.
I had been there a while and I had seen
a few other things along the way
that made me question why I was there
and what we were doing with these animals.
On November 4, 1988,
a killer whale at SeaWorld
gave the performance of a lifetime.
Don't miss this small miracle.
Come see our new Baby Shamu.
I know it was naive of me,
but I thought that...
it was our responsibility
to do as much as we could
to keep their family units together
since we knew that in the wild
that's what happens.
Yes, sir, that's our baby...
Kalina was the first Baby Shamu.
Baby Shamu--
SeaWorld's newest star...
She had become quite disruptive
and challenging her mom a little bit
and disrupting some shows
and that kind of thing.
She's got the whole place jumpin'
Shamu,
she's that baby whale.
It was decided by the higher-ups
that she would be moved
to another park when she was
just four, four and a half years old.
And that was news to us as trainers
that were working with her.
To me, it had never crossed my mind
that they might be moving the baby from her mom.
The supervisors basically
was kind of mocking me,
like, "Oh, you're saying, 'Poor Kalina,"'
you know, "'what's she going to do
without her mommy?"'
And, you know-- and that
of course just shut me up.
So, the night of the move,
we had to deploy the nets
to separate them and get Kalina,
the baby, into the med pool.
And Katina was generally a quiet whale.
She was not an overly vocal whale.
After, Kalina was removed from the scene
and put on the truck and taken to the airport,
and Katina, her mom, was left in the pool.
She stayed in the corner of the pool,
like, literally just shaking and screaming,
screeching, crying.
Like, I had never seen her
do anything like that.
And the other females in the pool,
maybe once or twice during the night
they'd come out and check on her.
And she'd screech and cry
and they would just run back.
There was nothing that you could call that,
watching it, besides grief.
Those are not your whales.
You know, you love them and you'll think,
"I'm the one that touches them,
feeds them, keeps them alive,
gives them the care
that they need."
They're not your whales.
They own them.
Kasatka and Takara were very close.
Kasatka was the mother, Takara's the calf.
Takara was special to me.
They were inseparable.
When they separated Kasatka and Takara,
it was to take Takara to Florida.
Once Takara had already been
stretchered out of the pool,
put on the truck, driven to the airport...
Kasatka continued to make vocals
that had never been heard before.
They brought in
the senior research scientists
to analyze the vocals.
They were long-range vocals.
She was trying something
that no one had even heard before
looking for Takara.
That's heartbreaking.
How can anyone
look at that and think
that that is morally acceptable?
It's not.
It is not okay.
Stand by, Dean.
Let's go live to SeaWorld
where Dean Gomersall
is joining us for a sneak peek.
Hi, Dean.
Tell us about the new show.
Good afternoon, Richard.
The new show is the Whale and Dolphin Discovery.
What it does is it shows
the relationship we have
between all our animals here at the Whale...
There's so many things that were told to us
that they tell us-- they tell you
so many times
that you just--
you start believing it.
So all the animals here get along very well.
It's just like training your dog, really.
I was blind, you know.
I was a kid.
I didn't know what I was doing, really.
- Nice.
- Good job.
You did a real good job.
Ladies and gentlemen,
this is David from Maryland.
Go ahead and wave at everyone, David.
I just really bought into what they told us.
You know, I learned to say
what they told us to the audience.
Hello out there.
Children are some of Shamu's biggest fans.
We can do just about anything we want.
I thought I knew everything about
killer whales when I worked there,
you know, and everything about these animals.
I really know nothing about killer whales.
I know a lot about being an animal trainer
or a killer whale trainer,
but I don't know anything
about these animals' natural history
or their behavior.
I really in some ways believed a lot
of what I was learning from them,
because why would they lie?
Because the whales in their pools die young,
they like to say that all orcas
die at 25 or 30 years.
- 25 to 35 years.
- 25 to 35 years.
They're documented in the wild
living to be about...
35, mid-30s.
They tend to live a lot longer
in this environment
because they have all the veterinary care.
And of course that's false.
We knew by 1980, after half a dozen
years of the research,
that they live equivalent to human life spans.
And every other potentially
embarrassing fact is twisted
and turned and denied one way or another.
So, in the wild, they live...
- Less.
- Less.
Like the floppy dorsal fins.
25% of whales have a fin
that turns over like that
as they get older.
Dorsal collapse happens
in less than 1% of wild killer whales.
We know this.
All the captive males
100% have collapsed dorsal fins.
And they say that they're a family,
that the whales are in their family.
They have their pods.
But that's just an artificial
assemblage of their collection,
however management decides they should mix them
and whichever ones happen to be born
or bought and brought in.
That's not a family, you know.
Come on.
You've got animals
from different cultural subsets
that have been brought in from various parks.
These are different nations.
These aren't just two different killer whales.
These animals, they've got different genes,
they use different languages.
Well, what could happen
as a result of them being
thrown in with other whales
that they haven't grown up with,
that are not part of their culture
is there's hyperaggression...
...a lot of violence,
a lot of killing in captivity
that you don't ever see in the wild.
For the health and safety of the animals,
please do not put your hands in the water.
It was always sort of this backdrop,
this underpinning of tension between animals.
Whale-on-whale aggression was
just part of your-- the daily existence.
We ask that you use
the stairs and aisleways as you exit.
Please do not step on the seats.
These areas may become wet
and therefore slippery to some footwear.
Thank you.
Blue wonder...
In the wild, when there's tension,
they've got thousands of square miles
to exit the scene and they can get away.
You don't have that in captivity.
Could you imagine being in a small
concrete enclosure for your life
when you're used to swimming 100 miles a day?
Free-feeling...
Sometimes this aggression became very severe
and, in fact, whales have died
in captivity because of this aggression.
I think it was 1988.
Kandu, trying to assert
her dominance over Corky,
rammed Corky.
It fractured her jaw,
which cut an artery in her head
and then she bled out.
Now that's got to be a hard way to go down.
I saw that there was just
a lot of things that weren't right.
And there was a lot of it--
misinformation--
and something was amiss.
And, you know, I sort of
compartmentalized that part of it
and did the best that I could
with the knowledge that I had
to take care of the animals that were there.
You know, I think all the trainers there
have the same thing in their heart.
They're trying to make a difference
in the lives of the animals.
You think that, "if I leave,
who's going to take care of Tilikum?"
That's why I stayed.
Because I felt sorry for Tilikum.
I mean, if you want to get down
to the nuts and bolts of it,
I stayed because I felt sorry for Tilikum.
And I couldn't bring myself to stop coming
and trying to take care of him.
Gosh, do I love coming out here every day
and having the audience just love
what we're doing with the animals.
How do I make this animal
as beautiful as they are
and have people walk away loving this animal?
And they're touched and they're moved
and I feel like I made a difference to them.
I left in January of 2010,
a month before Dawn passed away.
She was like a safety guru.
I mean, she was always
double-checking,
making sure that everyone
was doing the right thing.
So I remember she would record
every show that she did
and she would watch it and critique herself.
She was constantly trying to be better.
When I found out it was Dawn,
I was shocked.
That could have been me.
I could have been the spotter.
What if I was there and I could have saved her?
You know, all these things go through your mind.
John Sillick is the guy who, in 1987,
was crushed between two whales
at SeaWorld of San Diego.
Now, even though I'd been working
at SeaWorld for six months,
I had no idea that that had even happened.
I never even heard that story.
And the SeaWorld party line was that,
well, that was-- it was a trainer error.
It was John's fault.
You know, John's fault.
He was supposed to get off that whale.
And for years, I believed that
and I told people that.
I actually started at SeaWorld, like,
five days after that event occurred
and we didn't--
we weren't told much about it
other than it was trainer error.
And, you know, especially
when you're new into the program,
you don't really question a whole lot.
Well, you know, years later,
when you actually look at the footage,
you go, "You know what?
He didn't do anything wrong."
That whale just landed on him, you know.
That whale just went to the wrong spot.
It could have been aggression.
Who knows?
But it was not the trainer's fault
at all, watching that video.
When I saw the video
of the killer whale landing on John,
I mean, it just absolutely took my breath away.
L9aSped.
I watched it two or three times,
and every time I saw that, I just gasped.
I could not believe what I was seeing.
What kept his body together is--
his wetsuit basically held him together.
But I know he's had multiple surgeries
and he's got tons of hardware in his body.
And it's hard for me to believe
that I didn't actually see that video
while I was actually an animal trainer
because it seems to me that every person
who works with killer whales
should have to watch that video.
Tamarie--
you know, Tamarie made mistakes.
The most important one
was interacting with whales
without a spotter.
So she's putting her foot on Orkid,
she's taking her foot off.
She's putting her foot on Orkid,
her rostrum, she's taking it off.
Watching the video, knowing Orkid,
your stomach drops because you know
what's probably going to happen.
She grabbed her foot.
Tamarie whips around and she grabs the gate.
You see herjust ripped from the gate.
At this point, Tamarie knows
that she's in trouble.
She's under the water.
Splash and Orkid both have her.
She's totally out of view.
No other trainer knows that this is happening.
People start to scream.
It was a park guest that was filming it.
You hear-- you don't see her,
but you hear Tamarie surface.
You hear herjust scream out,
"Somebody help me."
And the way she screamed it,
it was just
such a bloodcurdling--
like she knew she was going to die.
Robin-- when he ran over,
he made a brilliant decision.
He told a trainer to run and take
the chain off Kasatka's gate.
By taking that chain off,
it would give the precursor to Orkid
that Kasatka was coming in.
