One Fish, Two Fish, BlackFish-Bullshit!

This is an opinion piece, feel free to disagree, I don’t care!

       After watching the Orcas at Sea Word last night, I feel the need to revisit the entire “Peta/Earth Firster/Green Peace” lunatic fringe who would mandate that there be no more breeding allowed between captive born Orcas. While there are increasingly frequent reports of wild Orcas sighted in poor condition or simply dead in the wild, last night I watched a 42year-old female in prime condition and several of her offspring interacting with humans and each other to the apparent enrichment of both groups. We actually saw the first of those births as it happened in the large tank at Sea World years ago.

        Apparently, captivity isn’t either the death sentence or life of slavery portrayed in such fatally skewed “mockumentaries” as “Blackfish,” a film which is the product of much the same approach as "Creation Science," in that the film makers began with their conclusions and reverse engineered everything else, disavowing what refuted their position and skewing the rest. To borrow an earlier characterization from politics, this was essentially a “Swift Boat” job, not journalistic film making. (Yes, I watched and then deleted it, lest it infect my computer!)

          Most of the litany of un-journalistic half-truths and outright lies which characterized this film flowed from a single incident. That was the tragic death of Sea World Orca specialist, Dawn Brancheau while in the tank with Tillikum, a male Orca, who died at age 36 in 2016 of pneumonia, a common cause of Orca deaths in the wild or in captivity. Even as a  captive and using the most exaggerated lifespan numbers “determined” by those opposing captive breeding, “Tilly” outlived the average wild male Orca by more than six years. (As an aside, and counter to claims that more captive born calves die in birth, Tilly sired 12 live calves, which means his legacy is largely the end of the "need" for wild captures). Of course those who claim to be able to "read" the minds of Orcas are fond of channelling their thoughts and interpreting them as lonely isolated and unloved save as profit producing objects.  

     A major gross inaccuracy of the film is that the blame for Tillikum’s behavior is leveled at Sea World, who had no hand in his 1983 capture off Iceland at around three years of age, and was actually his third “owner’ after he had been maltreated elsewhere and was essentially unreturnable to the ocean. Would PETA have SEA World sell him for dog food? Does this make him fundamentally different from the host of captive born Orcas in marine parks around the world? Of course, it does.

        The filmmakers used two former Sea World employees as their principal mouthpieces. Note the word “former.” It matters, just as “disgruntled” matters when discussing homicidal postal workers.  As someone who actually has known a number of persons who are intimately, as in hands on,  familiar with Sea World’s Orcas and their behaviors, I can report that, to a person, they maintain that the one person who would oppose “Blackfish” most vehemently, would have been the late Ms. Brancheau. The two ex-employees had axes to grind and were happy to do so, smearing their former employers, like Trump smears all things Clinton. They cite stats from the earliest days of wild caught Orcas and imply that they are equally applicable to captive-born animals. These include longevity and overall health numbers.

         We still see phrases written, probably in well-meaning good faith, by true believers, such as: “Helpless victims of a blatantly commercial experiment which has seen dozens of wild orcas plucked from their families and forced to live in artificial social groupings which bear scant resemblance to their natural order“

       This might be close to true if it were describing the 1970’s small tank, single specimen, “Miami Seaquarium” or “Marineland” setting. It is certainly vastly less applicable to the, mother and offspring huge tank environment at Sea World. Of course, PETA and their ilk would maintain that they can think like an Orca and, in some ludicrous marine Vulcan mind meld, speak for them. The good done by SeaWorld’s pioneering captive breeding programs, not only in ending the threat of capture for wild Orcas, but in understanding their physiology and possible health threats as a species and raising general awareness of the need to conserve these magnificent creatures, are Gold Standards in Marine Biology.      

    Although PETA was not responsible for Blackfish, they supported it and embraced it as if they had financed it. Of course, in reality, they (PETA) couldn’t afford to finance it because so much of their annual income, which they allege is used for the protection of animals, actually is used by them in their role of euthanasia providers. “The organization (PETA) reportedly destroyed almost 90% of all the animals dropped off at its headquarters in Norfolk, Va., in 2012, according to the Daily Mail.” Over a span of 14 years, PETA has killed more than 29,000 animals, and the carnage continues.

      It is worthy of mention that the reader will find numerous websites extolling the end of captive breeding and of the maintenance of Orcas in captivity at all. This is different from ending wild capture, which many including myself applaud. The operators of these sites and those who read and applaud them all share a common trait. None of them have ever touched, worked with or cared for a live Orca in person and in the flesh, yet they know how the creatures feel! This is called anthropomorphization. In layman's terms, it means I can understand why my dog licks it's genitals, because "Hey, who wouldn't wanna be able to do that?" 

         These folks and others are aware that captive bred Orcas cannot be returned to the wild. Their insistence in no more captive breeding is analogous to demanding the end of captive breeding of dogs, since they are the lineal descendants of wild wolves. I wonder what the lifespan of a Bassett Hound in Yellowstone would be? Sounds really dumb when you put it that way, huh?