This documentary explores the lives of orcas in captivity, revealing deep emotional pain and human impact. It continues an important conversation while offering new voices, stories, and powerful truths.
Original Title : Long Gone Wild
✨ Watch other inspiring documentaries here ➤ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTXI6HH1eSUvJJ_sOoOLgTi2wY_2EbYav
© 2025 – All Rights Reserved
[film projector whirring] [spouting] [somber orchestral music] [Ric V.O.] Russia is
capturing orcas and shipping them here to China. They’re getting between two
and seven million dollars, we understand, for each animal. [Dr. Rose V.O.] This is a
lucrative business. It is wildlife trade,
and there’s nothing worse but the drug trade when
you’re talking about “scary.” So this is the location
that the construction worker told us that the marine
mammals are held in before they’re displayed, so
the orcas are here someplace. [Jeff V.O.] The idea that you’re
taking naive trainers and dropping in freshly
caught killer whales in the parks in Russia
and China is terrifying. [somber orchestral music] [spouting] [Carol V.O.] Seeing
orcas in the wild, honestly, it’s
just indescribable. [David Neiwert V.O.]
It’s intimidating and exhilarating
at the same time. [Rose] That first
breath that you hear in person, changes your life. [David Kirby] It is
just an experience in the wild that
is second to none. [somber music] [splashing] [tense music] [splashing and spouting] Their Latin name, Orcinus orca, roughly translates
as “demon from hell.” They’ve been the object of
fear for most of the time that Western civilization’s
been aware of ’em. The reason they call
them “killer” whales was because they feed
on the largest whales in the world, which
are blue whales, which is the largest
living animal that’s ever lived on the planet. So these guys are so
fierce and so intelligent that they can take down animals that are 50 times their size. Even the US Navy in the
1960s would warn its divers to be especially
aware of these animals ’cause they might
tear ’em apart. [tense music] [reflective music] So, then in 1965, somebody
got the clever idea to capture one of
these gigantic beasts of the sea and put
it on public display. His name was Ted Griffin. He was the owner of the
old Seattle Aquarium, and two men up in
Namu, B.C. called him, said, “We’ve got a big ol’
male killer whale in our nets.” He flew up there, paid them
$8,000 cash on the barrel head for the killer whale, and
put him in a floating cage and towed him all the
way back to Seattle, with his family
following behind. Ted Griffin wasn’t a saint. He’d killed a number
of killer whales in the process of
capturing them, but with Namu, he
had a very different and close and
intimate relationship. [sorrowful music] [Narrator] Griffin
was the first man to swim with a killer whale, a daring act that led to
total trust and acceptance. The national and
international attraction that this animal brought
also changed opinions and attitudes about
killer whales, so their fearsome,
ferocious reputation changed considerably
at that time, and it all started with
a young male named Namu. But Griffin wasn’t done
yet, not by a long shot. He actually wanted to
get a mate for Namu, so he decided to go out
and capture a female, but that didn’t work out
’cause they didn’t get along at all, and she rammed
him all the time. So these two guys
from San Diego, who had a new marine
park down there, showed up shortly after,
and asked if they could buy a killer whale from him,
and he said, “Well, I have this calf here for ya,”
and they named her Shamu, which was a combination
of “she” and “Namu,” thus, the legend was born. [forlorn electric guitar music] [upbeat piano and
orchestral music] [driving marimba
and string music] [Caller] SeaWorld [mumbles] [Dispatcher] Okay, and where’s
the patient located inside? [Caller] They are
at Shamu Stadium. She actually had a
trainer in the water with one of our whales, the whale that they’re not supposed to be
in the water with. On that fateful day
in February 2010, Dawn was doing what was
called “Dine with Shamu” it was a lunchtime
performance in a back pool, where people sit in tables,
and basically Dawn showed the different behaviors
and how they make the whale do different things, and everything was
going fairly well. So, I believe, if you
look at the video tape, it was a 12-minute session. She ran out of food. She was probably
doing a lot of extra fluffy stuff to
impress the VIPs. But when the show was over
and people were leaving, she went around to
the back of the pool and there was a slide-out area, and she got in