Kasatka's more dominant than Orkid,
so Orkid let her go.
Her arm, it was U-shaped.
It was compound fractured.
She's very lucky to be alive, that's for sure.
I believe it's 70 plus, maybe even more,
just killer whale trainer accidents.
Maybe 30 of them happened prior to me
being actually hired at SeaWorld.
And I knew about none of them.
I've seen animals come out at trainers.
Something's wrong.
I've seen people get slammed.
The whales, they're just playing or--
or they're upset for a second.
It was just something that happened, you know?
This culture of "You get back on the horse
and you dive back in the water.
And if you're hurt, well, then we've got
other people that will replace you."
And, "You came a long way.
Are you sure you want that?"
A SeaWorld trainer is recovering today
after a terrifying ordeal
in front of a horrified audience.
For some reason,
the whale just took a different approach
to what it was going to do
with a very senior,
very experienced trainer, Ken Peters,
and dragged him to the bottom of the pool
and held him at the bottom.
Let him go, picked him up,
took him down again.
And these periods he was taken down
were pretty close to the mark.
You know, a minute, a minute 20.
When he was at the surface, he didn't panic,
he didn't thrash, he didn't scream.
Maybe he's just built that way.
But he stroked the whale.
And the whale let go of one foot
and grabbed the other.
That's a pretty deep pool
and he took him right down.
I think that's to two atmospheres of pressure.
Apparently, Mr. Peters
is an experienced scuba diver
and I think that knowledge probably contributed
to how he was able to be hauled down there
that quickly and stay calm and know what to do.
He knew what he was doing because
you can see him actually in the film.
It's-- the def is so good,
you can see him ventilating.
You can see him ventilating really hard.
So he knows about swimming
and diving and being underwater.
He may have been assuming
he was going under again.
I did not walk away unimpressed
by his calm demeanor
during that whole affair.
I would be scared shitless.
He was near to the end.
Presumably, Ken Peters
had a relationship with this whale.
Maybe he did.
Maybe that's what saved him.
But Peters got the whale to let him go.
And they strung a net across.
And Ken Peters pulled himself
over the float line
and swam like a demon
to a slide-out
because the whale was coming right behind him.
The whale jumped over and came right after him.
He tried to stand up and run.
Of course, his feet were damaged.
I mean, he just fell and he scrambled.
And they take this as a prime example
of their training working.
And they say, "Just stand back
and stay calm," and that did work.
They claim this as a victory
of how they do business.
And maybe so, but it can also be interpreted
as a hair's breadth away from another fatality.
Hi, Shamu.
Hi, everybody.
We're the Johnsons from Detroit, Michigan.
We sure had a great time
when we visited SeaWorld.
It's one of our favorite places.
Yeah, I like the part when Shamu
gets everybody wet.
When the whales get close to the glass
and start kicking out the water?
Whamo!
You're a goner.
Orange County's sheriff's deputies
have identified the 27-year-old man
found dead in a killer whale's tank at SeaWorld.
The victim is Daniel P. Dukes
from South Carolina.
Dukes was found yesterday
draped over the back of Tilikum,
the largest orca held in captivity.
Well, all I know is
the public relations version of it--
he was a young man that had been arrested
not long before he snuck into SeaWorld.
Maybe he climbed the barbed wire fence
around the perimeter and stayed after hours.
Perfect story line--
a mentally disturbed guy
hides in the park after hours
and strips his clothes off
and decides he wants to have
a magical experience with an orca
and drowns because he became hypothermic.
Right.
So that's the story line
and none of us were there
to know the difference.
He was not detected by the night watch trainers
who were presumably at that station.
There are cameras all over SeaWorld.
There are cameras all over
the back of Shamu Stadium
pointing every which way.
There are underwater cameras.
I find it hard to believe
that nobody knew until the morning
that there was a body in there.
They have a night watch trainer every night.
That person didn't hear
any splashing or screaming?
I mean, I just find that really suspicious.
One of the employees--
I don't know if it was
a physical therapist or somebody--
was coming in in the morning
and there was Tilikum,
you know, with a dead guy,
a dead, naked guy on his back,
kind of parading him around the back pool.
The public relations spin on this was that
he was kind of a drifter
and died of hypothermia.
But the medical examiner reports
were more graphic than that.
For example, Tilikum stripped him,
bit off his genitals.
There was bite marks all over his body.
Now, whether that was post-death
or pre-death, I don't know.
But, yeah, all I can comment on
is that the guy definitely
jumped in the wrong pool.
So why keep Tilikum there?
This guy, he has a proven
track record of killing people.
He's clearly a liability to the institution.
Why keep him around?
Well, it's quite simple to answer.
And that is that his semen
is worth a lot of money.
Over the years, Tilikum has been
one of the main breeding whales at SeaWorld.
It's brilliant because they can
inseminate way more female whales,
because they can just
get his sperm and freeze it.
And then he's basically
operating as a sperm bank.
In a reputable breeding program, rule number one
is you certainly would not breed
an animal that has shown
a history of aggression towards humans.
Imagine if you had a pit bull who had killed.
That animal would have likely been put down.
But in the entire
SeaWorld collection--
it's like 54% of the whales
in SeaWorld's collection
now have Tilikum's genes.
The fall is to assume that
all killer whales are like Tilikum.
You have to look at their
learning history from birth.
You have to understand why Tilikum was a hazard
to anybody in the water.
And you have to understand that none
of the other killer whales at SeaWorld
that are in that system are that way.
What about the incident at Loro Parque?
First of all, I-- I can't--
I can't speak with specificity
about Loro Parque.
I wasn't there.
In fact, I know very little about it.
Probably about as much
as the general public knows.
Loro Parque, it's in the Canary Islands,
which is an autonomous region of Spain.
It's the largest tourist attraction
in all of Spain.
And when SeaWorld sent the orcas to Loro Parque,
everybody was always questioning,
like, how did they make
that leap to send four young orcas
to a park off the west coast of Africa
with trainers who-- a lot of them
had never been around orcas before?
Nothing was ready.
The venue wasn't ready.
It wasn't ready for the orcas,
it wasn't ready for a show.
The owner of the park
didn't want to lose revenue
by shutting down the pools and repairing them.
So for three years, the animals ate the pools
and for three years
the animals had problems--
with their teeth, with their stomachs.
So that's the reason why these animals
are enduring the endoscope procedures.
Back up.
Now back up, back up.
Those are still SeaWorld's animals
and they are responsible for those animals.
Loro Parque doesn't have a good reputation.
People that work in the business
know the reputation of places
and Loro Parque does not have a good reputation.
They didn't spend the same amount
of time as the SeaWorld trainers,
did not go through the same regimen
that the SeaWorld trainers went through.
You know, and Alexis really was
the best trainer.
And I did say-- I said,
"You're the only trainer there
that can hold his own
with a SeaWorld trainer."
And I said, "But you need
to be careful."
Anywhere along the line
it could have been stopped
because everyone knew
it was a tragedy waiting to happen.
But no one ever did anything about it.
And in the end,
it was the best trainer who lost his life.
Those were SeaWorld's whales.
They were trained using SeaWorld's techniques.
And their training was being supervised
at the time of the fatal accident
by one of their senior trainers from San Diego.
For somebody to get up and say in a court of law
they have no knowledge of the linkages
between SeaWorld
and this park in Tenerife is well--
either she doesn't know and is telling the truth
or it's just a bold-faced lie.
As trainers, we never forget
Shamu's true potential.
We see it each and every day.
That's why all of our interactions
are very carefully thought out,
especially our water work interaction.
Whoa!
You big dork.
Especially our water work interactions
because they're potentially the most dangerous.
I'd been expecting it
since the second person was killed.
I'd been expecting somebody
to be killed by Tilikum.
I'm surprised it took as long as it did.
First tonight,
a six-ton killer whale
has lived up to its name,
killing an experienced trainer
at SeaWorld, Orlando, today.
A tourist at an earlier show
said the animal seemed agitated.
Trainers complained
the whales weren't cooperating.
The whole show, the main show,
was a disaster that day.
There was, you know, whales chasing each other
and eventually the trainers decided
that they had to stop the show
because they couldn't
get the whales under control.
Tilikum was in the back pool
set up to do a Dine with Shamu
performance with Dawn.
Likely she saw what had gone on
during the main show
and so she had probably felt
more pressure to do a good show.
Yay!
When you watch the whole video, you can see
that Tilikum is actually really with Dawn
in the beginning of the video.
There's a couple of behaviors
that she asks him to do
where Tilikum justjumps right in
and he does exactly what she asks him to do.
There seemed to be a point in the session
where things went south, so to speak.
And in my humble opinion,
it was at that missed bridge--
whistle bridge,
on the perimeter pec wave.
She asked him to do a perimeter pec wave
where she asked him to basically
go all the way around the pool
and wave his pectoral flipper.
And she blows her whistle...
- There we go.
- ...which is a bridge,
which tells the animal that, okay,
you've done a good job.
Come back and get food.
But he missed that cue.
He likes waving so much.
That's beyond waving.
And he went all the way around the pool
on this perimeter pec wave.
That's all right.
We're going to let him keep on waving.
My interpretation is that
he didn't hear the whistle.
So not only did he not hear the bridge,
then he went and did
a perfect behavior and came back,
and what he got was what we call
a three-second neutral response,
which is just a way to let the animal know,
"No, you didn't do the correct thing.
You're not going to get rewarded.
And then we're going to move on."
And then you can also see through the video
that Dawn is running out of food.
