Orange County Fire Rescue.
6600 Sea Harbor Drive.
SeaWorld Stadium.
Okay.
We actually have a trainer in the water with one of our whales-- the whale that they're not supposed to be in the water with.
Okay. We'll get somebody en route.
Okay, through gate #3 to Shamu Stadium.
Gate 3.
Orange County Sheriff's Office.
We need SO to respond for a dead person at SeaWorld.
Uh, a whale has eaten one of the trainers.
A whale ate one of the trainers?
That's correct.
Do you believe?
My parents first brought me to a SeaWorld park when I was very young.
From that point forward, I was hooked.
It meant everything to me because I'd never wanted anything more.
I remember being probably in first or second grade watching National Geographic specials or Mutual of Omaha specials and seeing whales and seeing dolphins and as a little kid just being really incredibly inspired by it.
I never went to SeaWorld.
I grew up in New York, so I went to the Bronx Zoo.
Grew up on a lake with horses. We'd swim the horses.
I grew up around the ocean.
I came from the middle of the country in flatland Kansas.
I'm from Virginia.
Traveled down, did the theme park thing in Orlando when I was 17 and saw the night show at Shamu Stadium.
Very emotional, you know, popular music.
And I was just-- I was very driven to want to do that.
Then I saw what the trainers did... and I said, "That's what I want to do."
One of the trainers there, he goes, "What are you doing out there? You should be a trainer."
I go, "I don't know how to train animals.
I've never trained animals in my life."
How do you prepare yourself for an encounter with an 8,000-pound Orcinus orca?
I always thought you needed, like, a master's degree in marine biology to be a trainer.
It takes years of study and experience to meet the strict requirements necessary to interact in the water with Shamu.
Come to find out, it really is more about your personality and how good you can swim.
I went and tried out, got the job right away.
I'm like, "Yeah!" So excited, you know.
I was so, so excited.
I really wanted to be there. I really wanted to do the job.
I couldn't wait to get in the water with the animals.
I really was proud of being a SeaWorld trainer.
You know, I thought this was the most amazing job.
I showed up there on my first day, not really knowing what to expect.
I was told to put on a wetsuit and get in the water.
Hi, Mom!
Oh, I was scared out of my wits.
First of all, I put my wetsuit on backwards because I was raised on a farm in Virginia.
Hi, Dad! My first thought and memory of that time was that dolphins are a lot bigger...
...heh, than they look when you get in the water next to them.
Well, I watched the Sea Lion & Otter Show, and this guy, Mike Morocco, he comes out during the show with a dress on as Dorky, the alter ego of Dorothy-- in a dress with a sea lion, the Coward Sea Lion, right?
And he's walking along with this little basket, and I go, "I will never, ever do that."
You know? Two months later...
Hi, I'm Dorky!
Walking out onstage with a sea lion.
I was overwhelmed and I was so excited.
I mean, just seeing a k*ller whale... is breathtaking.
I was just in awe.
It's shocking to see how large they are and how beautiful they are.
Being in the presence of the k*ller whales was just inspiring and amazing, and I remember seeing them for the first time, just not being able to believe how huge they were.
You're there because you want to train k*ller whales and that's your goal.
Yay!
I didn't know it was going to happen, so I wasn't expecting it.
And one day they say, "Okay, Sam, you're ready to go."
Come on, you got it.
"You're going to stand on the whale.
You're going to dive off the whale.
The whale's going to swim under you and pick you up again.
And then you're going to do a perimeter ride around the pool."
Good!
Keep moving. Ride him to the slide-out.
They just told me to go do it and I did it.
Wow, I did-- I just rode a k*ller whale.
Yay, girly!
When you look into their eyes, you know somebody is home.
Somebody's looking back.
You form a very personal relationship with your animal.
There's something absolutely amazing about working with an animal.
You are a team.
You build a relationship together.
You both understand the goal and you help each other.
I've been with this whale since I was 18 years old and I've seen her have all four of her babies.
We've grown up together. Huh?
That's the joy I got out of it.
It's a relationship like I've never had.
Bro, I have to know-- are you nervous?
I'm scared.
Oh, no. Nice hair, Jeff.
Did you see anything?
Projection for the future of Jeff Ventre.
Jeff Ventre is going to go over there, he's going to shine.
You're going to notice... Dawn.
Oh, that's Dawn. Wow.
He's going to be my supervisor one day.
There you go.
I knew Dawn when she was new.
She was a great person to work with and she obviously blossomed into one of SeaWorld's best trainers.
This is Dawn Brancheau.
Dawn is the senior trainer here at Shamu Stadium.
I guess you could say I kind of knew Dawn in a past life.
It's a tough job, isn't it?
Yeah, we really do go through a lot of physical exertion.
You can see in the show we do a lot of deepwater work, breath holds, very high-energy behaviors with animals.
Obviously they're giving out a lot of energy too, but we're working together and having a lot of fun as well.
She's beautiful, she's blonde, she's athletic, she's friendly.
You know, everybody loves Dawn.
And I mean this so sincerely, watching you perform yesterday-- you're amazing.
Thank you. You really are.
She captured what it means to be a SeaWorld trainer.
She had so much experience that it made me realize what happened to her really could have happened to anyone.
This is Detective Revere with the Orange County Sheriff's Office.
Today's date is February 24, 2010.
The time is 4:16.
In the room with me right now is a Thomas George Tobin.
Is that correct? Correct.
So the arm is nowhere... Right.
OSHA, on behalf of the federal government, is basically suggesting that swimming with orcas is inherently dangerous and that you can't completely predict the outcome when you enter the water or enter their environment.
That's the crux of the OSHA case.
Stay out of proximity with the animals and you won't get k*lled.
It will have a ripple effect through the whole industry.
This was national headline news.
SeaWorld's whale performances may never be the same.
Right now the theme park is arguing in court to keep whale trainers in the water, something OSHA says is extremely dangerous.
These are wild animals, and they are unpredictable because we don't speak whale.
