Blackfish Wows the Critics – Nudges World Towards Change

It does seem kind of hopeless to imagine that SeaWorld really will do the right thing and end their killer whale circus act. I’d say they ought to end the dolphin show too but the more pressing matter are the whales, Tilikum in particular, who is still living in a bathtub, exiled away from the other whales, used only to milk semen from to breed yet more whales so SeaWorld can make yet more millions off of these beautiful, intelligent creatures.  How did we ever get here? Propaganda by SeaWorld, which has been fooling ticket buyers into thinking everything was A-okay in orca land.  But once a trainer was killed in public everyone started to wonder what was really going on.  Now we know.

This is one of the reasons US News’ Jeff Nesbit calls Blackfish the “most important documentary of the year.”  Blackfish has also made a deal to expand to Europe.

In his review for Salon, Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir meditates on the question, what then must we do? Where do we draw the line between what creatures should be spared and which should be used for our own amusement or food? Do we draw the line at exceptional intelligence? The smarter the animal the more likely they are to be exploited by humans? Chimps used for lab research lowers our humanity to such a degree any progress we made in researching those chimps is wiped clean. How many more SeaWorld trainers are going to leave their jobs disgusted at what they saw go down? Awareness has to start somewhere. We are the most intelligent animals on the planet and yet we’re the most cruel. Some say cats are cruel because they play with their pray before killing – but believe me, cats got nothing on us. Says O’Hehir:

No spokesperson for SeaWorld, the venerable American chain of oceanariums and marine mammal parks that owns almost half of the world’s captive orcas, or killer whales, ever appears on camera in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s devastating documentary “Blackfish.” SeaWorld is quite right to view “Blackfish” as an existential threat, since the film attacks not just the parks’ wholesome public image but also the basic morality of their business model. In a time-honored but dubious maneuver, SeaWorld declined to cooperate with Cowperthwaite (who spoke to Salon’s Daniel D’Addario this week) in any way during the making of the film but then launched a vigorous P.R. counteroffensive before the movie had even reached theaters. Most of the disputed issues in the film are relatively minor, and on the semiotic level, the meaning of all this is clear: This is what big companies do when they have something to hide and a lot to lose.

“Blackfish” is a highly compelling film that’s already being touted as a likely Oscar contender. It uses the gruesome 2010 death of a SeaWorld trainer named Dawn Brancheau, and the troubled life history of a six-ton bull orca named Tilikum – who drowned and partly ate Brancheau, and has apparently killed two other people – as the starting points for a disturbing and much larger story. Through extensive interviews with former SeaWorld trainers, scientists and marine-mammal experts, Cowperthwaite builds a portrait of an intelligent but profoundly traumatized animal who was taken from his family in the North Atlantic as an infant, and has been driven to anger, resentment and perhaps psychosis after spending his life in a series of concrete swimming pools.

Joe Morgenstern at the Wall Street Journal:

For those of us who’ve been to these parks as spectators, there’s a lingering temptation to think of large marine mammals as lovable, or at least companionable, if not downright cute. (A pilot whale in the petting tank of a long-gone park called Marineland of the Pacific once swallowed a new pair of Ray-Bans that had slipped off my sweaty nose. When the whale spit them out moments later, an attendant netted them up undamaged, except for a tiny tooth mark on the left lens.) After watching “Blackfish,” you come away with a sense of orcas’ singular intelligence, to be sure, even their astonishing playfulness, but most of all their glorious power, and the majesty of their existence in their natural habitat.

And this Gawker piece reaches out to a  Scientist who studies orcas. She had this to say:

Killer whales are social animals [resident killer whales stay with their mothers for life]. That’s a really, really important thing with killer whales because you don’t see it with other animals. Maybe in some human societies you have both brother and sister staying with mother their entire life, but you don’t see it in the wild, you don’t see it in other animals. The social aspect of them is what I love to study here looking at these groups. To have a healthy individual it has to be allowed to be in its natural environment and the captive environment is so unnatural that it surpasses any benefit that we might get from having animals in captivity. We are changing their nature so dramatically in order for us to see a pretty thing, because really that’s what that boils down to. We’re not seeing the actual animal anymore when we see it in captivity, it’s a different sort of beast. They’re just too amazing, they’re just too complex to sacrifice.

Point by point, Gawker’s Scientist knocks down SeaWorld’s defenses. The truth: it has none.  An example:

SeaWorld Assertion 4: “The accusation that SeaWorld callously breaks up killer whale families. SeaWorld does everything possible to support the social structures of all marine mammals, including killer whales. It moves killer whales only when doing so is in the interest of their long-term health and welfare. And despite the misleading footage in the film, the only time it separates unweaned killer whale calves from their mothers is when the mothers have rejected them.”

Film Response: “The calf-mother separations that are mentioned in the film both involve two of the most responsible and bonded mothers in SeaWorld’s collection, both of whom have had multiple calves taken from them. The separations are said to be driven primarily by introducing new breeding options to other SeaWorld parks and by fulfilling entertainment and other husbandry needs. We are surprised that SeaWorld has brought up calf rejection, an issue the film does not address and a phenomenon that is extremely rare in wild orcas. In the wild, females generally have their first calf around 13-16 years of age. Because SeaWorld has bred their females as early as 5-6 years of age, these females have not learned proper social behavior, they have not learned how to mother a calf, and may ultimately reject and injure their calves.”

Giles adds: “[SeaWorld’s response] is nonsense — a mother at SeaWorld should have all of her offspring with her. And we know that’s not true. And, let me respond one more thing, with regard to breeding, you would never have inbreeding the way that they do inbreeding with captive killer whales. You wouldn’t see that in the wild where mothers and sons are breeding and producing offspring. You know what you end up seeing in the wild is females that are starting to approach that age or breeding, you tend to see them with a bunch of calves, like they’ll take on this nanny position and they’ll hang out with other females calves, which is probably a nice respite for the mom, so these females that are coming of age, it’s documented, it’s commonly known that’s what ends up happening that they become the babysitters. And that’s preparing them to be good moms.”