The animals can sense
when you're getting to the bottom
of your bucket of fish,
because they can hear the ice clanging around
and the kind of fishy, soupy water
at the bottom.
And the handfuls of fish that
they're getting delivered by the trainer
are all getting smaller.
So they know that they're coming down
to the end of session.
When you see the difference
between the beginning of the video
and the end of the video, you can see
that he's just not quite on his game anymore.
There was no food left.
She kept asking him for more and more behaviors.
He wasn't getting reinforced for the behaviors
that he was doing correctly.
He probably was frustrated towards the end.
Then she walked around the perimeter of G pool.
He followed her.
And then continued over
into the rocky ledge area
where she laid down with him
to do a relationship session,
which is--
it's quiet time, basically.
Tilikum at some point
grabbed ahold of her left forearm
and started to drag her
and eventually did a barrel roll
and pulled her in.
It may have started as play or frustration
and clearly escalated to be
very violent behavior
that I think was anything but play.
In the end, he basically
just completely mutilated that poor girl.
They were gathering
all of the trainers at the Texas park.
He said, "There's been an accident
at the Florida park
and a trainer was killed."
Hearing that it was Dawn,
I was-- I couldn't believe it.
I just remember saying to myself, "Not Dawn.
It can't be Dawn."
He said that--
"And he still has her."
And I just...
was so disturbed by that
and the reality of how powerless we are.
Avulsion, laceration, abrasion, fractures.
Fractures and associated hemorrhages.
Blunt force traumas
to the main body, to the extremities.
To see this meted out against a trainer...
and I cannot fathom the reason.
It's shocking.
The lawyer for OSHA asked me
what I thought we'd learned,
and I'm sitting in the courtroom
and I've got the Keltie Byrne
case file in one hand
and I've got Dawn Brancheau in the other.
And they're almost, to the day, 20 years apart.
And I'm looking at these two things.
My only answer is, "Nothing."
In fact, it's not a damn thing.
We have not learned a damn thing
for something like that
to happen 20 years apart.
Could you tell
if it was an accident or if this--
Did this female trainer
work with this whale on a regular basis?
I don't know. What apparently happened
is we had a female trainer
back in the whale holding area.
She apparently slipped or fell into the tank
and was fatally injured by one of the whales.
At first, SeaWorld reported
that a trainer slipped
and fell in the water and was drowned.
So that was the first report.
It wasn't until eyewitness
accounts disputed that
that they had to go back in their huddle
and say, "Wait a minute.
We gotta come up with a new plan."
New tonight--
SeaWorld has confirmed
the killer whale pulled
the woman into the water.
She didn't fall into the tank
as the sheriff's department initially reported.
The new plan is that he grabbed her ponytail.
This is a subtle way of placing
the blame on Dawn's shoulders.
She shouldn't have had a long ponytail,
or if she did have that ponytail,
it should have been up in a bun.
Dawn, if she was standing here
with me right now,
would tell you that it was her mistake
in allowing that to happen.
They blamed her.
How dare you?
How disrespectful for you to blame her
when she's not even alive to defend herself.
He grabbed her ponytail
and pulled her into the water.
That's as simple as it gets.
There are photographs
of plenty of other trainers
doing exactly the same thing that she was doing,
so I knew that SeaWorld was lying
about the fact that this was her fault.
The ponytail, in all likelihood, is just a tale.
The safety spotter, who apparently
didn't actually see the takedown,
came up with that.
- Are you excited?
- Yeah!
During the spotter's testimony,
OSHA pushed him to say
that he wasn't really sure
that it was her ponytail
that was in the whale's mouth,
that he just saw her underwater
and he assumed it was the ponytail.
OSHA contends that the whale came up
and grabbed Dawn Brancheau's arm,
saying that that was another level
of aggressiveness.
And again, SeaWorld is saying
it was not an aggressive move.
One of SeaWorld's top curators, Chuck Tompkins,
said when Dawn Brancheau
was pulled off that ledge,
it wasn't necessarily
aggressive behavior by the whale.
The initial grab was not an act of aggression.
This is not a crazed animal.
The industry has a vested interest
in spinning these
so that the animals continue to appear
like cuddly teddy bears
that are completely safe.
You know, that sells a lot of Shamu dolls,
it sells a lot of tickets at the gate,
and that's the story line
that they're going to continue
to stick with for as long as they can.
Recognize that those that say
this is a crazed animal
that acted out and grabbed Dawn maliciously,
they want to prove the theorem
that captivity makes animals crazy.
And that is just false.
All whales in captivity have a bad life.
They're all emotionally destroyed.
They're all psychologically traumatized,
so they are ticking time bombs.
It's not just Tilikum.
We have to separate
what happened to Dawn--
and, as tragic as it is, no one wants
to ever see it happen again.
Can SeaWorld create an environment
where it never happens again?
Yes, I absolutely believe they can.
What if there were no SeaWorlds?
I can't imagine a society, with the value we put
on marine mammals, if those parks didn't exist.
I'm not at all interested in having my daughter,
who is three and a half,
grow up thinking that it's normalized
to have these intelligent,
highly evolved animals
in concrete pools.
I don't want her to think
that's how we treat the kin
that we find ourselves around on this planet.
I think it's atrocious.
This hearing is expected to last all week
with OSHA continuing to work
toward this theory--
that SeaWorld knew there was
a calculated risk of injury or death,
but put trainers in the water
with the whales anyway,
while SeaWorld will say
that Dawn Brancheau's death
was an isolated incident.
Reporting live in Seminole County,
Dave McDaniel, WESH 2 News.
There's something wrong.
You know with Tilikum that
there's something wrong and that's--
when you have a relationship
with that animal and you--
you understand that he's killing
not to be a savage.
He's not killing because he's just crazy.
He's not killing because
he doesn't know what he's doing.
He's killing because he's frustrated
and he's got aggravations
and he doesn't know how to--
he has no outlet for it.
Now Tilikum is spending
a great deal of time by himself
and basically floating lifeless in a pool.
Three hours now...
and he hasn't moved.
They try to sugarcoat it by saying,
"He comes out in the front pool
every once in a while.
Now he's doing shows."
Really? You know
what he does in a show?
He does a few bows
and then he goes back in his little jail cell.
That's his life.
I feel sad for Tilikum.
A regal thing like him swimming around the tank
with his fin flopped over like that
compared to a wild bull killer whale that size,
which is one of the most kinetic
and dynamic things
you can imagine...
I feel sad when I see him.
It's time to stop the shows.
It's time to stop forcing animals to perform
in basically a circus environment.
And they should release the animals
that are young enough
and healthy enough to be released,
and the animals like Tilikum
who are old and sick and have put in
25 years in the industry
should be released to an open ocean pen
so they can live out their lives
and just experience
the natural rhythms of the ocean.
This is a multibillion-dollar
corporation
that makes its money
through the exploitation of orcas.
They're not suitable to have in captivity.
The whales are really bored.
You deprive them of all
this environmental stimulation.
I think that in 50 years,
we'll look back and go,
"My God, what a barbaric time."
Dawn Brancheau--
DB, dream big.
Dawn was the most loving,
giving person you ever met.
Her smile just radiated.
She's comp-- she fulfilled her life.
We saw whales
swimming in straight lines
with straight dorsal fins.
I was so honored to be there.
And I was so thankful that I had sunglasses on
because the tears were kind of coming out.
And it was moving.
Orange County Fire Rescue.
6600 Sea Harbor Drive.
SeaWorld Stadium.
Okay.
We actually have a trainer in the water
with one of our whales--
the whale that they're not supposed
to be in the water with.
Okay.
We'll get somebody en route.
Okay, through gate #3 to Shamu Stadium.
Gate 3.
Orange County Sheriff's Office.
We need SO to respond
for a dead person at SeaWorld.
Uh, a whale has eaten one of the trainers.
A whale ate one of the trainers?
That's correct.
Do you believe?
My parents first brought me to a SeaWorld park
when I was very young.
From that point forward, I was hooked.
It meant everything to me because
I'd never wanted anything more.
I remember being probably
in first or second grade
watching National Geographic specials
or Mutual of Omaha specials
and seeing whales and seeing dolphins
and as a little kid
just being really incredibly inspired by it.
I never went to SeaWorld.
I grew up in New York,
so I went to the Bronx Zoo.
Grew up on a lake with horses.
We'd swim the horses.
I grew up around the ocean.
I came from the middle of the country
in flatland Kansas.
I'm from Virginia.
Traveled down, did the theme park thing
in Orlando when I was 17
and saw the night show at Shamu Stadium.
Very emotional, you know, popular music.
And I was just-- I was very driven
to want to do that.
Then I saw what the trainers did...
and I said,
"That's what I want to do."
One of the trainers there, he goes,
"What are you doing out there?
You should be a trainer."
I go, "I don't know how to train animals.
I've never trained animals
in my life."
How do you prepare yourself for an encounter
with an 8,000-pound Orcinus orca?
I always thought
you needed, like, a master's degree
in marine biology to be a trainer.
It takes years of study and experience
to meet the strict requirements necessary
to interact in the water with Shamu.
Come to find out, it really is more about
your personality and how good you can swim.
I went and tried out, got the job right away.
I'm like, "Yeah!"
So excited, you know.
I was so, so excited.
I really wanted to be there.
I really wanted to do the job.
I couldn't wait to get in the water
with the animals.
I really was proud of being a SeaWorld trainer.
You know, I thought this was
the most amazing job.
I showed up there on my first day,
not really knowing what to expect.