We don't speak whale, we don't speak tiger, we don't speak monkey.
And tempers flared between the two sides today when OSHA's attorney suggested that SeaWorld only made changes after trainer Dawn Brancheau's death outraged the public.
OSHA doesn't want the trainers going back in the water without a physical barrier between them and the whales.
Being in close proximity to these top predators is too dangerous.
They won't then be getting in the water riding on the whales, things like that.
If you were in a bathtub for 25 years, don't you think you'd get a little irritated, aggravated, maybe a little psychotic?
The situation with Dawn Brancheau-- it didn't just happen.
It's not a singular event.
You have to go back over 20 years to understand this.
It was a really exciting thing to do and so everybody wanted to do it.
What were they telling you you were going to do?
Mm, capture orcas.
Whoo-hoo!
They had aircraft, they had spotters, they had speedboats, they had bombs they were throwing in the water.
They were lighting their bombs with acetylene torches in their boats and throwing them as fast as they could to herd the whales into coves.
Whoo!
But the orcas had been caught before and they knew what was going on and they knew their young ones would be taken from them.
So the adults without young went east into a cul-de-sac and the boats followed them, thinking they were all going that way, while the mothers with babies went north.
But the capture teams had aircraft.
And they have to come up for air eventually.
And when they did, the capture teams alerted the boats and said, "Oh, no, they're going north-- the ones with babies."
So the boats-- the speedboats caught them there and herded them in.
And then they had fishing boats with seine nets that they would stretch across so none could leave and then they could just pick out the young ones.
We were only after the little ones.
And a little one is, you know, a big animal still.
But I was told because of shipping costs that's why they only take the little ones.
They had the young ones that they wanted in the corrals, so they dropped the seine nets.
And all the others could have left, but they stayed.
We're there, trying to get the young orca into the stretcher, and the whole famn damily is out here, 25 yards away maybe, in a big line...
...and they're communicating back and forth.
Well... you understand then what you're doing, you know.
I-- I lost it.
I mean, I just started crying.
I didn't stop working, but I... you know, I just couldn't handle it.
Just like kidnapping a little kid away from their mother.
Everybody's watching. What can you do?
It's the worst thing I can think of, you know?
I can't think of anything worse than that.
Now, and this really sounds bad, but when the whole hunt was over, there were three dead whales in the net.
And... so they had Peter and Brian and I... cut the whales open, fill them with rocks, put anchors on their tail, and sink them.
Well... you know... really, I didn't even think about it being illegal at that point.
I thought it was a PR thing.
They were finally ejected from the State of Washington by a court order in 1976.
It was SeaWorld by name that was told, "Do not come back to Washington to capture whales."
Without missing a b*at, they went from Washington to Iceland and began capturing there.
I've been part of a revolution and two change of presidents in Central and South America... and seen some things that's hard to believe, but this is the worst thing that I've ever done-- is hunt that whale.
Sealand has been a part of Victoria for over 20 years.
We specialize in the care and display of k*ller whales.
By the time I started, when he was four, he was up to 16 feet long and weighed 4,000 pounds.
Tilikum, up again.
Thank you.
I had actually seen Tilikum quite a number of times.
He was right across the street here in Victoria.
Now, this show can get a little bit soggy at times.
All Sealand was was a net hanging in a marina with a float around it.
Tilikum was the one we really loved to work with.
He was very well behaved and he was always eager to please.
When he was first introduced, everything just went fine and dandy, but the previous head trainer used techniques that involved punishment.
He would team a trained orca up with Tilikum who was untrained.
He would send them both off to do the same behavior.
If Tilikum didn't do it, then both animals were punished.
Deprived of food to keep them hungry, this caused a lot of frustration with the larger animal, the established animal, and would in turn get frustrated with Tilikum and would rake him with his teeth.
There would be times during certain seasons that Tilikum would be covered head to toe with rakes.
Rakes are teeth on teeth and raking the skin.
And from head to toe you could see blood and you could see scratches, and he would just be raked up.
Both females would g*ng up on him.
Tilikum was the one we trusted.
We never were concerned about Tilikum.
The issue was really that we stored these whales at night in what we call a module, which was 20 feet across and probably 30 feet deep as a safety precaution because we were worried about people cutting the net and letting them go.
And the lights were all turned out, so there was really no stimulation.
They're just in this dark, metal 20x30-foot pool for two-thirds of their life.
When we first started, they were quite small and quite young.
So they fit in there quite nicely, but they were immobile for the most part.
It didn't feel good. It just didn't.
And it was just wrong.
We started having difficulty getting them all into this one small steel box, to be honest.
That's what it was. It was a floating steel box.
That's where food deprivation would come in.
We would hold back food, and they would know if they went in the module that they would get their food.
So if they're hungry enough, they're going to go in there.
And during the winter that would be from 5:00 at night till 7:00 in the morning.
When you let them out, you'd see these new tooth rakes and sometimes you'd see blood.
Closing that door on him and knowing that he's locked in there for the whole night is like...
it's a s*ab, it's a "whoa."
If that is true, it's not only inhumane, and I'll tell them so... but it probably led to what I think is a psychosis that... he was on a hair trigger.
He'd k*ll.
An employee is dead after an encounter...
...at a Canadian park called Sealand of the Pacific.
The victim, Keltie Byrne, was a championship swimmer and a part-time worker at Sealand.
As seen in this home video, rescuers used a huge net to try...
...rescue workers' efforts were hindered by the agitated whales.
I'd like to make the Pan Pacific team this summer, but my more immediate goal is just to swim fast at nationals.
It was sort of a cloudy, gray day and we were looking for something to do, so we thought, "Why not go to Sealand?"
It was kind of like this dingy pool with these whales and-- it just felt a little bit like an amusement park that was kind of on its last legs and everything was a bit gray.
Yeah. It was like a swimming pool.
Yeah, yeah. You know, three whales in a swimming pool.
Yeah.
