Orca babies need their families, not concrete tanks and humans
It must have been the final blow for SeaWorld: Kyara, the last orca to be born at one of their marine parks, died this week at the age of three months.
Under pressure from public opinion, SeaWorld announced last year that it would not continue its breeding program. So, when Kyara was born at SeaWorld San Antonio, the company must have been banking on her having a bright future.
But instead, her death brings a sad and poignant end to this chapter in the history of treating these magnificent individuals as entertainment for tourists.
SeaWorld has written in a statement that their “dedicated team of veterinarians spent the last three days providing critical care to Kyara.” And certainly, they have the most experience and the best treatments available anywhere in the world.
But even the best medical care that the human world can provide cannot make up for what orca babies need most: the loving care of their own true families in their own true environment. In the absence of that, they are permanently stressed to the point where their immune systems are compromised, and they have no defense against the kind of infections that are common to orcas who spend their lives in concrete tanks.
Kyara’s mother, Takara, has lived her entire life in a concrete tank without ever knowing what it’s like to swim the ocean waters off the coast of Iceland from where her mother and father were captured. In the wild, an orca baby is surrounded by her family: her mother; her aunts, who play an active part in raising her; and her grandmother and maybe great-grandmother, who carry the knowledge and culture of the whole social group. Instead of being surrounded by the natural cultural and physical environment to which her species is adapted, she was born into a sterile artificial world. And inevitably, despite even the best intentions and medical skills of her caretakers, the stress Kyara was under can only have been exacerbated by the fact that she had been taken from her mother and was being constantly handled and watched by what must have been to her a foreign species: humans. The bottom line is that there’s a fundamental mismatch between what orcas need to thrive and the conditions to which they’re subjected by living in marine parks and aquariums. Even the very best of human care and medicine cannot fill the void since, if they are to thrive, orcas need “orca care” in an orca environment, not a human one.
Marine parks claim that they play a valuable role in educating people, especially young people, about wildlife. These claims have been challenged in the peerreviewed scientific literature. But even if you grant that there’s a small educational benefit, you have to ask what it is exactly that these young visitors are learning. Is it that these magnificent apex predators are to be respected and their environments to be protected? Or is it that we humans are the masters of nature, who can turn even the most magnificent and powerful of animals into objects that can be tamed for our amusement and entertainment?
Almost a century ago, the naturalist Henry Beston wrote that our fellow animals “are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Nothing could be truer of our relationship to the dolphins and whales. At a time when we have objectified and commoditized almost every aspect of nature, it would be a small but meaningful gesture to treat these animals with the respect that is their due.
For SeaWorld, Kyara’s death will be a bitter blow. But if it can help them to understand that it’s time to bring this form of “entertainment” to an end and retire their whales to permanent seaside sanctuaries, then Kyara’s sacrifice will not have been in vain.