I was told to put on a wetsuit
and get in the water.
Hi, Mom!
Oh, I was scared out of my wits.
First of all, I put my wetsuit on backwards
because I was raised on a farm in Virginia.
- Hi, Dad!
- My first thought
and memory of that time
was that dolphins are a lot bigger...
...heh, than they look
when you get in the water next to them.
Well, I watched the Sea Lion & Otter Show,
and this guy, Mike Morocco,
he comes out during the show
with a dress on as Dorky,
the alter ego of Dorothy--
in a dress with a sea lion,
the Coward Sea Lion, right?
And he's walking along with this little basket,
and I go, "I will never,
ever do that."
You know?
Two months later...
Hi, I'm Dorky!
Walking out onstage with a sea lion.
I was overwhelmed and I was so excited.
I mean, just seeing a killer whale...
is breathtaking.
I was just in awe.
It's shocking to see how large they are
and how beautiful they are.
Being in the presence of the killer whales
was just inspiring and amazing,
and I remember seeing them for the first time,
just not being able to believe
how huge they were.
You're there because you want to train
killer whales and that's your goal.
Yay!
I didn't know it was going to happen,
so I wasn't expecting it.
And one day they say,
"Okay, Sam, you're ready to go."
Come on, you got it.
"You're going to stand on the whale.
You're going to dive off the whale.
The whale's going to swim under you
and pick you up again.
And then you're going to do
a perimeter ride around the pool."
Good!
Keep moving.
Ride him to the slide-out.
They just told me to go do it and I did it.
Wow, I did-- I just rode
a killer whale.
Yay, girly!
When you look into their eyes,
you know somebody is home.
Somebody's looking back.
You form a very personal relationship
with your animal.
There's something absolutely amazing
about working with an animal.
You are a team.
You build a relationship together.
You both understand the goal
and you help each other.
I've been with this whale
since I was 18 years old
and I've seen her have all four of her babies.
We've grown up together. Huh?
That's the joy I got out of it.
It's a relationship like I've never had.
Bro,
I have to know-- are you nervous?
I'm scared.
- Oh, no.
- Nice hair, Jeff.
Did you see anything?
Projection for the future of Jeff Ventre.
Jeff Ventre is going to go over there,
he's going to shine.
- You're going to notice...
- Dawn.
- Oh, that's Dawn.
- Wow.
He's going to be my supervisor one day.
There you go.
I knew Dawn when she was new.
She was a great person to work with
and she obviously blossomed
into one of SeaWorld's best trainers.
This is Dawn Brancheau.
Dawn is the senior trainer
here at Shamu Stadium.
I guess you could say
I kind of knew Dawn in a past life.
It's a tough job, isn't it?
Yeah, we really do go through
a lot of physical exertion.
You can see in the show
we do a lot of deepwater work,
breath holds, very high-energy
behaviors with animals.
Obviously they're giving out
a lot of energy too,
but we're working together
and having a lot of fun as well.
She's beautiful, she's blonde,
she's athletic, she's friendly.
You know, everybody loves Dawn.
And I mean this so sincerely,
watching you perform yesterday--
you're amazing.
- Thank you.
- You really are.
She captured what it means
to be a SeaWorld trainer.
She had so much experience
that it made me realize
what happened to her
really could have happened to anyone.
This is Detective Revere
with the Orange County Sheriff's Office.
Today's date is February 24, 2010.
The time is 4:16.
In the room with me right now
is a Thomas George Tobin.
- Is that correct?
- Correct.
- So the arm is nowhere...
- Right.
OSHA, on behalf of the federal government,
is basically suggesting that swimming with orcas
is inherently dangerous
and that you can't completely predict
the outcome when you enter the water
or enter their environment.
That's the crux of the OSHA case.
Stay out of proximity with the animals
and you won't get killed.
It will have a ripple effect
through the whole industry.
This was national headline news.
SeaWorld's whale performances
may never be the same.
Right now the theme park is arguing in court
to keep whale trainers in the water,
something OSHA says is extremely dangerous.
These are wild animals,
and they are unpredictable
because we don't speak whale.
We don't speak whale, we don't speak tiger,
we don't speak monkey.
And tempers flared between the two sides today
when OSHA's attorney suggested
that SeaWorld only made changes
after trainer Dawn Brancheau's death
outraged the public.
OSHA doesn't want
the trainers going back in the water
without a physical barrier
between them and the whales.
Being in close proximity
to these top predators is too dangerous.
They won't then be getting in the water
riding on the whales, things like that.
If you were in a bathtub for 25 years,
don't you think you'd get
a little irritated, aggravated,
maybe a little psychotic?
The situation with Dawn Brancheau--
it didn't just happen.
It's not a singular event.
You have to go back over 20 years
to understand this.
It was a really exciting thing to do
and so everybody wanted to do it.
What were they telling you you were going to do?
Mm, capture orcas.
Whoo-hoo!
They had aircraft,
they had spotters, they had speedboats,
they had bombs they were throwing in the water.
They were lighting their bombs
with acetylene torches in their boats
and throwing them as fast as they could
to herd the whales into coves.
Whoo!
But the orcas had been caught before
and they knew what was going on
and they knew their young ones
would be taken from them.
So the adults without young
went east into a cul-de-sac
and the boats followed them,
thinking they were all going that way,
while the mothers with babies went north.
But the capture teams had aircraft.
And they have to come up for air eventually.
And when they did,
the capture teams alerted the boats
and said, "Oh, no, they're going north--
the ones with babies."
So the boats-- the speedboats
caught them there
and herded them in.
And then they had fishing boats with seine nets
that they would stretch across
so none could leave
and then they could just pick out
the young ones.
We were only after the little ones.
And a little one is, you know,
a big animal still.
But I was told because of shipping costs
that's why they only take the little ones.
They had the young ones
that they wanted in the corrals,
so they dropped the seine nets.
And all the others could have left,
but they stayed.
We're there, trying to get
the young orca into the stretcher,
and the whole famn damily is out here,
25 yards away maybe,
in a big line...
...and they're communicating
back and forth.
Well...
you understand then what you're doing, you know.
I-- I lost it.
I mean, I just started crying.
I didn't stop working,
but I...
you know, I just couldn't handle it.
Just like kidnapping a little kid
away from their mother.
Everybody's watching.
What can you do?
It's the worst thing I can think of, you know?
I can't think of anything worse than that.
Now, and this really sounds bad,
but when the whole hunt was over,
there were three dead whales in the net.
And...
so they had Peter and Brian and I...
cut the whales open, fill them with rocks,
put anchors on their tail, and sink them.
Well...
you know...
really, I didn't even think about it
being illegal at that point.
I thought it was a PR thing.
They were finally ejected
from the State of Washington
by a court order in 1976.
It was SeaWorld by name that was told,
"Do not come back to Washington
to capture whales."
Without missing a beat, they went
from Washington to Iceland
and began capturing there.
I've been part of a revolution
and two change of presidents
in Central and South America...
and seen some things that's hard to believe,
but this is the worst thing
that I've ever done--
is hunt that whale.
Sealand has been
a part of Victoria for over 20 years.
We specialize in the care
and display of killer whales.
By the time I started, when he was four,
he was up to 16 feet long
and weighed 4,000 pounds.
Tilikum, up again.
Thank you.
I had actually seen Tilikum
quite a number of times.
He was right across the street here in Victoria.
Now, this show
can get a little bit soggy at times.
All Sealand was was a net hanging in a marina
with a float around it.
Tilikum was the one
we really loved to work with.
He was very well behaved
and he was always eager to please.
When he was first introduced,
everything just went fine and dandy,
but the previous head trainer
used techniques that involved punishment.
He would team a trained orca up
with Tilikum who was untrained.
He would send them both off
to do the same behavior.
If Tilikum didn't do it,
then both animals were punished.
Deprived of food to keep them hungry,
this caused a lot of frustration
with the larger animal,
the established animal,
and would in turn get frustrated with Tilikum
and would rake him with his teeth.
There would be times during certain seasons
that Tilikum would be covered
head to toe with rakes.
Rakes are teeth on teeth and raking the skin.
And from head to toe you could see blood
and you could see scratches,
and he would just be raked up.
Both females would gang up on him.
Tilikum was the one we trusted.
We never were concerned about Tilikum.
The issue was really that we stored
these whales at night
in what we call a module,
which was 20 feet across
and probably 30 feet deep as a safety precaution
because we were worried about people
cutting the net and letting them go.
And the lights were all turned out,
so there was really no stimulation.
They're just in this dark,
metal 20x30-foot pool
for two-thirds of their life.
When we first started,
they were quite small and quite young.
So they fit in there quite nicely,
but they were immobile for the most part.
It didn't feel good.
It just didn't.
And it was just wrong.
We started having difficulty getting them all
into this one small steel box, to be honest.
That's what it was.
It was a floating steel box.
That's where food deprivation would come in.
We would hold back food,
and they would know if they went in the module
that they would get their food.
So if they're hungry enough,
they're going to go in there.
And during the winter that would be
from 5:00 at night
till 7:00 in the morning.
When you let them out,
you'd see these new tooth rakes
and sometimes you'd see blood.
Closing that door on him
and knowing that he's locked in there
for the whole night is like...
it's a stab, it's a "whoa."
If that is true, it's not only inhumane,
and I'll tell them so...
but it probably led to what I think
is a psychosis that...
he was on a hair trigger.
He'd kill.
An employee is dead after an encounter...
...at a Canadian park
called Sealand of the Pacific.