And they would come up and touch the ball and there was--
I think there was some tail splashing and there was some--
Some jumping. The fish. And--
They hold the fish and the whales jump up.
I remember saying, "Oh, what a fun job.
You know, she's so lucky."
And then I saw her walking with her rubber boots and she tripped and her foot just dipped into the edge of the pool and she lost her balance and fell in.
And then she was pushing her way up to get out of the pool and the whale zoomed over, grabbed her boot, and pulled her back in.
At first, I didn't think it was that serious because you see the trainer in the pool with the whale and you think, "Oh, well, the whales are used to that."
And then all of a sudden, it started getting-- there was more swimming, more activity, more thrashing, and she was starting to get panicked.
And then as it progressed, you started to realize, "Whoa, something's not right here."
She started to scream and she started looking around and her eyes were, like, bigger and bigger and realizing that, "I really am in trouble here."
And then they would pull her under.
And then they would come up and then when she-- they came up, she'd be, "Help me, help me."
And then they'd take her down again.
And she would be submerged for several seconds up to, I don't know, maybe a minute.
You're not keeping track.
So it was harder and harder for her to get the air in because she was screaming.
And my sister remembers her saying, "I don't want to die."
Well, condolences to Keltie's family.
Yeah.
That we couldn't help her was pretty wretched.
Sealand closed. Well, it's probably a good thing.
I mean, it was a little pond.
And I think the owner, you know, made the right decision for whatever reasons.
I don't believe he's a bad guy, a bad man.
I think he was shocked by the whole affair, too.
The blush was gone from the business and he decided that that was it.
We should shut down.
No one ever contacted us. There was an inquest.
No one ever asked us to say what happened.
Yeah. You know, we just left.
There was no big lawsuits afterwards and there was no memorial.
And the only thing remaining of Keltie Byrne is-- is what's left in the folks' minds who recall the case.
So in the newspaper articles, the cause of death was that she drowned accidentally, but she was pulled under by the whale.
Well, there's a bit of smoke and mirrors going on.
I mean, one of the fundamental facts is is that none of the witnesses were clear about which whale pulled Keltie in.
Yes. Yeah, it was the large whale.
Tilikum, the male, is the one that went after her.
And the other two just kind of circled around.
But he was definitely the instigator.
And we knew it was that whale because he had the flopped-over fin.
Like, it was very easy to tell.
Sealand of the Pacific closed its doors and was looking, I guess, to make a buck on the way out and these whales are worth millions of dollars.
When SeaWorld heard that Tilikum was available after this accident at Sealand of the Pacific, they really wanted Tilikum because they needed a breeder.
So I don't even think that anybody even was questioning, like, is this a good idea?
My understanding of the situation was that Tilikum and the others would not be used in shows.
They would not be performance animals.
Our understanding of their behavior was that it was such a highly stimulating event for them that they were likely to repeat it.
Sealand was-- we were all young and bit of sea cowboys and we weren't so technical and scientific as SeaWorld, so we all had this vision that they knew more than us and they were better than us and Tilikum would have a bigger pool and he'd have a better life and he would have better care and he'd have better food and it'd be a great life for him.
So it was like, "Okay, Tilly.
You're going to Disneyland. Lucky you."
The orcas' intelligence may be even superior to man's.
As parents, they are exemplary, better than many human beings.
And like human beings, they have a profound instinct for vengeance.
Dino De Laurentiis presents...
..."Orca."
If you go back only 35 years, we knew nothing.
In fact, less than nothing.
What the public had was superstition and fear.
A fight to the death... between the two most dangerous animals on Earth.
What in hell are you?!
These were the vicious k*ller whales that, you know, had 48 sharp teeth that would rip you to shreds if they got a chance.
What we learned is that they're amazingly friendly and understanding and intuitively want to be your companion.
Are you recording this?
And to this day there is no record of an orca doing any harm to any human in the wild.
They live in these big families.
And they have life spans very similar to human life spans.
The females can live to about 100, maybe more, males to about 50 or 60.
But the adult offspring never leave their mother's side.
Each community has a completely different set of behaviors.
Each has a complete repertoire of vocalizations with no overlap.
You could call them languages.
The scientific community is reluctant to say any other animal but humans uses languages, but there's every indication that they use languages.
The orca brain just screams out intelligence, awareness.
We took this tremendous brain and we put it in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.
What we found was just astounding.
They've got a part of the brain that humans don't have.
A part of their brain has extended out right adjacent to their limbic system.
The system processes emotions.
The safest inference would be these are animals that have highly elaborated emotional lives.
It's becoming clear that dolphins and whales have a sense of self, a sense of social bonding that they've taken to another level-- much stronger, much more complex than in other mammals, including humans.
We look at mass strandings, the fact that they stand by each other.
Everything about them is social-- everything.
It's been suggested that their whole sense of self is distributed among the individuals in their group.
There are five of them.
These orca are going to att*ck this seal on-- they've been breaking the ice off and swimming around him.
Oh, here they come, two of them. Lookit, underneath there.
You can see them underneath.
They made a big wave. Look at that, a big wave.
Oh, yeah. Whoa.
Oh, God. Oh, God. No, no, no.
Oh! Oh, I can't stand it.
If you can't watch the bullfight, you'd better leave.
Oh, yeah, here they go. Look at this-- three of them.
Look at this. Look at this.
Oh, God. Oh, no!
Oh, God! It's all over.
Nope, not quite.
Yeah, it's all over.
It's all over.
The First Nations people and the old fishermen on the coast, they call them "blackfish."
They're an animal that possesses great spiritual power and they're not to be meddled with.
I've spent a lot of time around k*ller whales and they're always in charge.
I never get out of the boat, I never mess with them.
The speed and the power is quite amazing.
Rules are the same as the pool hall-- keep one foot on the floor at all times.
Even after seeing them thousands of times...
you see them and you still-- you know, wake up.
He arrived, I think, in 1992.
I was at Whale and Dolphin Stadium when he arrived.
And he's twice as large as the next animal in the facility.
