(Orca calling)
I remember the first time that I heard orca sounds like that
more than 30 years ago,
when I was in Australia doing advanced work
for a Jacques Cousteau documentary.
Then I found myself near a marine park.
I met the trainers and they invited me into the tank.
And in short order, when I crossed my feet like this under water,
a small whale came up under me and threw me high in the air.
The next trick I tried
was to waterski across the tank on the backs of two whales.
This was amazing, it was a rush!
Imagine being up close and personal with a 15-foot, 4,000-pound whale!
I was out of breath, my heart was pounding.
I was laughing because you just can’t help it!
And I stayed to watch the show.
The audience reacted the same way: shouts and cheers, they loved it.
But the more I watched the more troubled I became.
What had I done and why?
Here I am, the Cousteau guy, an environmentalist,
jumping in the tank with these magnificent creatures,
not giving it a second thought.
What about the whales?
We think of them as whales,
but orca are actually very large long-lived dolphins.
Males living into theirs 50s, females into their 70s and beyond.
They are wide-ranging predators,
traveling 100 miles a day and diving as much as 300 feet to forage.
And they live in tightly-knit family groups,
often not leaving their birth family their whole lives,
and in many of these families, the moms call all the shots.
Just like us.
(Laughter)
They’re intelligent, self-aware.
Scientific studies show us that dolphins actually recognize themselves in a mirror,
and their brains are larger than we would expect
for an animal this size,
especially in the areas that control emotion and social interaction.
We can’t know what it’s like to be an orca,
but what we do know is that they live in a community, always working together,
whether for food, for fun, or for survival.
We have to feel that whales should not have to live in concrete tanks.
They should have the opportunity to survive as we do, in freedom.
More than 20 years ago, the movie Free Willy was a big hit.
And in the movie,
Keiko, Willy’s real name, leaped over a wall to freedom.
But in reality, he never left the tank.
Life Magazine exposed the horrible living conditions
that Keiko had in Mexico City.
A tank so small he could only swim in tight circles.
So shallow, he couldn’t dive at all.
He had skin infections, and he was terribly underweight.
Thousands of children sent letters and cards to Keiko
and to Warner Brothers, demanding that something be done,
igniting a movement for Keiko to be returned to the wild.
More recently,
the movie Black Fish has opened our eyes to the treatment of orca in captivity,
and explored the unusual relationship that these animals have with trainers.
Since Black Fish,
Sea World has seen a decline in attendance, profit and share price,
as the public votes with their fee,
and shareholders vote by withdrawing their dollars.
Science shows us
that whales and dolphins in captivity have radically different lives
than their wild counterparts.
Captive whales rarely live more than 20 years.
And of all wild-caught orca,
fewer than 50% lived more than four years after capture.
And in captivity they live in artificial families.
Mothers and calves are separated, based solely on commercial interest.
And they live in very small tanks,
often not any deeper than the whales are long.
As the public ethic around keeping whales and dolphins in captivity changes,
people are demanding that the shows stop
and that the animals have an opportunity to live in more natural environments.
What started years ago as a slow burn
is now becoming a roaring fire of public indignation.
But why?
People love these shows!
Don’t children learn about whales and dolphins by visiting these shows?
And aren’t there only a handful of them in captivity?
There are actually almost 3,000 whales and dolphins in captive environments,
57 orca in 14 parks in eight countries.
165 orca have died in captivity.
You would go to SeaWorld to see Shamu,
but it was often just another whale called Shamu.
So, orca are also showing us that they are sentient beings.
They think, they plan and they feel.
In the wild, when the younger are captured, it’s always the very young.
They’re separated from their families.
The sisters, the mothers, and the aunts can be heard keening for their offspring.
Just like us.
And in the wild,
they demonstrate unusual capacity for social interaction and communication.
I had the privilege of seeing this firsthand
when I was managing the project to return Keiko to his home waters in Iceland.
I was in a helicopter.
Keiko was adjacent to our boat, about ten miles offshore.
A few miles from Keiko we saw wild whales approaching.
And this is always what we wanted to see
because we wanted to understand
how Keiko and the wild whales would interact,
whether he would approach them
and whether they would accept him into a pod.
In this instance, when the wild whales got about a mile away from Keiko,
they separated into three groups,
with one group going wide to the east, and one group going wide to the west,
and one group coming directly toward Keiko.
From the air, from my vantage point,
this looked like a classic military pincer movement.
And when the whales got to Keiko, the one in the middle,
they all thrashed around for a few seconds,
Keiko came back to our boat, and the whales went on.
What had we witnessed?
A plan to deal with something, or someone, unknown to the group,
without putting the whole group at risk;
the communication of the plan among all the group members;
and the execution of the plan.
Now, we had hydrophones in the water, the whole time,
and we didn’t hear a single sound, from the wild whales or Keiko,
in advance of the actual interaction.
Yet they knew he was there, and they dealt with it as a group.
Pretty amazing.
People also say that these shows are educational.
Doesn’t our love for these animals stem from seeing them perform?
And I have to say, yeah, there’s some truth in that,
because years ago
there were very few ways to interact with wild whales.
But today that’s no longer the case.
For less than the cost of going to a marine park,
a family can go whale-watching.
And here on the West Coast we have the Orca Trail,
with sites along the California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia coasts
where you can see whales from shore.
