25 Quotes by John Hargrove

They are no longer really orcas but mutants, genetically killer whales but made up of warped psychologies.

SeaWorld’s corporate marketing strategy turned the orcas into the pandas of the sea, commercial and cuddly, with little hint of the complexities of killer whales and the effects of confinement on them.

For example, there is the matter of eating paint. The whales peel the paint off the pool’s inner walls with their teeth. To those who witness the behavior, it looks as if they are nibbling on the wall or the floor of the pool. They are trying to occupy themselves, stimulating their enormous jaws and great intelligences with obsessively meticulous work.

Unlike in SeaWorld, there is no known instance of mother-son mating in wild orca communities. In SeaWorld Orlando, Katina mated with her son Taku, resulting in the female calf Nalani. Kohana was bred with her uncle Keto twice. This is an instance of what appears to be a taboo – strictly reinforced in the wild by generations of matriarchs – that has broken down in the confines of captivity.

Nothing in the ocean hunts killer whales as prey.

All of the reasons its orcas cannot be returned to nature stem from the fact that they have been psychologically and physically damaged by captivity.

Captive whales bake in the sun and suffer from sunburn and dehydration. Orcas in the wild spend much of their time fully submerged.

In retrospect, the process sounds barbaric: using behavioral training methods to get a hugely intelligent animal to submit to being artificially inseminated for the benefit of a corporation.

Orcas can sense affection and they can return it.