The victim, Keltie Byrne,
was a championship swimmer
and a part-time worker at Sealand.
As seen in this home video,
rescuers used a huge net to try...
...rescue workers' efforts
were hindered by the agitated whales.
I'd like to make
the Pan Pacific team this summer,
but my more immediate goal
is just to swim fast at nationals.
It was sort of a cloudy, gray day
and we were looking for something to do,
so we thought,
"Why not go to Sealand?"
It was kind of like this dingy pool
with these whales and--
it just felt a little bit like an amusement park
that was kind of on its last legs
and everything was a bit gray.
Yeah. It was like
a swimming pool.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You know,
three whales in a swimming pool.
Yeah.
And they would come up
and touch the ball and there was--
I think there was some tail splashing
and there was some--
- Some jumping.
- The fish. And--
They hold the fish and the whales jump up.
I remember saying, "Oh, what a fun job.
You know, she's so lucky."
And then I saw her walking with her rubber boots
and she tripped and her foot
just dipped into the edge of the pool
and she lost her balance and fell in.
And then she was pushing her way up
to get out of the pool
and the whale zoomed over, grabbed her boot,
and pulled her back in.
At first, I didn't think it was that serious
because you see the trainer
in the pool with the whale
and you think, "Oh, well,
the whales are used to that."
And then all of a sudden,
it started getting--
there was more swimming,
more activity, more thrashing,
and she was starting to get panicked.
And then as it progressed,
you started to realize,
"Whoa, something's not right here."
She started to scream
and she started looking around
and her eyes were, like, bigger and bigger
and realizing that,
"I really am in trouble here."
And then they would pull her under.
And then they would come up
and then when she--
they came up, she'd be,
"Help me, help me."
And then they'd take her down again.
And she would be submerged for several seconds
up to, I don't know, maybe a minute.
You're not keeping track.
So it was harder and harder
for her to get the air in
because she was screaming.
And my sister remembers
her saying, "I don't want to die."
Well, condolences to Keltie's family.
Yeah.
That we couldn't help her
was pretty wretched.
Sealand closed.
Well, it's probably a good thing.
I mean, it was a little pond.
And I think the owner,
you know, made the right decision
for whatever reasons.
I don't believe he's a bad guy, a bad man.
I think he was shocked by the whole affair, too.
The blush was gone from the business
and he decided that that was it.
We should shut down.
No one ever contacted us.
There was an inquest.
No one ever asked us to say what happened.
- Yeah.
- You know, we just left.
There was no big lawsuits afterwards
and there was no memorial.
And the only thing remaining
of Keltie Byrne is--
is what's left in the folks' minds
who recall the case.
So in the newspaper articles,
the cause of death
was that she drowned accidentally,
but she was pulled under by the whale.
Well, there's a bit of smoke
and mirrors going on.
I mean, one of the fundamental facts is
is that none of the witnesses
were clear about which whale pulled Keltie in.
Yes. Yeah, it was the large whale.
Tilikum, the male, is the one
that went after her.
And the other two just kind of circled around.
But he was definitely the instigator.
And we knew it was that whale
because he had the flopped-over fin.
Like, it was very easy to tell.
Sealand of the Pacific closed
its doors and was looking, I guess,
to make a buck on the way out
and these whales are worth millions of dollars.
When SeaWorld heard that Tilikum was available
after this accident at Sealand of the Pacific,
they really wanted Tilikum
because they needed a breeder.
So I don't even think that anybody
even was questioning,
like, is this a good idea?
My understanding of the situation
was that Tilikum and the others
would not be used in shows.
They would not be performance animals.
Our understanding of their behavior
was that it was such
a highly stimulating event for them
that they were likely to repeat it.
Sealand was-- we were all young
and bit of sea cowboys
and we weren't so technical
and scientific as SeaWorld,
so we all had this vision
that they knew more than us
and they were better than us
and Tilikum would have
a bigger pool and he'd have a better life
and he would have better care
and he'd have better food
and it'd be a great life for him.
So it was like, "Okay, Tilly.
You're going to Disneyland.
Lucky you."
The orcas' intelligence
may be even superior to man's.
As parents, they are exemplary,
better than many human beings.
And like human beings, they have
a profound instinct for vengeance.
Dino De Laurentiis presents...
..."Orca."
If you go back only 35 years, we knew nothing.
In fact, less than nothing.
What the public had was superstition and fear.
A fight to the death...
between the two most dangerous animals on Earth.
What in hell are you?!
These were the vicious killer whales
that, you know, had 48 sharp teeth
that would rip you to shreds
if they got a chance.
What we learned is that
they're amazingly friendly
and understanding and intuitively
want to be your companion.
Are you recording this?
And to this day there is no record
of an orca doing any harm
to any human in the wild.
They live in these big families.
And they have life spans
very similar to human life spans.
The females can live to about 100, maybe more,
males to about 50 or 60.
But the adult offspring never leave
their mother's side.
Each community has a completely
different set of behaviors.
Each has a complete repertoire of vocalizations
with no overlap.
You could call them languages.
The scientific community is reluctant to say
any other animal but humans uses languages,
but there's every indication
that they use languages.
The orca brain just screams out
intelligence, awareness.
We took this tremendous brain
and we put it in a magnetic
resonance imaging scanner.
What we found was just astounding.
They've got a part of the brain
that humans don't have.
A part of their brain has extended out
right adjacent to their limbic system.
The system processes emotions.
The safest inference would be these are animals
that have highly elaborated emotional lives.
It's becoming clear that dolphins and whales
have a sense of self, a sense of social bonding
that they've taken to another level--
much stronger, much more complex
than in other mammals, including humans.
We look at mass strandings,
the fact that they stand by each other.
Everything about them
is social-- everything.
It's been suggested
that their whole sense of self
is distributed among
the individuals in their group.
There are five of them.
These orca are going
to attack this seal on--
they've been breaking the ice off
and swimming around him.
Oh, here they come, two of them.
Lookit, underneath there.
You can see them underneath.
They made a big wave.
Look at that, a big wave.
- Oh, yeah.
- Whoa.
- Oh, God.
- Oh, God. No, no, no.
Oh!
Oh, I can't stand it.
If you can't watch
the bullfight, you'd better leave.
Oh, yeah, here they go.
Look at this-- three of them.
Look at this. Look at this.
Oh, God. Oh, no!
- Oh, God!
- It's all over.
Nope, not quite.
Yeah, it's all over.
It's all over.
The First Nations people
and the old fishermen on the coast,
they call them "blackfish."
They're an animal that possesses
great spiritual power
and they're not to be meddled with.
I've spent a lot of time around killer whales
and they're always in charge.
I never get out of the boat,
I never mess with them.
The speed and the power is quite amazing.
Rules are the same
as the pool hall--
keep one foot on the floor at all times.
Even after seeing them thousands of times...
you see them and you still--
you know, wake up.
He arrived, I think, in 1992.
I was at Whale and Dolphin Stadium
when he arrived.
And he's twice as large
as the next animal in the facility.
Yay!
The guy is right at about 12,000 pounds.
That's incredible.
He looks fantastic.
When Tilikum arrived at SeaWorld,
he was attacked viciously,
repeatedly by Katina and others.
In the wild, it's a very matriarchal society.
Male whales are kept at the perimeter.
In captivity,
the animals are squeezed
into very close proximity.
Tilikum-- the poor guy
is so large,
he couldn't get away
because he just is not as mobile
relative to the smaller and more agile females.
And where was he going to run?
There's no place to run.
I think he spent a lot of time in isolation.
SeaWorld claims that, "Oh, no,
he's always in with the other--
with the females," but from what I saw,
he was mostly put with the females
for breeding purposes
and he didn't spend a lot of time,
you know, with the other whales.
It's for his own protection
that he gets beat up.
And so by segregating him,
it provides a physical barrier
so the females can't kick his butt.
Tilikum is pretty much kept in the back,
and then brought out at the very end
as, like, the big splash.
He was always happy to see you in the morning.
- Hi!
- There we go.
- You're the boy.
- Look at his chompers.
Maybe because he was alone,
maybe because he was hungry,
maybe because he just liked you--
who knows what was going on in his head.
You want to whistle?
-- All right, so he can talk to us.
- Yes.
- You don't say.
He's precious.
Yes?
That was really loud.
Terrific.
- Come on, big boy.
- Show the pecs.
He seemed to like to work.
He seemed to be interested.
He seemed to want to learn new things.
He seemed to be enjoying
working with the trainers.
He, for me, was a joy.
He really responded to me and I--
you know, every day I went to work,
I was happy to see Tilly.
- Boop!
- That's cute.
You're being too cute.
I never got the impression
of him while I was there
that, oh, my God, he's the scary whale.
Not at all.
Maybe some of it's just our naivet or whatever,
you know, because we weren't given
the full details of Keltie's situation.
Turn around.
Smile, buddy.
- Cheese.
- Yay!
I was under the impression
that Tilikum had nothing to do
with her death specifically,
that it was the female whales
who were responsible for her death.
What I found really odd at first
was the way they were acting
around this whale and what they had told us
seemed to me to be two different things.
The first day he arrived, I remember
one of the senior trainers
at SeaWorld, she--
Tilikum was in a pool
and she was walking over a gate,
and she had her wetsuit unzipped
and it was tied around her waist.
And she was making cooing noises and going,
"Hey, Tilikum,
what a cute little whale."
And she was, like,
just kind of play-talking at him,
and one of the supervisors said,
"Get her out of there!"