Today, we also have the opportunity to learn about whales and dolphins
in TV shows and documentaries.
And our understanding of them has clearly changed.
P. T. Barnum displayed the first beluga whales
in a basement in New York city in 1861.
Now, we’ve come a long way from that;
but today there are still more than 50 belugas in one marine park in Canada.
So, what is it that we’re teaching our children in these kinds of shows?
That whales and dolphins are pets to be trained?
Does this really give them an appreciation for these magnificent animals?
Like us, orca are at the top of the food chain,
but unlike us, they eat what they kill.
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves
which of these species, human or whale, is the more advanced.
So, what should we do?
What should we do about whales and dolphins in captivity?
Some people say,
“Keep doing what we’re doing, but do it better.”
And in response to public pressure,
SeaWorld has announced a no-breeding policy
and a change to the style of their shows.
But the whales will still be in concrete tanks.
These are acoustic animals,
they’re used to living in a three-dimensional world.
And in a tank their vocalizations reverberate back at them.
It’s like living in an echo chamber.
This would be like me, a visual animal,
living in a room half the size of this stage,
with eight-foot walls, all encased in mirrors looking back at me.
Not a pretty sight.
And it’s also not a solution to keep whales and dolphins in concrete tanks,
even if they’re made larger.
Other people say,
“OK, set them free, release them.”
And in many cases, in many ways,
this is exactly what we tried to do with Keiko.
Rehabilitated in Oregon,
after all those letters from children, demanding that something be done.
He gained 2,000 pounds in weight,
and the sores on his body, the infections, were cured.
So we transported him to Iceland,
to a small island off the south coast of Iceland,
because that’s where he’d been captured, more than 20 years before.
And we set about trying to reintroduce him to the wild.
And I say “reintroduce” rather than “release”
because he had to bond with a family in order to survive.
He had to learn that live fish were food!
The first times we fed him live fish, he brought them back to the trainers,
perhaps thinking they were toys!
And he had to learn to dive deeply.
And he had to learn to swim that 100 miles a day and have the stamina to do so.
The literature says, to build his stamina,
you should take him on an “open ocean walk.”
How do you take a whale on a walk?
So our trainers cut a gate in the net,
and trained him to come through the gate, join a boat and go on long marathon swims.
And we took him out every opportunity that we had,
every summer from May to August, for four years.
And Keiko got to explore the open ocean, he did get to interact with wild whales.
And he expanded his horizons every single time out.
And what we saw in that
is that he had the capacity to explore and expand.
But the story is well-known.
At the end of the fourth summer
he’d been with wild whales for a few weeks in Iceland,
and on a stormy night he left the island and swam 1,000 miles to Norway.
And upon arrival he was alone.
And a fishing boat recognized him because of his bent dorsal fin.
They threw him some fish and he followed them home,
up a fjord, where there were no wild whales and very little herring to eat.
So we sent our trainers there, and they fed him,
and he was free to come and go, as much as he wanted.
So from my perspective, he had a remarkably high quality of life
for all of those years after his tanks in Mexico and even in Oregon.
And he was given more freedom than any captive orca ever.
But were we successful in having him bond with a group
and stay with them permanently? No.
So, while we’ve always known how easy it is to capture a whale,
what we learned is how hard it is to put one back.
So what should we do, what’s the solution?
The best solution is to build natural seaside sanctuaries,
where captive whales and dolphins can live in an environment
as close to their natural habitat as we can provide.
Sanctuaries have been built for elephants, for gorillas, and big cats.
But there’s never been a sanctuary for whales and dolphins.
So what’s a sanctuary?
Picture a bay, a big cove, 65 acres, 100 acres of water space.
Enclosed by a net, held up by a buoy line.
Now, whales can jump over a buoy line,
but they never do.
And in a sanctuary they will have 24/7 care;
they’ll have food to eat, they’ll have trainers to provide enrichment,
and veterinarians to care for their health.
They’ll have a sandy bottom with critters, fish and crabs with whom to interact.
They’ll have birds on the surface to chase.
Keiko always loved to chase birds across his bay.
And they will have space.
Not as much space as they would have in the wild, but more than 100 times more
than the largest performance tank in captivity,
represented by that white little tiny rectangle in the picture.
The call for sanctuaries is already taking place.
Legislation has been introduced in Canada and in California
to prohibit keeping cetaceans in captivity.
The National Aquarium in Baltimore
has announced a plan to move their bottlenose dolphin to a sanctuary
they will build in Florida or the Bahamas.
And the Whale Sanctuary Project, the organization I’m privileged to manage,
has identified candidate sanctuary sites in North America,
with plans to receive our first resident in 2019.
This is a bold vision,
but these animals have earned tens of millions of dollars for their owners,
and entertained millions of people.
Don’t we owe them something?
In a sanctuary,
whales will no longer have to perform for their supper and our entertainment.
Together we can make this happen
by making a commitment not to visit performance shows,
by choosing whale-watching over marine parks,
and by advocating for natural seaside sanctuaries.
This is a movement and it needs all of us.
And if we do it, what will be the result?
We will be providing quality of life for captive whales and dolphins,
and giving them back something of what we have taken from them.
Why should we do it?
Because it’s time.
Because it’s right.
And because if we do, we will be better for it, and so will the whales.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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