there with Tilikum, which, you couldn’t get
in the water with Tilikum. You couldn’t swim with him. That was forbidden, but
apparently it was okay to get into like
two feet of water. [suspenseful music] This is the third
time this killer whale has been involved in the death of a person over
the past 20 years. In this case, it was
a seasoned trainer who had worked at this park for 16 years and
knew the animal well. And I remember getting
a text about it, and I was very concerned about what had happened
and who it might be. Regardless if it’s
somebody I knew or not, it’s just one of those,
you can’t help but, “Oh, my goodness,
what’s going on?” [suspenseful music] All the trainers know
at at any given moment, something can go horribly wrong. SeaWorld claimed that
Tilikum wasn’t aggressive, showed no aggression towards
Dawn during that session, and that was the company line. It was just shocking
and unbelievable that they would even
attempt to do that. We knew, you know,
pardon my French, that it was B.S.,
it was %*#. Did he mean to kill her? Probably not, because he
had a relationship with her. She was one of his
social partners. He knew her for many years. I don’t think he
meant to kill her, but we are very, very
fragile compared to an orca. So, I think afterwards,
while she’s under an awning that they put
there until the coroner came, and Tilikum is in
the medical pool, and he is completely inert. He’s just floating there
like a log, he’s logging. The energy’s gone. The frustration is gone. And I imagine his
brain was ticking over at that point with,
“What just happened?” And I’ve always felt, every
time I see that footage, very sorry for everybody
involved, including Tilikum. [melancholic music] And that’s when said to myself, “Wow, this is a really,
really interesting story.” And then I started learning
about killer whales in the wild. So the focus, it didn’t
change but it expanded from just this incident
and the corporate response and the government intervention, to the whole question
of captivity. [cheering] [splashing] I went to see the
Believe show in Orlando two or three times
during my research, and I didn’t see any education. I didn’t see any science. What I saw was a circus,
a show with blaring music. I saw them kissing, I
saw them doing backflips. I saw them splashing the
audience at the end of the show, and I saw trainers, they
were basically just dancing [laughs] on the
side of the pool. It was ù^$, I just
didn’t understand it at all. Aa long we call entertainment,
education, research, or conservation, you can
do whatever you wanna do. And so the children walk out of this park
miseducated, confused, and it’s teaching them that
abusing nature is okay. [splashing and cheering] [ominous music] Four years before Dawn
Brancheau was killed, a trainer named Ken
Peters was attacked by one of their whales in
the San Diego Park, Kasatka. So, at the hearing
for Dawn Brancheau, for the very first time,
the public saw the video, the full video, and it
was way more dramatic than I have been led to believe. It was terrifying. He looked terrified. I don’t remember how many
people were in the courtroom, but everybody was
holding their breath. And they knew how it ended, and they were still
holding their breath. [suspenseful music] That video, I later
leaked to the media because it’s chilling, and that
also got a lot of attention. [ominous music] [squealing] [ominous music] I do think one of the reasons
why this changed everything was because people
do have a history with SeaWorld that is
nothing but positive. SeaWorld was right up there
with Mom and apple pie, and everything they said about
how happy their animals were and how coming to SeaWorld
was just a great day, and then suddenly
something happens that is so not consistent
with the narrative. I honestly thought it’s gonna be one of those little
indie documentaries that seven people
on a Saturday night go see at the Angelika Theater. It did not turn out that way. It had record crowds
starting at Sundance on, and Magnolia Pictures did a
really, really smart thing at Sundance, they
sold it to CNN. And when CNN aired
it, that was it. So, in the wake of all this, SeaWorld pushed back very
hard at the PR campaign. They set up a website called
The Truth About “Blackfish” that had 69 points
in it, and did this massive advertising
campaign that was designed, basically, to castigate the
cast and crew of the film. 69, I was very intrigued
with this number. [laughing] Kind of says it all,
really, doesn’t it? [laughing] -Couldn’t find 68 or 70.
