The whaling industry has been known to literally ‘buy' votes from other whale nations and lobby to keep whaling practices legal across the world. For aquariums, an orca is worth millions, and a bad Press is dealt with great public relations stunts
The first record of ‘whaling’ goes back to about 3000 BC, when whales were hunted for their meat and oil from their fat and liver. By the 1930s, over 50,000 whales were being killed annually and the oceans were looking emptier. Most whales are slow breeders and have a single calf only once every few years. With the wild population of all whales severely depleted, the International Whaling Commission passed a ban on commercial whaling in 1986, but, though controlled and monitored to a certain degree, whaling has continued.
Cetacens is the order of mammals that includes all species of whales, dolphins and porpoises and have always intrigued us as mammals that chose to live in the oceans and yet breathe air like us. Fossils records have proved that around 50 million years ago, cetaceans had a common ancestor that lived on land. Now studies have shown that they might be even closer to us than we ever could have imagined. Besides commercial whaling, dolphins and orcas have been captured in the wild and kept in aquariums as performing attractions.
Recently, a moving and powerful film called Blackfish came out and exposed the ‘dirty little secret’ that marine parks didn’t want us to know. The 90-minute documentary follows the story of Tilikum, an orca that was captured off the coast of Iceland in 1983 and taken from his pod when he was three years old. There is actual footage of a young orca being separated from its family and being captured. The family, instead of running to save their lives, circled the boat and just stayed there and made sounds which can only be described as screaming in panic and grief. Today, Tilikum lives in SeaWorld, Orlando, in Florida.
What has made Tilikum infamous is both unfortunate and tragic, since in his captivity Tilikum has killed three of his trainers. For the longest time, SeaWorld dodged all allegations and kept the show going, claiming the incidents were either the trainer’s error or miscommunication with the animal during a performance or training. It completely ignored the fact that it had imprisoned an extremely intelligent and social animal in an enclosure which was barely large enough to contain him for 30 years.
Orcas live in close-knit family structures in the wild and not unlike us, mother and child bond for life. The experts interviewed in the film believe that the trauma of being torn from his family and being kept in an environment of reward and punishment, has eventually led to a kind of psychosis in the creature. What is even more revealing is the fact that there has not been even a single recorded orca attack on humans in the wild ever.
Neuro-scientist lori Marino and a team of researchers have studied the brain of cetaceans and have found an astounding potential for intelligence. They found that the limbic system which processes all emotions in mammal brains was different in dolphins and whales. While some areas were smaller, there were other parts that were not only larger but more elaborate than what is found in the human brain. In fact, they had an extra lobe of tissue that did not even occur in other mammals, including humans.
In other words, cetaceans are translating and processing emotions on a different level altogether, something that is impossible for us to wrap our heads around and even test at this time. They also found that in a pod the idea and concept of an individual was very different from how we understand it. It seems that the way a pod communicates, interacts and moves is based less on individual’s acting and more on their behaviour as a complete and single unit, almost as if they were one animal.
This would really go a little further in explaining why a pod doesn’t leave behind an individual who is injured or sick, or like in the case of Tilikum, being captured. There has been a lot of discussion on the reasons behind mass strandings when entire pods of dolphins and pilot whales beach themselves. That is why, when a pod gets captured, no individual seems to try too hard to escape.
In another film called The Cove, the mass slaughtering of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, was filmed. Boats went out and drove pods of dolphins into a cove and netted the area trapping them. The dolphins could have easily jumped over the nets but for some reason when threatened the pod sticks together and no one leaves. It has been suggested that to be able to disconnect from a group might not even be part of their psychology. This is only a suggestion at this point but it certainly is descriptive of the behaviour which has been observed time and again.
In the case of male orcas they found that if the mother dies, the baby goes into some kind of a clinical depression, stops eating and may even die. Even in captivity when a young orca was separated from its mother and sold to another aquarium, the frantic mother orca went to a corner of the pool and made vocalisations for days which hadn’t been heard before. Experts were brought in and they concluded that the mother was making sounds that could travel long distances, presumably in an attempt to reach her baby.
Extremely vocal as a species, captive whales have been known to go completely silent and still. Orca pods can be as different from each other as people from opposite ends of the world. From the food they eat, to hunting techniques and their language, orcas from different pods would be unable to communicate in the same way. Moreover, all captive cetaceans have health issues, and it would seem obvious that an animal that is meant to swim for miles and migrate long distances in social groups with endless ocean all around would fall ill when kept in dark enclosures, in isolation and let ‘out’ into the larger pool only for performances.
So with all this data and research, how could the whaling industry and marine aquariums existIJ No surprise here, but it all comes down to the politics of business. The whaling industry has been known to literally ‘buy’ votes from other whale nations and lobby to keep whaling practices legal in waters across the world. For aquariums, an orca is worth millions and a bad Press is dealt with great public relations stunt.
A while back, a wild orca which had strayed and beached itself was rescued by a private aquarium which declared it would release it once it had been treated and was fit for release. Months after, the Orca is still in captivity and the aquarium has withdrawn its original promise of releasing it back to the wild. Keiko, a male Orca that starred in the film Free Willy, had a foundation which campaigned for his release back in the wild. The campaigning eventually paid off and Keiko was released into a sea pen and then into the open sea off the coast of Norway, but unfortunately. he got pneumonia and died in 2003.
In October, 2011, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a lawsuit against Seaworld on behalf of five orcas captured in the wild — Tilikum, Katina, Kasatka, Ulises, and Corky. PETA asserted that the conditions under which the orcas are kept not only amounts to slavery but the orcas are artificially inseminated and have been turned into breeding machines for seaworld. The case seeks to fight for the release of the orcas into a large sea pens and be in the environment they are meant to be, and ultimately be reunited with their pods.
In India, the Government of Maharashtra had approved a `509 crore project to build the first oceanarium in the country. The park is expected to be thrown open by this Diwali. But, thankfully, the Union Ministry of Environment & Forests has released a policy statement forbidding the keeping of captive dolphins for public entertainment anywhere in the country. What was an even bigger statement and has made ripples worldwide is that the ministry has recognised dolphins as ‘non-human persons’ and said they should have their own specific rights.
It’s an important move that will hopefully create the change that has been long overdue for a species which may well be more superior to us in more ways than we know.
(The writer is a wildlife film-maker)