Yay!
The guy is right at about 12,000 pounds.
That's incredible. He looks fantastic.
When Tilikum arrived at SeaWorld, he was att*cked viciously, repeatedly by Katina and others.
In the wild, it's a very matriarchal society.
Male whales are kept at the perimeter.
In captivity, the animals are squeezed into very close proximity.
Tilikum-- the poor guy is so large, he couldn't get away because he just is not as mobile relative to the smaller and more agile females.
And where was he going to run? There's no place to run.
I think he spent a lot of time in isolation.
SeaWorld claims that, "Oh, no, he's always in with the other-- with the females," but from what I saw, he was mostly put with the females for breeding purposes and he didn't spend a lot of time, you know, with the other whales.
It's for his own protection that he gets b*at up.
And so by segregating him, it provides a physical barrier so the females can't kick his butt.
Tilikum is pretty much kept in the back, and then brought out at the very end as, like, the big splash.
He was always happy to see you in the morning.
Hi! There we go.
You're the boy. Look at his chompers.
Maybe because he was alone, maybe because he was hungry, maybe because he just liked you-- who knows what was going on in his head.
You want to whistle?
-- All right, so he can talk to us.
Yes. You don't say.
He's precious. Yes?
That was really loud. Terrific.
Come on, big boy. Show the pecs.
He seemed to like to work. He seemed to be interested.
He seemed to want to learn new things.
He seemed to be enjoying working with the trainers.
He, for me, was a joy.
He really responded to me and I-- you know, every day I went to work, I was happy to see Tilly.
Boop! That's cute.
You're being too cute.
I never got the impression of him while I was there that, oh, my God, he's the scary whale.
Not at all.
Maybe some of it's just our naiveté or whatever, you know, because we weren't given the full details of Keltie's situation.
Turn around. Smile, buddy.
Cheese. Yay!
I was under the impression that Tilikum had nothing to do with her death specifically, that it was the female whales who were responsible for her death.
What I found really odd at first was the way they were acting around this whale and what they had told us seemed to me to be two different things.
The first day he arrived, I remember one of the senior trainers at SeaWorld, she--
Tilikum was in a pool and she was walking over a gate, and she had her wetsuit unzipped and it was tied around her waist.
And she was making cooing noises and going, "Hey, Tilikum, what a cute little whale."
And she was, like, just kind of play-talking at him, and one of the supervisors said, "Get her out of there!"
And just screamed at her, like, "Get her away from there," like they were so worried that something was going to happen.
And I remember thinking, "Why are you guys making such a big deal out of this when he didn't actually k*ll her?"
Well, clearly management thought there was some reason to exercise caution around him.
You know, clearly they knew more than they were telling us.
Ladies and gentlemen, the next two behaviors you're going to be seeing, you can only see right here at SeaWorld.
Jeff was out in the audience filming one of the Shamu shows.
It was a perfect show.
All of the hot dog sequences, the water works sequences went off great.
I was really excited just to be capturing this because it was kind of turning out to be a great show.
A show that's kind of complete-- it doesn't-- it probably only happens a few times a week.
At the very end of the show, Liz was working Tilikum and apparently Tilikum lunged out of the water at her.
And I had captured Tilikum coming out of the water kind of turning sideways and appeared to me to try to grab Liz.
And at that moment, the tape became unusable.
I was just kind of basically instructed to get rid of the tape.
Wanting to kind of preserve the tape, I actually used the editing equipment and snipped out that little half-second or second when he did that and stitched it back together so it just kind of looked like a glitch in the tape.
And I'm like, "Look at this." And it was like, "No.
This is no longer usable."
You know, and so we had to destroy the tape.
It's pretty outrageous that SeaWorld would claim there was no expecting Tilikum to come out of the water because they had witnessed him coming out of the water, and it's written into his profile.
He lunges at trainers.
When we visit SeaWorld, we tend to take advantage of the fact that Shamu has been provided with a safe and comfortable habitat.
And everything trained is an extension of the k*ller whale's natural behavior.
I spewed out the party line during shows.
I'm totally mortified now.
There was like-- something like, "Look at Namu.
Namu's not doing that because she has to."
Namu is doing this because she really wants to.
Oh, my gosh.
Like, some of the things I'm embarrassed by, so embarrassed by.
At the time, I think I could have convinced myself that the relationships that we had were built on something stronger than the fact that I'm giving them fish.
You know, I like to think that...
but I don't know that that's the truth.
I had been there a while and I had seen a few other things along the way that made me question why I was there and what we were doing with these animals.
On November 4, 1988, a k*ller whale at SeaWorld gave the performance of a lifetime.
Don't miss this small miracle.
Come see our new Baby Shamu.
I know it was naive of me, but I thought that...
it was our responsibility to do as much as we could to keep their family units together since we knew that in the wild that's what happens.
♪ Yes, sir, that's our baby... ♪ Kalina was the first Baby Shamu.
Baby Shamu-- SeaWorld's newest star...
She had become quite disruptive and challenging her mom a little bit and disrupting some shows and that kind of thing.
♪ She's got the whole place jumpin' ♪
♪ Shamu, she's that baby whale. ♪ It was decided by the higher-ups that she would be moved to another park when she was just four, four and a half years old.
And that was news to us as trainers that were working with her.
To me, it had never crossed my mind that they might be moving the baby from her mom.
The supervisors basically was kind of mocking me, like, "Oh, you're saying, 'Poor Kalina,"' you know, "'what's she going to do without her mommy?"'
And, you know-- and that of course just shut me up.
So, the night of the move, we had to deploy the nets to separate them and get Kalina, the baby, into the med pool.
And Katina was generally a quiet whale.
She was not an overly vocal whale.
After, Kalina was removed from the scene and put on the truck and taken to the airport, and Katina, her mom, was left in the pool.
She stayed in the corner of the pool, like, literally just shaking and screaming, screeching, crying.
Like, I had never seen her do anything like that.
