Dawn Brancheau
I remember Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau. Years ago I saw her perform with the killer whales she loved. On Wednesday one of them, a large male named Tilikum, killed her.
A seven-minute tourist video shows Brancheau interacting with the whale up until just seconds before the attack. An autopsy revealed Brancheau died from multiple traumatic injuries and drowning.
When I heard the trainer had wanted to work with Shamu since her first trip to Sea World at the age of 9, I realized I’d heard that story before. Brancheau was the woman I’d made my way downstage to see after the show.
Most of all, I remembered Brancheau because I’d never in my life seen someone so happy in her work. I must have been worried about the whales, because Brancheau told me that the performances only incorporated behavior observed in wild killer whales.
It’s no secret that others disagree, arguing that keeping whales in captivity is wrong. This debate has raged for decades.
Steve Irwin, the Aussie “crocodile hunter,” died from a thrust to the heart by a stingray that must have felt threatened by the looming presence overhead. In an interview Irwin said he had scars on top of scars. He also said that every single time he got attacked, it was his fault, never the fault of the animals.
Same goes for bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, with the added note that nearly everyone thought Treadwell was off his rocker. Hard to dispute if you saw the Werner Herzog documentary “Grizzly Man.” Treadwell was desperate to become one with bears, and his death in 2003 suggests he may have gotten his wish. In the wild, bears sometimes kill each other. It’s a cruel world out there, red in tooth and claw. One reason cats are such prolific breeders is that in the wild, 95 percent of cubs die within the first two years.
Wild animals, even those born in captivity, can grow up and turn on the very humans who raised them. Critics attribute this to revenge, like an angry employee wreaking havoc on his former place of employment. Some experts have said that orcas are so intelligent that the killing of Brancheau might have been a deliberate act.
But that notion projects a lot of humanity onto animals. The simplest explanation is probably the correct one: These animals act wild because they are wild. Evolution made them that way. Their aggression helped them survive.
There’s nothing cuter than a tiger cub, but most of these “exotic pets” end up dead, abandoned or abused for reasons made clear by Big Cat Rescue. Killer whales in the wild swim 75 to 100 miles a day. In 1980 a captive whale named Hugo died from cranial bleeding, caused by repeated ramming of his head against the tank wall.
We’ve come a long way since the miserable days of bear pits and cages filled with tigers pacing back and forth. Today’s zoos do important work protecting endangered species (of which the killer whale is one). The small cages are gone, replaced with large, natural enclosures.
Sea World needs to get on board. The Shamu shows may pay the bills, but the whale tanks could and should be much, much larger. Perhaps technology, which now allows high-definition footage of wild animals in our living rooms, has rendered zoos obsolete. These days aquariums and zoos are trying to remain relevant. Amusement parks will have to adapt too.
As for Dawn Brancheau, we can’t know what career she would have chosen if she’d foreseen her death at the age of 40. However, it would disrespect her memory to suggest she did not understand and accept the risk. While humans continue to increase their numbers, animals will continue to decline. A typical bear habitat may look spacious and unpopulated to us, but to a bear it might be the Las Vegas Strip on a Saturday night.
How do we peacefully co-exist with creatures that need so much room? How do we stop other countries from slaughtering our most treasured species? No matter how many amusement parks we close or allow to stay open, these troubling questions are not going away.
[originally published by Politics Daily in 2010]
Quixotic Chick 