The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of a fish
bowl is gold fish, furthermore a Beta fish or even a small bottom feeder
catfish or starfish. The great Orca Whale doesn’t come to mind when thinking of
the category of a fish bowl, yet that’s where they are in SeaWorld. Since carnival
show times and even earlier animals have been considered entertainment for
human consumption. Even though the conditions can be harmful and downright
abusive people don’t seem to be too concerned with that.
On September 13th 1916 Mary the Elephant was hung
with a crane for killing an assistant trainer who had been hired just the other
day. With peoples outrage over the public death of a person, the owner of the
carnival decided it would be best to execute her. There are even pictures of
it, and over 2,000 people came to see her public execution.
Similarly the 2010
death of trainer Dawn Brancheau who was killed by Tilikim an Orca who has been
involved in two other incidents before that. One in 1999 where a man visited
the park the day before and somehow got past security to enter the Orcas tank
after park hours, he was found dead and naked on Tilikums back the next
morning. The first incident took place in 1991 where tilikum and two other
pregnant female orcas were in a tank and Keltie Byrne slipped into the tank
while being a part time trainer for sea world. The orcas drowned her and kept
her away from the life ring thrown her way. Tilikum is still performing today.
Unlike Mary the elephant Tilikim hasn’t received much
outrage at least in the over the top sense that the people of Tennessee were. The
outrage has come in the form of a movie called blackfish which brings to light
the conditions of these Orcas in captivity. It claims insanity to the Orcas who
are acting aggressively toward people and their trainers. Although there hasn’t
been much done to take steps to change it. Because its now an industry, drawing
in thousands upon thousands of visitors. What people don’t realize is that Orcas
are not entertainment. They are not show dogs, they aren’t meant to be kept in
such small living spaces while being forced to do tricks for an audience of
careless faces every day.
Tilikum isn’t the only aggressive Orca in captivity, there
are many accounts that not only stem from seaworld but other parks as well. Going
all the way back to 1967 to the present you can find incidents involving Orcas
and aggression toward trainers and visitors. http://www.orcahome.de/incidents.htm
this website gives a comprehensive list of incidents and their locations.
Seaworlds response to the criticisms in Blackfish and what
the Orca project stands for were sort of fleshed out in a long article on their
main site, which can be read here http://seaworld.com/truth/truth-about-blackfish/
The whole article is basically spent saying that everything
in blackfish is false, while they never really address the aggressive behavior
or history of aggressive behavior of captive Orcas.