-[laughing] And some of them are
really, really funny. I mean they were hilarious. They took one of my
scientific papers and distorted the
heck out of it, and it was so distorted that
it was really, really funny. So they started their
“Ask SeaWorld” Campaign. How many of you guys saw this? Hi, my name is Allison, and
I’m a killer whale trainer here at SeaWorld Orlando. We received a
question from Annalise asking if killer whales could
hear their trainers talking. Well, the answer is yes,
they can hear us talking, but the more effective way
to communicate with them is through hand signals which
asks them for behaviors, and our whistle,
which lets them know that’s what we’re looking
for and that some type of reinforcement is on the way. Thanks for your
question, Annalise. For more information,
visit askseaworld.com. They lie to people
about these animals and their life history
and their behavior. They tell people dorsal
fins collapse naturally. They tell people that
it’s perfectly normal for killer whales to live
for about 25 to 35 years. It is not perfectly normal. Their lifespan in nature
is a lot longer than that. It varies depending on the
ecotype, but we know that orcas in the Pacific Northwest,
for example, can live into their 60s, 70s, 80s,
maybe even their 90s. So for SeaWorld to
tell people that, that’s just offensive to me. [intense music] “Blackfish” exceeded
expectation, and there’s a phrase called the “Blackfish”
effect that I helped coin. It blew everyone away. We just, the trainers just
wanted to get the story out. This had been a story
that needed to be told for a long time, and we
never could have predicted the influence and
the depth with which it’s penetrated the culture. I would say the
“Blackfish” effect, it had a horrible impact
on SeaWorld, on attendance, on stock prices, on reputation, on corporate partners,
on entertainers coming. I mean, the list
goes on an on and on, so “Blackfish” shot an
arrow into the heart of that business, and
it’s still struggling. They didn’t kill it,
but they wounded it. On the flip side, it
changed attitudes, kind of like what happened
with Namu back in 1965. The animal activist movement
has been around a long time. The “Blackfish” effect is
like a jumbo booster shot that has kind of sent
it, at least temporarily, into the stratosphere. I mean, I can say it, I
just don’t think, you know, after my two years
of making this film, going from taking
my kids to SeaWorld to where I am now, I don’t think it’s a wise place
to spend your money. I just, I hope people don’t go. [mid-tempo music] “Blackfish” was an inspiration
for Empty the Tanks. The first annual Empty the
Tanks event actually happened on the Saturday after
the premier of Blackfish. Today is the sixth annual Empty
the Tanks worldwide event, and there is a event
happening in downtown Seattle at Pier 56, which is the site of the original Seattle
Marine Aquarium, which is where Namu came from. We have over 70
locations, taking place in 21 countries, pretty
global everywhere. [contemplative piano music] The world’s three
loneliest orcas would be Kshamenk in Argentina, Lolita at Miami
Seaquarium in Miami, and Kiska at Marine Land
in Niagra Falls, Ontario. Kiska has remained at Marine
Land Canada ever since, and she’s roughly
42 years old now. Over the years, she’s
had five calves, and all five of
them are now dead. And now she’s left in
entire social isolation, not even with a dolphin. Kiska has been alone for
just over six years now, entirely alone, and I
can’t imagine what goes through her head being so alone and in such a barren tank
with not even %*#s in it. [sorrowful music] Part of the problem
with the USDA is that it serves
a dual mission, so, we have had to
challenge the USDA in numerous cases,
where they clearly are failing absolutely
to do their job, which is to protect animals kept in captivity, and
instead treat themselves like a rubber-stamping
permitting agency. [sorrowful music] It breaks my heart
to have to talk about Hugo or even
think about Hugo. He died of brain aneurysm from ramming his head
into the concrete walls. %*#e, he died of %*#e. The Seaquarium put him in
a dump truck and took him to the dump, the city dump,
and just dumped him like that. [gushing and blowing] [suspenseful music] What the Miami Seaquarium
did was dodge a big bullet. You had a Cat 5 storm
coming right at Lolita in an aged stadium that
would have surely ripped the roof off of the stadium,
but at the last second, Irma jogged left and
ended up heading to Tampa. If that little jog in
direction hadn’t have occurred, I don’t think Lolita
would be alive right now. The idea that they
did not move her out of the way of that
storm is unfathomable. [suspenseful music
and whales squeaking] The trade in
wildlife, in general, is a corrupt industry, but the
trade in whales and dolphins for live display
is very corrupt. When Russia started
capturing orcas, in addition to the
beluga capture operation, that was pretty mind-blowing. That had not happened
globally in decades, and so, it was very regressive when
they started doing that. These waters, the Sea of
Okhotsk, are very remote, and so it’s very hard
for us to get any sense for how many killer
whales have died in these Russian captures, but
the estimates are around 30, and from what we’ve seen of
the orcas that have shown up in the parks, that’s
probably an accurate number. What we do know is
