This is about Ky—Tilly’s son and an incident from 2004. Must be in the genes.
This is actually Tillikum’s second human kill. The first one was in 1999 — a 27 year old man who was apparently desperate to win a Darwin award: “The Orange County Sheriff’s Office said the man apparently hid in the park until after it closed and then climbed into the tank.”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/24/killer.whale.trainer.death/index.html
Also from this CNN article, it says that in the show just preceding this fatal attack, the trainers were having trouble getting the whales (plural) to obey their commands and one of the trainers even made a joking announcement to the crowd about it. I expect this will be a key point in the promised review of procedures that SeaWorld will be undertaking. When the whales aren’t reacting to their trainers the way they normally do, this should be a huge warning sign to stop the show, get the trainers on high alert, and cautiously investigate the cause. A tummy ache or a tooth ache could put a whale in a bad mood, and others might react to the changed mood of the first one (in other words, they may prioritize the needs of other whales over the wants of their human trainers).
And I expect there could be other hard-to-spot factors that could set off aggressive behavior in whales. They have the ability to hear frequencies that humans can’t hear (20kHz is the high end of the human hearing range, and orcas can hear up to 120 kHz). Does SeaWorld electronically monitor that range of frequencies, to make sure some moron in the crowd isn’t either unwittingly or deliberately transmitting a high-frequency sound that could distress the whales without being heard by people? See this posting by a marine biologist trying to determine a safe frequency for “pinging” in connection with seal research, to avoid triggering the predation instincts of orcas: http://www.mail-archive.com/bioacoustics-
Wild animals belong in the wild. Sea World needs to let them go. Enough is enough.
Cetaceans are highly, highly intelligent and complex animals. Think about it. It’d be like being in prison for a crime that never happened. Holding them in captivity for our entertainment is foolish as well as cruel. I’m very sorry about this woman being killed, but that animal should never have been there in the first place.
I have no problem with trophy hunting as long as the meat is eaten. I have no trouble with fishing as long as the head is cut off as soon as the fish is tossed on the filleting board, and I’m fine with cows, pigs, chickens, etc., being slaughtered for food, as long as they are treated humanely while alive and are dispatched quickly and humanely. God gave us dominion over the animals and expects us to treat them well. Imprisoning a beautiful wild animal that has a very long life span for our amusement is sick and, IMO, evil. It’s not and never can be a domesticated animal and not what God had in mind for them or us.