The very first orca taken into captivity wasn’t harpooned. She was a distraught killer whale who wandered solo into Newport Harbor, California, in 1961 and was scooped up by human beings who thought, “Why not?” A marine park down there called Marineland, which doesn’t exist anymore, got a call that there was an ailing killer whale in the water, went out and netted her and put her on a flatbed truck, and drove her 50 miles to Palos Verdes. Once they got her in a tank, “She went crazy,” the park’s chief animal captor said, as quoted in David Neiwert’s book Of Orcas and Men. “She started swimming at high speed around the tank, striking her body repeatedly. Finally, she convulsed and died.” She lived in captivity a total of three days.
The first killer whale taken into captivity by a human being who went out and hunted it was harpooned in the Gulf Islands three years later, in 1964, in those waters you see above. The Gulf Islands are Canada’s version of the San Juan Islands. As Sandra Pollard writes in her book Puget Sound Whales for Sale, an artist named Samuel Burich had been commissioned by the Vancouver Public Aquarium to create a life-size sculpture of a killer whale. He needed a real killer whale to do it, so he set up a harpoon gun on Saturna Island, where killer whales of more than one ecotype often swim past.
Burich chose the youngest whale he could see. Pollard writes: “The sharply pointed steel harpoon shaft hit the whale in the fatty tissue behind the skull, piercing the intricate framework of nerves and muscle and disorienting but not killing the juvenile mammal… The wounded creature made a valiant effort to free herself of the impaled harpoon. Emitting shrill, high-pitched whistles, the whale twisted repeatedly, violently thrashing her tail flukes in a doomed attempt to escape from the searing agony inflicted by the metal shaft.”
According to Neiwert: “The hunters also tried shooting the whale, to little apparent effect.” Having not been able to kill it, the aquarium decided to take the killer whale into custody.
“Using the harpoon line attached to the base of the whale’s dorsal fin, the weakened victim was dragged along on a twelve-hour overnight journey through rough seas, heavy rain, and wind-driven squalls,” Pollard writes.
In Vancouver, the whale was pumped full of antibiotics (the first time a killer whale ever got antibiotics), named Moby Doll (because they thought she was so beautiful), and put on display. She died 87 days later, and during the necropsy they realized she wasn’t a girl at all, but a boy. Oops!
As Neiwert writes in his book, “Moby Doll refused to eat for his first fifty-five days in captivity, during which time he appeared to be in shock, floating listlessly in the pen.” One of the people who came to see Moby Doll at the Vancouver aquarium was Ted Griffin, who owned the Seattle Marine Aquarium and brought a male killer whale to Seattle three years later. On the Seattle waterfront, Griffin became the first person in history to train and swim with a killer whale in front of an audience. That whale’s name was Namu. Then Griffin started a business capturing killer whales for marine parks all around the country, called Namu, Inc. Eventually, SeaWorld acquired Griffin’s company.
Putting a killer whale in a swimming pool and teaching it to dance with human beings for its food? Seattle started it.
Speaking of putting killer whales in swimming pools and teaching them to dance for food, SeaWorld was hit with “a consolidated federal lawsuit filed in San Diego on Friday [which] alleges that SeaWorld has concealed the mistreatment of its captive orca whales with a deceptive marketing campaign.” SeaWorld argues back, “There is no higher priority than the health and well-being of our animals.” The lawsuit is here.
