The Best American Sampler by Best American Series

Author:Best American Series [Best American Series]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Sealand, situated at Oak Bay Marina, was a wholly alien world for a wild orca. Its performance pool—about one hundred feet by fifty feet, and thirty-five feet deep—was created by suspending mesh netting from the floating docks. The pool was open to the marina water, and thus to any bilge oil or sewage pumped into it by boaters. Marina traffic and motors created a cacophony of artificial underwater background noise, obscuring the natural sounds Tilikum had known in the wild. In the fourteen years before his arrival, seven orcas had died under Sealand's care. Their average survival time was just shy of three and a half years.

At Sealand, Tilikum joined two female killer whales, Haida and Nootka, who were sorting out the social pecking order. (Orca society is dominated by females.) That meant conflict and tooth raking for all three orcas, and even after Haida established herself as dominant, both females continued to push the young Tilikum around. The stress was worse at night. Sealand's owner, a local entrepreneur named Robert Wright, who'd captured his share of Pacific Northwest killer whales in the early 1970s, worried that someone might cut the net to free his orcas or that they might chew through it themselves. So at 5:30 P.M., after the shows were over, the orcas were moved into a small metal-sided pool that was twenty-six feet in diameter and less than twenty feet deep. The trainers referred to it as "the module," and the orcas were left in it for the next fourteen and a half hours.

According to Eric Walters, who was a trainer at Sealand from 1987 to 1989 while working toward a bachelor's degree in marine biology at the University of Victoria, the module was so tight that the orcas had difficulty avoiding conflict, and their skin would get scratches and cuts from rubbing against the sides. About once a week, Walters says, one or more of the orcas would simply refuse to swim into the module and would have to be left in the performance pool overnight.

The orca show was performed every hour on the hour, eight times a day, seven days a week. Both Nootka and Tilikum had stomach ulcers, which had to be treated with medication. Sometimes Nootka's ulcers were so bad she had blood in her stool.

Walters was interested in the science of training and was encouraged when Sealand brought in Bruce Stephens, a former SeaWorld head trainer, to make recommendations to improve Sealand's practices. Stephens gave each trainer a handbook, which warned, "If you fail to provide your animals with the excitement they need, you may be certain they will create the excitement themselves." He emphasized that killer whales needed constant change to keep them engaged and responsive, and made a series of recommendations for new learning sessions and playtime for Sealand's orcas. But within a month, Walters told me, Sealand was back to its usual routines. "They basically ran it like you would run McDonald's," he says. "It just can't be good for an animal that is so intelligent to do the same thing every day.

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