that they captured an eight-year old
female named Narnia, at a six-year old
male named Nord, and those two captures did
not eat for the longest time. They later added a young
female named Juliet to the mix. [ominous music] [whimsical music] We absolutely felt
that we needed to protect the trainers. There had been a record
over a period of 20 years of dangerous interactions. Two people were killed,
others were injured. Two people were killed,
others were injured. Dawn Brancheau’s death was
what brought the case forward Dawn Brancheau’s death was
what brought the case forward but it was only two
months before that, on Christmas Eve 2009,
when a trainer was killed in the Canary Islands,
again unanticipated. It just happened. SeaWorld fought very hard to keep trainers in the water. Their argument was that
they could predict behavior 98 to 99 percent of the time,
and they did some simple math based on all of the interactions that they added up over
the years, and said, “Well, we can predict
behavior this accurately.” And the counterargument,
of course, is that, “What about
that one percent?” One of the judges of
the panel was eventually nominated to the Supreme
Court but never got there and never even got
a Senate hearing, and SeaWorld changed
its attorneys at that stage, and
they actually got Antonin Scalia’s son
to represent them, which added some political
flavor to the proceedings. [mid-tempo music] [Narrator] “It’s as if the
Federal Government came in “and told the NFL
that close contact “on the football field
would have to end “because, after all,
more people are injured “in the NFL on any given Sunday “than were injured
in the 22-year period “that OSHA looked
at in this case.” Now, we only responded to that in a sentence or
two in our brief, but at the oral argument,
this was the main argument that the lawyer
for SeaWorld made. So it did seem to be attractive
to one of the judges, and it turned out later,
when the decision came down, that one of the judges
accepted that argument and thought that OSHA
can’t ban football, therefore, it can’t
regulate SeaWorld. [mid-tempo music] A fundamental flaw in
Eugene Scalia’s argument comparing playing in the
NFL to training orcas is simply that when
you’re in the NFL, you’re playing
against other people. Dawn Brancheau
was taking a risk, and with an animal who’s
25 to 50 times the size of a person and has
such incredible power, the risk can’t
even be estimated. We were jubilant. We had put a lot of
hours and hours into it, both at the trial level
and at the appeal level, and we were thrilled
that we won. So, the product,
which was the bond between the trainer
and the whale, that SeaWorld was
selling, went away. No more getting in the water. It was all gonna
be from the deck. [mellow music] The singular thing
that focused me on this issue was
the film “Blackfish.” So I sat down with my staff. We devised a plan
for legislation, and out of that,
was born AB-2140. The next step for us was
to draft legislation, which we did, and then, to
announce it to the world, which we did at a
press conference in Santa Monica, on
the Santa Monica pier. AB-2140 will end
performance-based entertainment for all orcas in the
state of California. It will end captive
orca breeding, and it will end the
import and export of orcas into and
out of the state. And lastly, it
will limit the type of human interaction
for trainer safety. SeaWorld immediately
went into crisis mode. They reacted very
strongly to the bills. We knew they would, but this
is also a very political place. SeaWorld has had a
presence in the capital for many, many years,
and so we were up against a very strong,
well-funded operation, and the bill didn’t make it
out of its first committee. [contemplative piano music] So, the individual orca,
Nani and Nord and Juliet, you know, they were
captured at different times, and then they were
brought in there, and the behaviors that I’ve seen in there, it’s
really sad to watch. And I liken to a gulag for orca. These poor animals are
kept inside all the time. They never see the daylight. Tiny, tiny tanks, it’s
just tragic to see. Orcas are a lot like people
that they have culture. They have different languages. They behave differently. They even eat differently, so we have mammal-eaters
and fish-eaters. And they have different
hunting techniques depending on what it is
they’re trying to kill. So that was the one problem. I mean, do these trainers
even know how to deal with belugas and bottlenose
dolphins, let alone orcas? But the second problem was is
that these orcas were coming from a population that
were mammal-eaters, and one of the reasons for this
is Russia does not recognize that there are
different eco-types. And then you traumatize
them, and you transport them, and then you dump them in a
tank, it’s just a bad recipe. [suspenseful music] The Chinese society is
experiencing a tremendous change from virtually no middle class
at the turn of the century, to one that would reach
800 million by 2025. The consumption that is pursued by the Chinese middle class
has gone even more rampant. [energetic drum and bell music] China is the sleeping dragon
on all sorts of things, including what they call the
ocean theme park industry. If you look at the
industry globally, that’s the expansion market. That’s where they’re putting
them up every other day. There’s a big demand for
