We may pat ourselves on the back that popular, and righteous, opinion has helped stop the cetacean circus that is SeaWorld. A 100 years from now – an age that a wild female orca born this year could well aspire to – our descendants may well look back and ask us: what took you so long? That’s if whales manage to hold out against the other threats we pose to their kind, of course.

SeaWorld’s announcement on Thursday that it is to end the breeding of captive orcas was achieved in an agreement with the Humane Society of the United States. Its president and CEO, Wayne Pacelle, said: “Today’s announcement signals that the era of captive display of orcas will end.” His SeaWorld equivalent, Joel Manby, announced in the same press release that the company intends to increase its “rescue operations”, which enable “thousands of stranded marine mammals like dolphins and sea lions” to have “a place to go”.



Some may sneer at the timing, which comes just weeks after SeaWorld’s star sperm-provider for captive breeding, a killer whale called Tilikum, was reported to have a debilitating bacterial infection. Others may lament that it has taken another death – in this case, that of Dawn Brancheau, Tilikum’s trainer, who was dragged to the bottom of his pool by her possibly demented charge. (Meanwhile, 200 killer whales have died in captivity since the practice of displaying them in oceanaria began in the 1960s.)



SeaWorld decides to stop killer whale breeding program Read more

But these factors only overlie the image of wild creatures reduced to a performing automata, artificially supported by daily doses of antibiotics and gnawing at the concrete sides of their compounds in what appears to be visceral frustration. As the documentary movie Blackfish demonstrated, Tilikum and his like appear to be suffering what would be diagnosed as psychotic states in their human counterparts, subjected as they are to close and unnatural confinement.

Orca are the alpha predator of the oceans. They are incredibly successful animals. They are present in almost every open sea. They express their sentience in highly developed communication, using a series of clicks and whistles including, we suspect, their own names. They are, as scientists Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell have shown, animals who are collectively individual, capable of a sense of their abstract selves. They exhibit a culture that is matriarchal and transmitted down the matrilineal line. They learn, rather than behave by instinct. Female orca live for up to 100 years. They may be the only other animals other than us who undergo menopause, partly to be around to protect their sons: male orcas stay with their mothers their entire lives.

But even far away from SeaWorld, they face risks from humans in the open seas too. Scientists at the Zoological Society of London recently released data which shows that the northern Atlantic population of orca which live in west British and Irish waters have not had a healthy calf in 20 years.

Dr Conor Ryan, of the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, noted: “The prospects for the population were never good but now they’re worse.” He and his colleagues aren’t sure whether weakened females, reduced food resources (a concomitant of climate change) or pollution may be to blame. Their fate is a microcosm of the threats facing orca, and other whales, everywhere.

The 29 sperm whales – toothed cousins of the orca – that were stranded in the North Sea last January may be a paradoxical good sign: an indication that pre-whaling populations of great whales are recovering. But it is also likely that one reason for their stranding was anthropogenic noise, such as seismic oil surveys, which scared them into shallow water, fatal for such deep-feeding animals.

And it is certain that because of their place at the top of the marine food chain, those sperm whales, like orca, are unwitting recipients of the pollution we have pumped into their environment: PCBs, organochlorines and heavy metals such as lead, chromium and mercury. These end up in the animal’s adipose fat, to be released when it suffers stress, such as dehydration and starvation. Or, in a terrible irony, the toxins are downloaded from a mother’s body via her milk when she suckles her calf.

We should certainly welcome SeaWorld’s decision, even if it was prompted by profit and loss. But the greater issue is us. SeaWorld will remain in business only as long as we think its fun and educational to pay to see captive cetaceans.



Animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings”, the naturalist Henry Beston wrote from his dune shack on Cape Cod in the 1920s. He saw animals as “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear ... other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth”. We can only countenance what we do to them, and their environment, because we forget that we are animals too.

