Killer Whale Shows: It’s Time to Ask a Different Question

Two weeks ago, my family and I took a quick trip to Orlando — the first time my children visited Florida. We devoted one day on the short trip to typical tourist behavior, and we ultimately chose to spend that day at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. (And, believe me, twelve full hours of Disney’s alternate reality was enough — quite fun, but enough!) As part of the touristy-time decision making process, we explored online the multitude of theme parks that Orlando has to offer, including Sea World. We watched teaser video clips of the various water-spectacle shows at the park, and with each shot of a killer whale or dolphin jumping, leaping and splashing I became more and more uneasy. This can’t be right, I thought, putting these animals through such paces over and over again every day. The queasy feeling in my stomach and the ache in my heart center told me to move away from the Sea World website and head back to The Wonderful World of Disney.

It turns out that my stomach and heart were right. Within a week of our Orlando trip, a killer whale pulled one of trainers underwater at the end of a show. She died. The reporters’ talk immediately turned to whether or not the animal would be euthanized after the incident. I wasn’t shocked by the direction of the media’s questioning; I was sad. My inner reporter began asking: “Isn’t it time to evaluate if these kinds of shows are balanced activities for the animals?” The whales, dolphins and sea lions looked overworked to me in just the few minutes of clips that I watched on the Internet — and with each show running four or five times a day, seven days a week, that’s a lot of cumulative stress. In addition, whales and dolphins rely on sound waves (sonar) to move throughout their environs, and penning them in small performance tanks in an arena filled with a cacophony of crowd noise strips them of their ability to function naturally. And I’ve now read that the animals’ food supply is limited in order to increase their incentive to perform for food reward. Cruelty, plain and simple.

I wish the person who first thought of the idea to stage a show featuring killer whales jumping through hoops of fire in exchange for smidgens of chum had stopped and asked: “Is this in balance with Nature? Would staging this show be something the whales would naturally evolve to do? Would I choose to perform in this way, if I were a whale?” Instead, the questions probably went more like this: “How much would people pay to see this? How many people would come each day? How many shows can we stage without getting charged with excessively cruelty to animals?” Having recently decided not to fork over $300 for my four-person family to spend a day at Sea World, it’s clear which questions were asked and are still being asked today. The trainer who died was the third to be killed by that particular whale — a whale clearly under extreme stress but who also clearly brings in a lot of money for the park. (Despite the recent tragedy, visitors are still paying to see the “Believe” and “Shamu Rocks” shows day after day.) I wonder if there is a balanced way for humans and killer whales to stage an entertaining show together, where both species are respected and actually collaborate? Without asking that question, we’ll never know. It’s time to ask.