And the other females in the pool, maybe once or twice during the night they'd come out and check on her.
And she'd screech and cry and they would just run back.
There was nothing that you could call that, watching it, besides grief.
Those are not your whales.
You know, you love them and you'll think, "I'm the one that touches them, feeds them, keeps them alive, gives them the care that they need."
They're not your whales.
They own them.
Kasatka and Takara were very close.
Kasatka was the mother, Takara's the calf.
Takara was special to me.
They were inseparable.
When they separated Kasatka and Takara, it was to take Takara to Florida.
Once Takara had already been stretchered out of the pool, put on the truck, driven to the airport...
Kasatka continued to make vocals that had never been heard before.
They brought in the senior research scientists to analyze the vocals.
They were long-range vocals.
She was trying something that no one had even heard before looking for Takara.
That's heartbreaking.
How can anyone look at that and think that that is morally acceptable?
It's not.
It is not okay.
Stand by, Dean.
Let's go live to SeaWorld where Dean Gomersall is joining us for a sneak peek.
Hi, Dean. Tell us about the new show.
Good afternoon, Richard.
The new show is the Whale and Dolphin Discovery.
What it does is it shows the relationship we have between all our animals here at the Whale...
There's so many things that were told to us that they tell us-- they tell you so many times that you just-- you start believing it.
So all the animals here get along very well.
It's just like training your dog, really.
I was blind, you know. I was a kid.
I didn't know what I was doing, really.
Nice. Good job.
You did a real good job.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is David from Maryland.
Go ahead and wave at everyone, David.
I just really bought into what they told us.
You know, I learned to say what they told us to the audience.
Hello out there.
Children are some of Shamu's biggest fans.
We can do just about anything we want.
I thought I knew everything about k*ller whales when I worked there, you know, and everything about these animals.
I really know nothing about k*ller whales.
I know a lot about being an animal trainer or a k*ller whale trainer, but I don't know anything about these animals' natural history or their behavior.
I really in some ways believed a lot of what I was learning from them, because why would they lie?
Because the whales in their pools die young, they like to say that all orcas die at 25 or 30 years.
25 to 35 years. 25 to 35 years.
They're documented in the wild living to be about...
35, mid-30s.
They tend to live a lot longer in this environment because they have all the veterinary care.
And of course that's false.
We knew by 1980, after half a dozen years of the research, that they live equivalent to human life spans.
And every other potentially embarrassing fact is twisted and turned and denied one way or another.
So, in the wild, they live...
Less. Less.
Like the floppy dorsal fins.
25% of whales have a fin that turns over like that as they get older.
Dorsal collapse happens in less than 1% of wild k*ller whales.
We know this.
All the c*ptive males 100% have collapsed dorsal fins.
And they say that they're a family, that the whales are in their family.
They have their pods.
But that's just an artificial assemblage of their collection, however management decides they should mix them and whichever ones happen to be born or bought and brought in.
That's not a family, you know. Come on.
You've got animals from different cultural subsets that have been brought in from various parks.
These are different nations.
These aren't just two different k*ller whales.
These animals, they've got different genes, they use different languages.
Well, what could happen as a result of them being thrown in with other whales that they haven't grown up with, that are not part of their culture is there's hyperaggression...
...a lot of v*olence, a lot of k*lling in captivity that you don't ever see in the wild.
For the health and safety of the animals, please do not put your hands in the water.
It was always sort of this backdrop, this underpinning of tension between animals.
Whale-on-whale aggression was just part of your-- the daily existence.
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♪ Blue wonder... ♪ In the wild, when there's tension, they've got thousands of square miles to exit the scene and they can get away.
You don't have that in captivity.
Could you imagine being in a small concrete enclosure for your life when you're used to swimming 100 miles a day?
♪ Free-feeling... ♪ Sometimes this aggression became very severe and, in fact, whales have d*ed in captivity because of this aggression.
I think it was 1988.
Kandu, trying to assert her dominance over Corky, rammed Corky.
It fractured her jaw, which cut an artery in her head and then she bled out.
Now that's got to be a hard way to go down.
I saw that there was just a lot of things that weren't right.
And there was a lot of it-- misinformation-- and something was amiss.
And, you know, I sort of compartmentalized that part of it and did the best that I could with the knowledge that I had to take care of the animals that were there.
You know, I think all the trainers there have the same thing in their heart.
They're trying to make a difference in the lives of the animals.
You think that, "if I leave, who's going to take care of Tilikum?"
That's why I stayed. Because I felt sorry for Tilikum.
I mean, if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of it, I stayed because I felt sorry for Tilikum.
And I couldn't bring myself to stop coming and trying to take care of him.
Gosh, do I love coming out here every day and having the audience just love what we're doing with the animals.
How do I make this animal as beautiful as they are and have people walk away loving this animal?
And they're touched and they're moved and I feel like I made a difference to them.
I left in January of 2010, a month before Dawn passed away.
She was like a safety guru.
I mean, she was always double-checking, making sure that everyone was doing the right thing.
So I remember she would record every show that she did and she would watch it and critique herself.
She was constantly trying to be better.
When I found out it was Dawn, I was shocked.
That could have been me. I could have been the spotter.
What if I was there and I could have saved her?
You know, all these things go through your mind.
John Sillick is the guy who, in 1987, was crushed between two whales at SeaWorld of San Diego.
Now, even though I'd been working at SeaWorld for six months, I had no idea that that had even happened.
I never even heard that story.
And the SeaWorld party line was that, well, that was-- it was a trainer error.
It was John's fault. You know, John's fault.
He was supposed to get off that whale.
And for years, I believed that and I told people that.
I actually started at SeaWorld, like, five days after that event occurred and we didn't-- we weren't told much about it other than it was trainer error.
And, you know, especially when you're new into the program, you don't really question a whole lot.
Well, you know, years later, when you actually look at the footage, you go, "You know what? He didn't do anything wrong."
That whale just landed on him, you know.
That whale just went to the wrong spot.
It could have been aggression. Who knows?
