Posted on 02/25/2010 8:00:20 PM PST by BunnySlippers
This stuff has been going on for ages, and in Europe too. No one cares because the Orcas bring in the bucks. Oh well, a trainer dead here or there, no biggie.
Japan, grrr. Don’t get me started. I am trying to find the courage to watch The Cove but I don’t know if I can do it.
There are plenty of dangerous occupations out there.
Training whales is one of them.
It's not just this whale. Perhaps it is the captivity/lifestyle of the whale, or perhaps it is just the way an Orca is...
Have you ever seen that video of the Orca who zooms up on a beach out of nowhere and swallows a huge seal before you even see it happen? It is so amazingly rapid it takes your breath away. The seal never knew a thing.
So the point is, there is no safety in working with Orcas. Period. No matter if you stay out of the water.
Yet certain trainers do at times withhold some food if an animal refuses to perform. A former Sea World trainer who requested anonymity told me that whales or dolphins that would not perform were sometimes denied food during or immediately after the shows. They would only be given their "base" including vitamins - about 2/3 of their daily food allotment. "Usually the whales would start performing when they realized they weren't going to get fed," she added.
But Paul Nachtigall of the US Naval Ocean Systems Center, found that food deprivation did not enhance learning in bottlenose dolphins, and that hungry animals were even less interested in co-operating.
The above is from the second link I posted just above to you. Do you think an underfed POW who is aggressive toward his captors should be killed? I am just not seeing much difference, except of course that the POW is human.
"A SeaWorld trainer is in good condition after a killer whale attacked him Wednesday and pulled him underwater twice.
"This is not the first time that Kasatka has attacked her trainer.
Since the 1970s, killer whales have attacked nearly two dozen people worldwide. In 2004 at San Antonio's SeaWorld, a whale slammed his trainer repeatedly."
The second human this whale “killed” doesn’t count — he was an eager seeker of a Darwin award who hid inside the park grounds after closing and then got into the pool with the whale (and it’s not at all clear that the whale actually killed him — he died of hypothermia, not of any of the superficial injuries which were apparently inflicted by the whale). But the whale would certainly have been well within its rights to kill the idiot. If some stranger barges into my home in the middle of the night, I’ll shoot first and ask questions later.
The first killing, 19 years ago, was while the whale was being subjected to horribly inhumane conditions at its previous home — it was confined 14 hours a day to a tank that was the size of a bathtub in relation to his size, and was punished with food deprivation whenever he balked at going back into this tiny tank when trainers ordered him to. You could make a good argument that the people in charge of perpetrating this cruelty should have been killed, but not that the whale should have been.
SeaWorld already protects human life from reckless disregard of dangers. They’re not running a children’s petting zoo with these orcas. It’s not reckless at all for a professional who has spent close to 20 years working directly with marine mammals, after obtaining a degree in psychology, to make the decision to assume the significant risk involved in physically interacting with them. SHE made the decision, then SHE made what other professionals in the field are saying was a clear mistake, and SHE paid the price for the mistake with her life. The whale is just minding its own business of being a whale.
Very interesting. I wonder just what Keiko does when she feels “challenged” by someone making eye contact and nodding.
As I recall now, the sign only said do not make eye contact and nod , and I think it was someone there that said it makes them feel challenged.
I wasn’t going to mention this, but I did exactly that when I first saw him and hadn’t read the sign yet. I did not see any reaction from him.
A better solution is to turn him loose in his natural habitat, or NOT to make him perform in situations where his first instinct is to KILL.
Let's face it, people allowed this to happen.....either we accept the risks or we do not.
We do NOT punish the animal for putting him in this situation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.