And just screamed at her,
like, "Get her away from there,"
like they were so worried
that something was going to happen.
And I remember thinking,
"Why are you guys making
such a big deal out of this
when he didn't actually kill her?"
Well, clearly management thought
there was some reason
to exercise caution around him.
You know, clearly they knew more
than they were telling us.
Ladies and gentlemen, the next two
behaviors you're going to be seeing,
you can only see right here at SeaWorld.
Jeff was out in the audience
filming one of the Shamu shows.
It was a perfect show.
All of the hot dog sequences,
the water works sequences went off great.
I was really excited just to be capturing this
because it was kind of turning out
to be a great show.
A show that's kind of complete--
it doesn't-- it probably only happens
a few times a week.
At the very end of the show,
Liz was working Tilikum
and apparently Tilikum
lunged out of the water at her.
And I had captured Tilikum
coming out of the water
kind of turning sideways and appeared to me
to try to grab Liz.
And at that moment,
the tape became unusable.
I was just kind of basically instructed
to get rid of the tape.
Wanting to kind of preserve the tape,
I actually used the editing equipment
and snipped out
that little half-second or second
when he did that and stitched it back together
so it just kind of looked like
a glitch in the tape.
And I'm like, "Look at this."
And it was like, "No.
This is no longer usable."
You know, and so we had to destroy the tape.
It's pretty outrageous that SeaWorld would claim
there was no expecting Tilikum
to come out of the water
because they had witnessed him
coming out of the water,
and it's written into his profile.
He lunges at trainers.
When we visit SeaWorld,
we tend to take advantage of the fact
that Shamu has been provided
with a safe and comfortable habitat.
And everything trained is an extension
of the killer whale's natural behavior.
I spewed out the party line during shows.
I'm totally mortified now.
There was like-- something like,
"Look at Namu.
Namu's not doing that
because she has to."
Namu is doing this because she really wants to.
Oh, my gosh.
Like, some of the things I'm embarrassed by,
so embarrassed by.
At the time, I think
I could have convinced myself
that the relationships that we had
were built on something
stronger than the fact
that I'm giving them fish.
You know, I like to think that...
but I don't know that that's the truth.
I had been there a while and I had seen
a few other things along the way
that made me question why I was there
and what we were doing with these animals.
On November 4, 1988,
a killer whale at SeaWorld
gave the performance of a lifetime.
Don't miss this small miracle.
Come see our new Baby Shamu.
I know it was naive of me,
but I thought that...
it was our responsibility
to do as much as we could
to keep their family units together
since we knew that in the wild
that's what happens.
Yes, sir, that's our baby...
Kalina was the first Baby Shamu.
Baby Shamu--
SeaWorld's newest star...
She had become quite disruptive
and challenging her mom a little bit
and disrupting some shows
and that kind of thing.
She's got the whole place jumpin'
Shamu,
she's that baby whale.
It was decided by the higher-ups
that she would be moved
to another park when she was
just four, four and a half years old.
And that was news to us as trainers
that were working with her.
To me, it had never crossed my mind
that they might be moving the baby from her mom.
The supervisors basically
was kind of mocking me,
like, "Oh, you're saying, 'Poor Kalina,"'
you know, "'what's she going to do
without her mommy?"'
And, you know-- and that
of course just shut me up.
So, the night of the move,
we had to deploy the nets
to separate them and get Kalina,
the baby, into the med pool.
And Katina was generally a quiet whale.
She was not an overly vocal whale.
After, Kalina was removed from the scene
and put on the truck and taken to the airport,
and Katina, her mom, was left in the pool.
She stayed in the corner of the pool,
like, literally just shaking and screaming,
screeching, crying.
Like, I had never seen her
do anything like that.
And the other females in the pool,
maybe once or twice during the night
they'd come out and check on her.
And she'd screech and cry
and they would just run back.
There was nothing that you could call that,
watching it, besides grief.
Those are not your whales.
You know, you love them and you'll think,
"I'm the one that touches them,
feeds them, keeps them alive,
gives them the care
that they need."
They're not your whales.
They own them.
Kasatka and Takara were very close.
Kasatka was the mother, Takara's the calf.
Takara was special to me.
They were inseparable.
When they separated Kasatka and Takara,
it was to take Takara to Florida.
Once Takara had already been
stretchered out of the pool,
put on the truck, driven to the airport...
Kasatka continued to make vocals
that had never been heard before.
They brought in
the senior research scientists
to analyze the vocals.
They were long-range vocals.
She was trying something
that no one had even heard before
looking for Takara.
That's heartbreaking.
How can anyone
look at that and think
that that is morally acceptable?
It's not.
It is not okay.
Stand by, Dean.
Let's go live to SeaWorld
where Dean Gomersall
is joining us for a sneak peek.
Hi, Dean.
Tell us about the new show.
Good afternoon, Richard.
The new show is the Whale and Dolphin Discovery.
What it does is it shows
the relationship we have
between all our animals here at the Whale...
There's so many things that were told to us
that they tell us-- they tell you
so many times
that you just--
you start believing it.
So all the animals here get along very well.
It's just like training your dog, really.
I was blind, you know.
I was a kid.
I didn't know what I was doing, really.
- Nice.
- Good job.
You did a real good job.
Ladies and gentlemen,
this is David from Maryland.
Go ahead and wave at everyone, David.
I just really bought into what they told us.
You know, I learned to say
what they told us to the audience.
Hello out there.
Children are some of Shamu's biggest fans.
We can do just about anything we want.
I thought I knew everything about
killer whales when I worked there,
you know, and everything about these animals.
I really know nothing about killer whales.
I know a lot about being an animal trainer
or a killer whale trainer,
but I don't know anything
about these animals' natural history
or their behavior.
I really in some ways believed a lot
of what I was learning from them,
because why would they lie?
Because the whales in their pools die young,
they like to say that all orcas
die at 25 or 30 years.
- 25 to 35 years.
- 25 to 35 years.
They're documented in the wild
living to be about...
35, mid-30s.
They tend to live a lot longer
in this environment
because they have all the veterinary care.
And of course that's false.
We knew by 1980, after half a dozen
years of the research,
that they live equivalent to human life spans.
And every other potentially
embarrassing fact is twisted
and turned and denied one way or another.
So, in the wild, they live...
- Less.
- Less.
Like the floppy dorsal fins.
25% of whales have a fin
that turns over like that
as they get older.
Dorsal collapse happens
in less than 1% of wild killer whales.
We know this.
All the captive males
100% have collapsed dorsal fins.
And they say that they're a family,
that the whales are in their family.
They have their pods.
But that's just an artificial
assemblage of their collection,
however management decides they should mix them
and whichever ones happen to be born
or bought and brought in.
That's not a family, you know.
Come on.
You've got animals
from different cultural subsets
that have been brought in from various parks.
These are different nations.
These aren't just two different killer whales.
These animals, they've got different genes,
they use different languages.
Well, what could happen
as a result of them being
thrown in with other whales
that they haven't grown up with,
that are not part of their culture
is there's hyperaggression...
...a lot of violence,
a lot of killing in captivity
that you don't ever see in the wild.
For the health and safety of the animals,
please do not put your hands in the water.
It was always sort of this backdrop,
this underpinning of tension between animals.
Whale-on-whale aggression was
just part of your-- the daily existence.
We ask that you use
the stairs and aisleways as you exit.
Please do not step on the seats.
These areas may become wet
and therefore slippery to some footwear.
Thank you.
Blue wonder...
In the wild, when there's tension,
they've got thousands of square miles
to exit the scene and they can get away.
You don't have that in captivity.
Could you imagine being in a small
concrete enclosure for your life
when you're used to swimming 100 miles a day?
Free-feeling...
Sometimes this aggression became very severe
and, in fact, whales have died
in captivity because of this aggression.
I think it was 1988.
Kandu, trying to assert
her dominance over Corky,
rammed Corky.
It fractured her jaw,
which cut an artery in her head
and then she bled out.
Now that's got to be a hard way to go down.
I saw that there was just
a lot of things that weren't right.
And there was a lot of it--
misinformation--
and something was amiss.
And, you know, I sort of
compartmentalized that part of it
and did the best that I could
with the knowledge that I had
to take care of the animals that were there.
You know, I think all the trainers there
have the same thing in their heart.
They're trying to make a difference
in the lives of the animals.
You think that, "if I leave,
who's going to take care of Tilikum?"
That's why I stayed.
Because I felt sorry for Tilikum.
I mean, if you want to get down
to the nuts and bolts of it,
I stayed because I felt sorry for Tilikum.
And I couldn't bring myself to stop coming
and trying to take care of him.
Gosh, do I love coming out here every day
and having the audience just love
what we're doing with the animals.
How do I make this animal
as beautiful as they are
and have people walk away loving this animal?
And they're touched and they're moved
and I feel like I made a difference to them.
I left in January of 2010,
a month before Dawn passed away.
She was like a safety guru.
I mean, she was always
double-checking,
making sure that everyone
was doing the right thing.
So I remember she would record
every show that she did
and she would watch it and critique herself.
She was constantly trying to be better.
When I found out it was Dawn,
I was shocked.
That could have been me.
I could have been the spotter.
What if I was there and I could have saved her?
You know, all these things go through your mind.
John Sillick is the guy who, in 1987,
was crushed between two whales
at SeaWorld of San Diego.
Now, even though I'd been working
at SeaWorld for six months,
I had no idea that that had even happened.
I never even heard that story.