But it was not the trainer's fault at all, watching that video.
When I saw the video of the k*ller whale landing on John, I mean, it just absolutely took my breath away.
L9aSped.
I watched it two or three times, and every time I saw that, I just gasped.
I could not believe what I was seeing.
What kept his body together is-- his wetsuit basically held him together.
But I know he's had multiple surgeries and he's got tons of hardware in his body.
And it's hard for me to believe that I didn't actually see that video while I was actually an animal trainer because it seems to me that every person who works with k*ller whales should have to watch that video.
Tamarie-- you know, Tamarie made mistakes.
The most important one was interacting with whales without a spotter.
So she's putting her foot on Orkid, she's taking her foot off.
She's putting her foot on Orkid, her rostrum, she's taking it off.
Watching the video, knowing Orkid, your stomach drops because you know what's probably going to happen.
She grabbed her foot.
Tamarie whips around and she grabs the gate.
You see herjust ripped from the gate.
At this point, Tamarie knows that she's in trouble.
She's under the water.
Splash and Orkid both have her.
She's totally out of view.
No other trainer knows that this is happening.
People start to scream.
It was a park guest that was filming it.
You hear-- you don't see her, but you hear Tamarie surface.
You hear herjust scream out, "Somebody help me."
And the way she screamed it, it was just such a bloodcurdling-- like she knew she was going to die.
Robin-- when he ran over, he made a brilliant decision.
He told a trainer to run and take the chain off Kasatka's gate.
By taking that chain off, it would give the precursor to Orkid that Kasatka was coming in.
Kasatka's more dominant than Orkid, so Orkid let her go.
Her arm, it was U-shaped.
It was compound fractured.
She's very lucky to be alive, that's for sure.
I believe it's 70 plus, maybe even more, just k*ller whale trainer accidents.
Maybe 30 of them happened prior to me being actually hired at SeaWorld.
And I knew about none of them.
I've seen animals come out at trainers.
Something's wrong.
I've seen people get slammed.
The whales, they're just playing or-- or they're upset for a second.
It was just something that happened, you know?
This culture of "You get back on the horse and you dive back in the water.
And if you're hurt, well, then we've got other people that will replace you."
And, "You came a long way. Are you sure you want that?"
A SeaWorld trainer is recovering today after a terrifying ordeal in front of a horrified audience.
For some reason, the whale just took a different approach to what it was going to do with a very senior, very experienced trainer, Ken Peters, and dragged him to the bottom of the pool and held him at the bottom.
Let him go, picked him up, took him down again.
And these periods he was taken down were pretty close to the mark.
You know, a minute, a minute 20.
When he was at the surface, he didn't panic, he didn't thrash, he didn't scream.
Maybe he's just built that way.
But he stroked the whale.
And the whale let go of one foot and grabbed the other.
That's a pretty deep pool and he took him right down.
I think that's to two atmospheres of pressure.
Apparently, Mr. Peters is an experienced scuba diver and I think that knowledge probably contributed to how he was able to be hauled down there that quickly and stay calm and know what to do.
He knew what he was doing because you can see him actually in the film.
It's-- the def is so good, you can see him ventilating.
You can see him ventilating really hard.
So he knows about swimming and diving and being underwater.
He may have been assuming he was going under again.
I did not walk away unimpressed by his calm demeanor during that whole affair.
I would be scared shitless.
He was near to the end.
Presumably, Ken Peters had a relationship with this whale.
Maybe he did. Maybe that's what saved him.
But Peters got the whale to let him go.
And they strung a net across.
And Ken Peters pulled himself over the float line and swam like a demon to a slide-out because the whale was coming right behind him.
The whale jumped over and came right after him.
He tried to stand up and run.
Of course, his feet were damaged.
I mean, he just fell and he scrambled.
And they take this as a prime example of their training working.
And they say, "Just stand back and stay calm," and that did work.
They claim this as a victory of how they do business.
And maybe so, but it can also be interpreted as a hair's breadth away from another fatality.
Hi, Shamu. Hi, everybody.
We're the Johnsons from Detroit, Michigan.
We sure had a great time when we visited SeaWorld.
It's one of our favorite places.
Yeah, I like the part when Shamu gets everybody wet.
When the whales get close to the glass and start kicking out the water?
Whamo! You're a goner.
Orange County's sheriff's deputies have identified the 27-year-old man found dead in a k*ller whale's t*nk at SeaWorld.
The victim is Daniel P. Dukes from South Carolina.
Dukes was found yesterday draped over the back of Tilikum, the largest orca held in captivity.
Well, all I know is the public relations version of it-- he was a young man that had been arrested not long before he snuck into SeaWorld.
Maybe he climbed the barbed wire fence around the perimeter and stayed after hours.
Perfect story line-- a mentally disturbed guy hides in the park after hours and strips his clothes off and decides he wants to have a magical experience with an orca and drowns because he became hypothermic.
Right. So that's the story line and none of us were there to know the difference.
He was not detected by the night watch trainers who were presumably at that station.
There are cameras all over SeaWorld.
There are cameras all over the back of Shamu Stadium pointing every which way.
There are underwater cameras.
I find it hard to believe that nobody knew until the morning that there was a body in there.
They have a night watch trainer every night.
That person didn't hear any splashing or screaming?
I mean, I just find that really suspicious.
One of the employees--
I don't know if it was a physical therapist or somebody-- was coming in in the morning and there was Tilikum, you know, with a dead guy, a dead, naked guy on his back, kind of parading him around the back pool.
The public relations spin on this was that he was kind of a drifter and d*ed of hypothermia.
But the medical examiner reports were more graphic than that.
For example, Tilikum stripped him, bit off his genitals.
There was bite marks all over his body.
Now, whether that was post-death or pre-death, I don't know.
But, yeah, all I can comment on is that the guy definitely jumped in the wrong pool.
So why keep Tilikum there?
This guy, he has a proven track record of k*lling people.
He's clearly a liability to the institution.
