How one whale’s tragic death could get a movement going
The death last month of the killer whale known as Tokitae or Lolita touched a raw nerve in our culture. Toki lived 53 years in a deteriorating tank at Miami Seaquarium — a home that nearly everyone agreed was both inadequate and horrifically small for an animal whose wild counterparts often travel up to 100 miles a day. From her inhumane 1970 capture in Penn’s Cove, Washington, until last month, she endured life in a tank barely four times her length.
Last year, a new owner made the courageous decision to try to set things right with Toki by allowing a consortium of NGOs and donors to launch an unprecedented effort to return her to her native waters. Why go to such expense and effort for an animal arguably in her twilight years? Every member of the “Friends of Toki” team with whom I spoke talked of dignity. In her proposed sea pen near the San Juan Islands, they even allowed themselves to imagine she might encounter her mother, thought to be the surviving matriarch of the endangered Southern Resident L-Pod.
The cause of Toki’s death last month is still unknown. One thing is certain: There will be innumerable opinions, along with questions as to why she wasn’t simply left to live out her years in relative peace. But the questions at the heart of this issue are values-based, not practical, for we cannot know what constitutes “quality of life” for a species this intelligent and different from our own.
What motivates humans to dedicate themselves with such fervor to the welfare of one animal? In my view, it’s compassion. We humans are equipped with an innate capacity for empathy — the act of caring for others and sharing their lived experience — though we are notorious for routinely losing sight of it. But, in our best moments, we also show a unique capability to act on that care, to be moved to help those in need.
So it is with whales and dolphins (collectively, cetaceans), a family of animals that are arguably among our closest evolutionary analogues. They share our large brain — actually, theirs are larger. They live in socially complex groupings. They use tools, communicate over long distances, grieve the loss of relatives and engage in recreational sex. Had evolution given them a thumb, there’s no telling what kind of underwater metropolises they might have built.
These are many reasons why some humans have reached the conclusion that we’ve done them an injustice by taking them from their ocean home and placing them in artificial environments to entertain us. I am one of those who has concluded that this nearly century-long experiment has run its course. Although we once hunted whales for blubber and shot orcas for eating “our” salmon, perhaps we’ve reached a turning point in our relationship with cetaceans. While there’s no undoing what’s been done to Toki and the 132 orcas who have died in captivity, an estimated 3,600 whales and dolphins remain in human care worldwide. Most were born into that life and have therefore never hunted their prey, swum in the open ocean or even felt the sensation of rain on their dorsal fins.
Dependent though they are on humans for food and care, what if we could give this remnant population a measure of freedom and dignity? This is what Toki’s rescuers were trying to do, and it is what the nonprofit National Aquarium has resolved to do with its colony of six Atlantic bottlenose dolphins.
There are many good and practical reasons for creating cetacean sanctuaries, but the most compelling is also the one that shows the greatest potential: to begin to repair humankind’s broken relationship with nature. We are at risk of losing our innate connection to the living ecosystems that sustain us.
Some are working to restore that connection, and one way is by creating sanctuaries for species we once held captive. These include elephants, chimpanzees, gorillas, tigers, lions, racehorses, farm animals and even cats and dogs. Yet none exist for dolphins and whales. Why?
For one, it is incredibly hard to construct an authentic, ocean-water sanctuary big enough to allow natural social groupings among far-ranging species, while still ensuring that humans can provide the requisite care these captive-born animals need. Unfortunately, like us, cetaceans learn most of their life skills from their parents. Captivity has robbed this generation of the skills they would need to survive in the wild, like hunting prey and avoiding predators. Experts agree their likelihood of surviving, if simply released at sea, would be low at best.
Hard or not, the work to create cetacean sanctuaries continues. The UK-based SeaLife Trust currently operates a beluga sanctuary in Iceland. The Whale Sanctuary Project has secured a bay in Nova Scotia, Canada, for the same purpose. The National Aquarium is actively pursuing sites in the Caribbean for a dolphin sanctuary. Such facilities are expensive; capital costs for each range from $15-25 million. But the will is strong, and the science supports it.
Indeed, the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries recently released its first-ever standards for cetaceans. Sanctuaries will be built, if enough donors step forward to usher in this new era for dolphins and whales in human care.
Toki’s 53 years in captivity were tragic — but they were not wasted. If her story can catalyze this movement and help us address the disconnection that threatens our sacred relationship with the natural world that sustains us, then her life can still have purpose.
We are a part of nature as much as the ocean’s most remarkable denizens. Like them, we can trace our origins to the sea, from which all life sprang. We mammals came ashore, but for some evolutionary reason, cetaceans returned. For the next 50 million years, they refined their superb adaptation to that dynamic, ever-changing ecosystem. It is their birthright. Perhaps, if we can give that back to them, we can restore a measure of our own connection to nature. And our compassion for it, and for each other.