And the SeaWorld party line was that,
well, that was-- it was a trainer error.
It was John's fault.
You know, John's fault.
He was supposed to get off that whale.
And for years, I believed that
and I told people that.
I actually started at SeaWorld, like,
five days after that event occurred
and we didn't--
we weren't told much about it
other than it was trainer error.
And, you know, especially
when you're new into the program,
you don't really question a whole lot.
Well, you know, years later,
when you actually look at the footage,
you go, "You know what?
He didn't do anything wrong."
That whale just landed on him, you know.
That whale just went to the wrong spot.
It could have been aggression.
Who knows?
But it was not the trainer's fault
at all, watching that video.
When I saw the video
of the killer whale landing on John,
I mean, it just absolutely took my breath away.
L9aSped.
I watched it two or three times,
and every time I saw that, I just gasped.
I could not believe what I was seeing.
What kept his body together is--
his wetsuit basically held him together.
But I know he's had multiple surgeries
and he's got tons of hardware in his body.
And it's hard for me to believe
that I didn't actually see that video
while I was actually an animal trainer
because it seems to me that every person
who works with killer whales
should have to watch that video.
Tamarie--
you know, Tamarie made mistakes.
The most important one
was interacting with whales
without a spotter.
So she's putting her foot on Orkid,
she's taking her foot off.
She's putting her foot on Orkid,
her rostrum, she's taking it off.
Watching the video, knowing Orkid,
your stomach drops because you know
what's probably going to happen.
She grabbed her foot.
Tamarie whips around and she grabs the gate.
You see herjust ripped from the gate.
At this point, Tamarie knows
that she's in trouble.
She's under the water.
Splash and Orkid both have her.
She's totally out of view.
No other trainer knows that this is happening.
People start to scream.
It was a park guest that was filming it.
You hear-- you don't see her,
but you hear Tamarie surface.
You hear herjust scream out,
"Somebody help me."
And the way she screamed it,
it was just
such a bloodcurdling--
like she knew she was going to die.
Robin-- when he ran over,
he made a brilliant decision.
He told a trainer to run and take
the chain off Kasatka's gate.
By taking that chain off,
it would give the precursor to Orkid
that Kasatka was coming in.
Kasatka's more dominant than Orkid,
so Orkid let her go.
Her arm, it was U-shaped.
It was compound fractured.
She's very lucky to be alive, that's for sure.
I believe it's 70 plus, maybe even more,
just killer whale trainer accidents.
Maybe 30 of them happened prior to me
being actually hired at SeaWorld.
And I knew about none of them.
I've seen animals come out at trainers.
Something's wrong.
I've seen people get slammed.
The whales, they're just playing or--
or they're upset for a second.
It was just something that happened, you know?
This culture of "You get back on the horse
and you dive back in the water.
And if you're hurt, well, then we've got
other people that will replace you."
And, "You came a long way.
Are you sure you want that?"
A SeaWorld trainer is recovering today
after a terrifying ordeal
in front of a horrified audience.
For some reason,
the whale just took a different approach
to what it was going to do
with a very senior,
very experienced trainer, Ken Peters,
and dragged him to the bottom of the pool
and held him at the bottom.
Let him go, picked him up,
took him down again.
And these periods he was taken down
were pretty close to the mark.
You know, a minute, a minute 20.
When he was at the surface, he didn't panic,
he didn't thrash, he didn't scream.
Maybe he's just built that way.
But he stroked the whale.
And the whale let go of one foot
and grabbed the other.
That's a pretty deep pool
and he took him right down.
I think that's to two atmospheres of pressure.
Apparently, Mr. Peters
is an experienced scuba diver
and I think that knowledge probably contributed
to how he was able to be hauled down there
that quickly and stay calm and know what to do.
He knew what he was doing because
you can see him actually in the film.
It's-- the def is so good,
you can see him ventilating.
You can see him ventilating really hard.
So he knows about swimming
and diving and being underwater.
He may have been assuming
he was going under again.
I did not walk away unimpressed
by his calm demeanor
during that whole affair.
I would be scared shitless.
He was near to the end.
Presumably, Ken Peters
had a relationship with this whale.
Maybe he did.
Maybe that's what saved him.
But Peters got the whale to let him go.
And they strung a net across.
And Ken Peters pulled himself
over the float line
and swam like a demon
to a slide-out
because the whale was coming right behind him.
The whale jumped over and came right after him.
He tried to stand up and run.
Of course, his feet were damaged.
I mean, he just fell and he scrambled.
And they take this as a prime example
of their training working.
And they say, "Just stand back
and stay calm," and that did work.
They claim this as a victory
of how they do business.
And maybe so, but it can also be interpreted
as a hair's breadth away from another fatality.
Hi, Shamu.
Hi, everybody.
We're the Johnsons from Detroit, Michigan.
We sure had a great time
when we visited SeaWorld.
It's one of our favorite places.
Yeah, I like the part when Shamu
gets everybody wet.
When the whales get close to the glass
and start kicking out the water?
Whamo!
You're a goner.
Orange County's sheriff's deputies
have identified the 27-year-old man
found dead in a killer whale's tank at SeaWorld.
The victim is Daniel P. Dukes
from South Carolina.
Dukes was found yesterday
draped over the back of Tilikum,
the largest orca held in captivity.
Well, all I know is
the public relations version of it--
he was a young man that had been arrested
not long before he snuck into SeaWorld.
Maybe he climbed the barbed wire fence
around the perimeter and stayed after hours.
Perfect story line--
a mentally disturbed guy
hides in the park after hours
and strips his clothes off
and decides he wants to have
a magical experience with an orca
and drowns because he became hypothermic.
Right.
So that's the story line
and none of us were there
to know the difference.
He was not detected by the night watch trainers
who were presumably at that station.
There are cameras all over SeaWorld.
There are cameras all over
the back of Shamu Stadium
pointing every which way.
There are underwater cameras.
I find it hard to believe
that nobody knew until the morning
that there was a body in there.
They have a night watch trainer every night.
That person didn't hear
any splashing or screaming?
I mean, I just find that really suspicious.
One of the employees--
I don't know if it was
a physical therapist or somebody--
was coming in in the morning
and there was Tilikum,
you know, with a dead guy,
a dead, naked guy on his back,
kind of parading him around the back pool.
The public relations spin on this was that
he was kind of a drifter
and died of hypothermia.
But the medical examiner reports
were more graphic than that.
For example, Tilikum stripped him,
bit off his genitals.
There was bite marks all over his body.
Now, whether that was post-death
or pre-death, I don't know.
But, yeah, all I can comment on
is that the guy definitely
jumped in the wrong pool.
So why keep Tilikum there?
This guy, he has a proven
track record of killing people.
He's clearly a liability to the institution.
Why keep him around?
Well, it's quite simple to answer.
And that is that his semen
is worth a lot of money.
Over the years, Tilikum has been
one of the main breeding whales at SeaWorld.
It's brilliant because they can
inseminate way more female whales,
because they can just
get his sperm and freeze it.
And then he's basically
operating as a sperm bank.
In a reputable breeding program, rule number one
is you certainly would not breed
an animal that has shown
a history of aggression towards humans.
Imagine if you had a pit bull who had killed.
That animal would have likely been put down.
But in the entire
SeaWorld collection--
it's like 54% of the whales
in SeaWorld's collection
now have Tilikum's genes.
The fall is to assume that
all killer whales are like Tilikum.
You have to look at their
learning history from birth.
You have to understand why Tilikum was a hazard
to anybody in the water.
And you have to understand that none
of the other killer whales at SeaWorld
that are in that system are that way.
What about the incident at Loro Parque?
First of all, I-- I can't--
I can't speak with specificity
about Loro Parque.
I wasn't there.
In fact, I know very little about it.
Probably about as much
as the general public knows.
Loro Parque, it's in the Canary Islands,
which is an autonomous region of Spain.
It's the largest tourist attraction
in all of Spain.
And when SeaWorld sent the orcas to Loro Parque,
everybody was always questioning,
like, how did they make
that leap to send four young orcas
to a park off the west coast of Africa
with trainers who-- a lot of them
had never been around orcas before?
Nothing was ready.
The venue wasn't ready.
It wasn't ready for the orcas,
it wasn't ready for a show.
The owner of the park
didn't want to lose revenue
by shutting down the pools and repairing them.
So for three years, the animals ate the pools
and for three years
the animals had problems--
with their teeth, with their stomachs.
So that's the reason why these animals
are enduring the endoscope procedures.
Back up.
Now back up, back up.
Those are still SeaWorld's animals
and they are responsible for those animals.
Loro Parque doesn't have a good reputation.
People that work in the business
know the reputation of places
and Loro Parque does not have a good reputation.
They didn't spend the same amount
of time as the SeaWorld trainers,
did not go through the same regimen
that the SeaWorld trainers went through.
You know, and Alexis really was
the best trainer.
And I did say-- I said,
"You're the only trainer there
that can hold his own
with a SeaWorld trainer."
And I said, "But you need
to be careful."
Anywhere along the line
it could have been stopped
because everyone knew
it was a tragedy waiting to happen.
But no one ever did anything about it.
And in the end,
it was the best trainer who lost his life.
Those were SeaWorld's whales.
They were trained using SeaWorld's techniques.
And their training was being supervised
at the time of the fatal accident
by one of their senior trainers from San Diego.
For somebody to get up and say in a court of law
they have no knowledge of the linkages
between SeaWorld
and this park in Tenerife is well--
either she doesn't know and is telling the truth
or it's just a bold-faced lie.