Why keep him around? Well, it's quite simple to answer.
And that is that his semen is worth a lot of money.
Over the years, Tilikum has been one of the main breeding whales at SeaWorld.
It's brilliant because they can inseminate way more female whales, because they can just get his sperm and freeze it.
And then he's basically operating as a sperm bank.
In a reputable breeding program, rule number one is you certainly would not breed an animal that has shown a history of aggression towards humans.
Imagine if you had a pit bull who had k*lled.
That animal would have likely been put down.
But in the entire SeaWorld collection-- it's like 54% of the whales in SeaWorld's collection now have Tilikum's genes.
The fall is to assume that all k*ller whales are like Tilikum.
You have to look at their learning history from birth.
You have to understand why Tilikum was a hazard to anybody in the water.
And you have to understand that none of the other k*ller whales at SeaWorld that are in that system are that way.
What about the incident at Loro Parque?
First of all, I-- I can't--
I can't speak with specificity about Loro Parque.
I wasn't there.
In fact, I know very little about it.
Probably about as much as the general public knows.
Loro Parque, it's in the Canary Islands, which is an autonomous region of Spain.
It's the largest tourist attraction in all of Spain.
And when SeaWorld sent the orcas to Loro Parque, everybody was always questioning, like, how did they make that leap to send four young orcas to a park off the west coast of Africa with trainers who-- a lot of them had never been around orcas before?
Nothing was ready.
The venue wasn't ready.
It wasn't ready for the orcas, it wasn't ready for a show.
The owner of the park didn't want to lose revenue by shutting down the pools and repairing them.
So for three years, the animals ate the pools and for three years the animals had problems-- with their teeth, with their stomachs.
So that's the reason why these animals are enduring the endoscope procedures.
Back up. Now back up, back up.
Those are still SeaWorld's animals and they are responsible for those animals.
Loro Parque doesn't have a good reputation.
People that work in the business know the reputation of places and Loro Parque does not have a good reputation.
They didn't spend the same amount of time as the SeaWorld trainers, did not go through the same regimen that the SeaWorld trainers went through.
You know, and Alexis really was the best trainer.
And I did say-- I said, "You're the only trainer there that can hold his own with a SeaWorld trainer."
And I said, "But you need to be careful."
Anywhere along the line it could have been stopped because everyone knew it was a tragedy waiting to happen.
But no one ever did anything about it.
And in the end, it was the best trainer who lost his life.
Those were SeaWorld's whales.
They were trained using SeaWorld's techniques.
And their training was being supervised at the time of the fatal accident by one of their senior trainers from San Diego.
For somebody to get up and say in a court of law they have no knowledge of the linkages between SeaWorld and this park in Tenerife is well-- either she doesn't know and is telling the truth or it's just a bold-faced lie.
As trainers, we never forget Shamu's true potential.
We see it each and every day.
That's why all of our interactions are very carefully thought out, especially our water work interaction.
Whoa!
You big dork.
Especially our water work interactions because they're potentially the most dangerous.
I'd been expecting it since the second person was k*lled.
I'd been expecting somebody to be k*lled by Tilikum.
I'm surprised it took as long as it did.
First tonight, a six-ton k*ller whale has lived up to its name, k*lling an experienced trainer at SeaWorld, Orlando, today.
A tourist at an earlier show said the animal seemed agitated.
Trainers complained the whales weren't cooperating.
The whole show, the main show, was a disaster that day.
There was, you know, whales chasing each other and eventually the trainers decided that they had to stop the show because they couldn't get the whales under control.
Tilikum was in the back pool set up to do a Dine with Shamu performance with Dawn.
Likely she saw what had gone on during the main show and so she had probably felt more pressure to do a good show.
Yay!
When you watch the whole video, you can see that Tilikum is actually really with Dawn in the beginning of the video.
There's a couple of behaviors that she asks him to do where Tilikum justjumps right in and he does exactly what she asks him to do.
There seemed to be a point in the session where things went south, so to speak.
And in my humble opinion, it was at that missed bridge-- whistle bridge, on the perimeter pec wave.
She asked him to do a perimeter pec wave where she asked him to basically go all the way around the pool and wave his pectoral flipper.
And she blows her whistle...
There we go. ...which is a bridge, which tells the animal that, okay, you've done a good job.
Come back and get food.
But he missed that cue.
He likes waving so much. That's beyond waving.
And he went all the way around the pool on this perimeter pec wave.
That's all right. We're going to let him keep on waving.
My interpretation is that he didn't hear the whistle.
So not only did he not hear the bridge, then he went and did a perfect behavior and came back, and what he got was what we call a three-second neutral response, which is just a way to let the animal know, "No, you didn't do the correct thing.
You're not going to get rewarded. And then we're going to move on."
And then you can also see through the video that Dawn is running out of food.
The animals can sense when you're getting to the bottom of your bucket of fish, because they can hear the ice clanging around and the kind of fishy, soupy water at the bottom.
And the handfuls of fish that they're getting delivered by the trainer are all getting smaller.
So they know that they're coming down to the end of session.
When you see the difference between the beginning of the video and the end of the video, you can see that he's just not quite on his game anymore.
There was no food left.
She kept asking him for more and more behaviors.
He wasn't getting reinforced for the behaviors that he was doing correctly.
He probably was frustrated towards the end.
Then she walked around the perimeter of G pool.
He followed her.
And then continued over into the rocky ledge area where she laid down with him to do a relationship session, which is-- it's quiet time, basically.
Tilikum at some point grabbed ahold of her left forearm and started to drag her and eventually did a barrel roll and pulled her in.
It may have started as play or frustration and clearly escalated to be very violent behavior that I think was anything but play.
In the end, he basically just completely mutilated that poor girl.
They were gathering all of the trainers at the Texas park.
He said, "There's been an accident at the Florida park and a trainer was k*lled."
Hearing that it was Dawn, I was-- I couldn't believe it.
I just remember saying to myself, "Not Dawn.
It can't be Dawn."
He said that-- "And he still has her."
And I just... was so disturbed by that and the reality of how powerless we are.
Avulsion, laceration, abrasion, fractures.
Fractures and associated hemorrhages.
Blunt force traumas to the main body, to the extremities.
To see this meted out against a trainer... and I cannot fathom the reason.
It's shocking.
The lawyer for OSHA asked me what I thought we'd learned, and I'm sitting in the courtroom and I've got the Keltie Byrne case file in one hand and I've got Dawn Brancheau in the other.
And they're almost, to the day, 20 years apart.
And I'm looking at these two things.
My only answer is, "Nothing."
In fact, it's not a damn thing.
We have not learned a damn thing for something like that to happen 20 years apart.
Could you tell if it was an accident or if this--
Did this female trainer work with this whale on a regular basis?
I don't know. What apparently happened is we had a female trainer back in the whale holding area.
She apparently slipped or fell into the t*nk and was fatally injured by one of the whales.
At first, SeaWorld reported that a trainer slipped and fell in the water and was drowned.
So that was the first report.
It wasn't until eyewitness accounts disputed that that they had to go back in their huddle and say, "Wait a minute. We gotta come up with a new plan."
New tonight-- SeaWorld has confirmed the k*ller whale pulled the woman into the water.
She didn't fall into the t*nk as the sheriff's department initially reported.
The new plan is that he grabbed her ponytail.
This is a subtle way of placing the blame on Dawn's shoulders.
She shouldn't have had a long ponytail, or if she did have that ponytail, it should have been up in a bun.
Dawn, if she was standing here with me right now, would tell you that it was her mistake in allowing that to happen.
They blamed her.
How dare you?
How disrespectful for you to blame her when she's not even alive to defend herself.
He grabbed her ponytail and pulled her into the water.
That's as simple as it gets.
There are photographs of plenty of other trainers doing exactly the same thing that she was doing, so I knew that SeaWorld was lying about the fact that this was her fault.
The ponytail, in all likelihood, is just a tale.
The safety spotter, who apparently didn't actually see the takedown, came up with that.
Are you excited? Yeah!
During the spotter's testimony, OSHA pushed him to say that he wasn't really sure that it was her ponytail that was in the whale's mouth, that he just saw her underwater and he assumed it was the ponytail.
OSHA contends that the whale came up and grabbed Dawn Brancheau's arm, saying that that was another level of aggressiveness.
And again, SeaWorld is saying it was not an aggressive move.
One of SeaWorld's top curators, Chuck Tompkins, said when Dawn Brancheau was pulled off that ledge, it wasn't necessarily aggressive behavior by the whale.
The initial grab was not an act of aggression.
This is not a crazed animal.
The industry has a vested interest in spinning these so that the animals continue to appear like cuddly teddy bears that are completely safe.
You know, that sells a lot of Shamu dolls, it sells a lot of tickets at the gate, and that's the story line that they're going to continue to stick with for as long as they can.
Recognize that those that say this is a crazed animal that acted out and grabbed Dawn maliciously, they want to prove the theorem that captivity makes animals crazy.
And that is just false.
All whales in captivity have a bad life.
They're all emotionally destroyed.
They're all psychologically traumatized, so they are ticking time bombs.
It's not just Tilikum.
We have to separate what happened to Dawn-- and, as tragic as it is, no one wants to ever see it happen again.
Can SeaWorld create an environment where it never happens again?
Yes, I absolutely believe they can.
What if there were no SeaWorlds?
I can't imagine a society, with the value we put on marine mammals, if those parks didn't exist.
I'm not at all interested in having my daughter, who is three and a half, grow up thinking that it's normalized to have these intelligent, highly evolved animals in concrete pools.
I don't want her to think that's how we treat the kin that we find ourselves around on this planet.
I think it's atrocious.
This hearing is expected to last all week with OSHA continuing to work toward this theory-- that SeaWorld knew there was a calculated risk of injury or death, but put trainers in the water with the whales anyway, while SeaWorld will say that Dawn Brancheau's death was an isolated incident.
Reporting live in Seminole County, Dave McDaniel, WESH 2 News.
There's something wrong.
You know with Tilikum that there's something wrong and that's-- when you have a relationship with that animal and you-- you understand that he's k*lling not to be a savage.
He's not k*lling because he's just crazy.
He's not k*lling because he doesn't know what he's doing.
He's k*lling because he's frustrated and he's got aggravations and he doesn't know how to-- he has no outlet for it.
Now Tilikum is spending a great deal of time by himself and basically floating lifeless in a pool.
Three hours now... and he hasn't moved.
They try to sugarcoat it by saying, "He comes out in the front pool every once in a while.
Now he's doing shows."
Really? You know what he does in a show?
He does a few bows and then he goes back in his little jail cell.
That's his life.
I feel sad for Tilikum.
A regal thing like him swimming around the t*nk with his fin flopped over like that compared to a wild bull k*ller whale that size, which is one of the most kinetic and dynamic things you can imagine...
I feel sad when I see him.
It's time to stop the shows.
It's time to stop forcing animals to perform in basically a circus environment.
And they should release the animals that are young enough and healthy enough to be released, and the animals like Tilikum who are old and sick and have put in 25 years in the industry should be released to an open ocean pen so they can live out their lives and just experience the natural rhythms of the ocean.
This is a multibillion-dollar corporation that makes its money through the exploitation of orcas.
They're not suitable to have in captivity.
The whales are really bored.
You deprive them of all this environmental stimulation.
I think that in 50 years, we'll look back and go, "My God, what a barbaric time."
Dawn Brancheau-- DB, dream big.
Dawn was the most loving, giving person you ever met.
Her smile just radiated.
She's comp-- she fulfilled her life.
We saw whales swimming in straight lines with straight dorsal fins.
I was so honored to be there.
And I was so thankful that I had sunglasses on because the tears were kind of coming out.
And it was moving.
Blackfish (2013)
Moderator: Maskath3