As trainers, we never forget
Shamu's true potential.
We see it each and every day.
That's why all of our interactions
are very carefully thought out,
especially our water work interaction.
Whoa!
You big dork.
Especially our water work interactions
because they're potentially the most dangerous.
I'd been expecting it
since the second person was killed.
I'd been expecting somebody
to be killed by Tilikum.
I'm surprised it took as long as it did.
First tonight,
a six-ton killer whale
has lived up to its name,
killing an experienced trainer
at SeaWorld, Orlando, today.
A tourist at an earlier show
said the animal seemed agitated.
Trainers complained
the whales weren't cooperating.
The whole show, the main show,
was a disaster that day.
There was, you know, whales chasing each other
and eventually the trainers decided
that they had to stop the show
because they couldn't
get the whales under control.
Tilikum was in the back pool
set up to do a Dine with Shamu
performance with Dawn.
Likely she saw what had gone on
during the main show
and so she had probably felt
more pressure to do a good show.
Yay!
When you watch the whole video, you can see
that Tilikum is actually really with Dawn
in the beginning of the video.
There's a couple of behaviors
that she asks him to do
where Tilikum justjumps right in
and he does exactly what she asks him to do.
There seemed to be a point in the session
where things went south, so to speak.
And in my humble opinion,
it was at that missed bridge--
whistle bridge,
on the perimeter pec wave.
She asked him to do a perimeter pec wave
where she asked him to basically
go all the way around the pool
and wave his pectoral flipper.
And she blows her whistle...
- There we go.
- ...which is a bridge,
which tells the animal that, okay,
you've done a good job.
Come back and get food.
But he missed that cue.
He likes waving so much.
That's beyond waving.
And he went all the way around the pool
on this perimeter pec wave.
That's all right.
We're going to let him keep on waving.
My interpretation is that
he didn't hear the whistle.
So not only did he not hear the bridge,
then he went and did
a perfect behavior and came back,
and what he got was what we call
a three-second neutral response,
which is just a way to let the animal know,
"No, you didn't do the correct thing.
You're not going to get rewarded.
And then we're going to move on."
And then you can also see through the video
that Dawn is running out of food.
The animals can sense
when you're getting to the bottom
of your bucket of fish,
because they can hear the ice clanging around
and the kind of fishy, soupy water
at the bottom.
And the handfuls of fish that
they're getting delivered by the trainer
are all getting smaller.
So they know that they're coming down
to the end of session.
When you see the difference
between the beginning of the video
and the end of the video, you can see
that he's just not quite on his game anymore.
There was no food left.
She kept asking him for more and more behaviors.
He wasn't getting reinforced for the behaviors
that he was doing correctly.
He probably was frustrated towards the end.
Then she walked around the perimeter of G pool.
He followed her.
And then continued over
into the rocky ledge area
where she laid down with him
to do a relationship session,
which is--
it's quiet time, basically.
Tilikum at some point
grabbed ahold of her left forearm
and started to drag her
and eventually did a barrel roll
and pulled her in.
It may have started as play or frustration
and clearly escalated to be
very violent behavior
that I think was anything but play.
In the end, he basically
just completely mutilated that poor girl.
They were gathering
all of the trainers at the Texas park.
He said, "There's been an accident
at the Florida park
and a trainer was killed."
Hearing that it was Dawn,
I was-- I couldn't believe it.
I just remember saying to myself, "Not Dawn.
It can't be Dawn."
He said that--
"And he still has her."
And I just...
was so disturbed by that
and the reality of how powerless we are.
Avulsion, laceration, abrasion, fractures.
Fractures and associated hemorrhages.
Blunt force traumas
to the main body, to the extremities.
To see this meted out against a trainer...
and I cannot fathom the reason.
It's shocking.
The lawyer for OSHA asked me
what I thought we'd learned,
and I'm sitting in the courtroom
and I've got the Keltie Byrne
case file in one hand
and I've got Dawn Brancheau in the other.
And they're almost, to the day, 20 years apart.
And I'm looking at these two things.
My only answer is, "Nothing."
In fact, it's not a damn thing.
We have not learned a damn thing
for something like that
to happen 20 years apart.
Could you tell
if it was an accident or if this--
Did this female trainer
work with this whale on a regular basis?
I don't know. What apparently happened
is we had a female trainer
back in the whale holding area.
She apparently slipped or fell into the tank
and was fatally injured by one of the whales.
At first, SeaWorld reported
that a trainer slipped
and fell in the water and was drowned.
So that was the first report.
It wasn't until eyewitness
accounts disputed that
that they had to go back in their huddle
and say, "Wait a minute.
We gotta come up with a new plan."
New tonight--
SeaWorld has confirmed
the killer whale pulled
the woman into the water.
She didn't fall into the tank
as the sheriff's department initially reported.
The new plan is that he grabbed her ponytail.
This is a subtle way of placing
the blame on Dawn's shoulders.
She shouldn't have had a long ponytail,
or if she did have that ponytail,
it should have been up in a bun.
Dawn, if she was standing here
with me right now,
would tell you that it was her mistake
in allowing that to happen.
They blamed her.
How dare you?
How disrespectful for you to blame her
when she's not even alive to defend herself.
He grabbed her ponytail
and pulled her into the water.
That's as simple as it gets.
There are photographs
of plenty of other trainers
doing exactly the same thing that she was doing,
so I knew that SeaWorld was lying
about the fact that this was her fault.
The ponytail, in all likelihood, is just a tale.
The safety spotter, who apparently
didn't actually see the takedown,
came up with that.
- Are you excited?
- Yeah!
During the spotter's testimony,
OSHA pushed him to say
that he wasn't really sure
that it was her ponytail
that was in the whale's mouth,
that he just saw her underwater
and he assumed it was the ponytail.
OSHA contends that the whale came up
and grabbed Dawn Brancheau's arm,
saying that that was another level
of aggressiveness.
And again, SeaWorld is saying
it was not an aggressive move.
One of SeaWorld's top curators, Chuck Tompkins,
said when Dawn Brancheau
was pulled off that ledge,
it wasn't necessarily
aggressive behavior by the whale.
The initial grab was not an act of aggression.
This is not a crazed animal.
The industry has a vested interest
in spinning these
so that the animals continue to appear
like cuddly teddy bears
that are completely safe.
You know, that sells a lot of Shamu dolls,
it sells a lot of tickets at the gate,
and that's the story line
that they're going to continue
to stick with for as long as they can.
Recognize that those that say
this is a crazed animal
that acted out and grabbed Dawn maliciously,
they want to prove the theorem
that captivity makes animals crazy.
And that is just false.
All whales in captivity have a bad life.
They're all emotionally destroyed.
They're all psychologically traumatized,
so they are ticking time bombs.
It's not just Tilikum.
We have to separate
what happened to Dawn--
and, as tragic as it is, no one wants
to ever see it happen again.
Can SeaWorld create an environment
where it never happens again?
Yes, I absolutely believe they can.
What if there were no SeaWorlds?
I can't imagine a society, with the value we put
on marine mammals, if those parks didn't exist.
I'm not at all interested in having my daughter,
who is three and a half,
grow up thinking that it's normalized
to have these intelligent,
highly evolved animals
in concrete pools.
I don't want her to think
that's how we treat the kin
that we find ourselves around on this planet.
I think it's atrocious.
This hearing is expected to last all week
with OSHA continuing to work
toward this theory--
that SeaWorld knew there was
a calculated risk of injury or death,
but put trainers in the water
with the whales anyway,
while SeaWorld will say
that Dawn Brancheau's death
was an isolated incident.
Reporting live in Seminole County,
Dave McDaniel, WESH 2 News.
There's something wrong.
You know with Tilikum that
there's something wrong and that's--
when you have a relationship
with that animal and you--
you understand that he's killing
not to be a savage.
He's not killing because he's just crazy.
He's not killing because
he doesn't know what he's doing.
He's killing because he's frustrated
and he's got aggravations
and he doesn't know how to--
he has no outlet for it.
Now Tilikum is spending
a great deal of time by himself
and basically floating lifeless in a pool.
Three hours now...
and he hasn't moved.
They try to sugarcoat it by saying,
"He comes out in the front pool
every once in a while.
Now he's doing shows."
Really? You know
what he does in a show?
He does a few bows
and then he goes back in his little jail cell.
That's his life.
I feel sad for Tilikum.
A regal thing like him swimming around the tank
with his fin flopped over like that
compared to a wild bull killer whale that size,
which is one of the most kinetic
and dynamic things
you can imagine...
I feel sad when I see him.
It's time to stop the shows.
It's time to stop forcing animals to perform
in basically a circus environment.
And they should release the animals
that are young enough
and healthy enough to be released,
and the animals like Tilikum
who are old and sick and have put in
25 years in the industry
should be released to an open ocean pen
so they can live out their lives
and just experience
the natural rhythms of the ocean.
This is a multibillion-dollar
corporation
that makes its money
through the exploitation of orcas.
They're not suitable to have in captivity.
The whales are really bored.
You deprive them of all
this environmental stimulation.
I think that in 50 years,
we'll look back and go,
"My God, what a barbaric time."
Dawn Brancheau--
DB, dream big.
Dawn was the most loving,
giving person you ever met.
Her smile just radiated.
She's comp-- she fulfilled her life.
We saw whales
swimming in straight lines
with straight dorsal fins.
I was so honored to be there.
And I was so thankful that I had sunglasses on
because the tears were kind of coming out.
And it was moving.