killer whales in China. Russia is supplying them. A few years ago, before
the Russians developed the techniques to
capture those animals, they approached me to teach
them how to catch ’em. They offered me
seven million dollars for eight animals
over two years, and I thought
seriously about it. That’s a lot of money, it’s
a lot of money to anybody. That’s more money than
I’ll ever see in my life, but I could not do it,
I just could not do it. In July 2014, off
Russia’s east coast in the Sea of Okhotsk, they
captured two killer whales under a permit for ostensibly educational and
cultural purposes. They were both sent to China. It’s usually difficult
to try to get at the market value of
a whale or a dolphin. It’s whatever the market
will bear, really. My understanding is
that some of these orcas are going for
millions of dollars, you know, whether
it’s one million or 10 million, it’s
somewhere in there. With that kind of money,
there’s potential, inevitability, I should
say, for corruption in two places that are
notoriously corrupt, Russia and China. This is a lucrative business. It is wildlife trade, and
there is nothing worse but the drug trade when
you’re talking about “scary.” [intense music] People have to
understand that China is about 40 or 50 years behind us, in terms of their sophistication
toward this industry. They are building
brand new facilities that look like they’re
from the 1960s. They’re putting
species together, like belugas, which
are Arctic animals, with bottlenose dolphins, which are temperate-weather
animals, which is something that the West used to
do back in the 1960s. There can be animals
performing with clear injuries or illnesses obvious
to the lay person, and nobody says anything. I mean, I look at this animal and I see its
condition and I’m like, “That animal should be in
a veterinary hospital.” And yet, it’s performing,
and nobody’s saying anything. And so one of the things
I observed, for example, was some beluga
whales screaming. [screaming] It was a bizarre vocalization It wasn’t natural at all. It was in air, it was
completely bizarre, and if I had to take a guess
why they were doing it, it was to get the
attention of their trainers who were wandering
around and not paying the slightest bit of
attention to them, again, not appropriate. From a safety perspective,
I’m very concerned about some of the
things I saw in China. For example, and again,
I’ve never seen this before in the West, the dolphins
were actually going over a low wall that
separated two enclosures, and the reason
that’s a problem is, one, that’s not what
you want them to do. You don’t want them to
be in that enclosure, you want them to be
in this enclosure for husbandry reasons,
so, they’re just doing what they want, which
is never a good thing. Historically, in the West,
you would see all sorts of silly pet tricks
and circus-type things that are gone now, but I
saw a lot of that still. One of those things is
putting a young child, who apparently has to be
at least four or five years of age, into a little dinghy,
giving the line to a dolphin, and they put the
ring on their snout, and then they start towing
the little dinghy around. This is a five-year-old
with a life jacket on being towed out into
an enclosure with a bunch of dolphins
in it who are being distracted by their
trainers. What if that kid just
decided, “I’m gonna stand up” “panic, and go over the side”? It was mind-numbing
to see that happen. It’s so dangerous because you
can’t trust a five-year-old to do what he or she’s told,
so the idea, for example, of somebody seeing something,
like a member of the public, seeing something like that,
and going, “Oh my gosh, “what’s wrong with these
people,” and filing a complaint, that
doesn’t happen in China. They just smile and clap
and think it’s great. [suspenseful music] [contemplative music] And in the midst of all of
this, there apparently had been some sort of dialogue started
between SeaWorld’s Joel Manby and The Humane Society of The
United States’ Wayne Pacelle, who was their CEO, and that
dialogue had been started by a mutual acquaintance,
who was a former congressman. So suddenly, in March of 2016,
very much out of the blue for me and for everybody
else who knew nothing about this dialogue between
The Human Society of the US and SeaWorld, we hear this
announcement that SeaWorld is going to end its orca
program through attrition. [Narrator] Today,
people are concerned about the world’s
largest animals like never before, so
we too must change. That’s why the orcas
in our care will be the last generation at SeaWorld. There will be no more breeding. We’re also phasing out
orca theatrical shows. They will continue to receive
the highest standard of care available anywhere, and
guests can come to see them simply being their
majestic selves, inspiring the next generation of people
to love them as you do. So they realized they were
going to have to shift their business model and not
be based on forcing orcas to perform silly tricks
for people for profit. [energetic music] I want a state law
that says that, for California, there will
never again be breeding in captivity, and there
will never be a place where orcas can be taken
and kept in captivity. [energetic music] [squealing] [sorrowful music] Tilikum was two years
old when he was captured off the waters of
Iceland, so that meant that he spent 33 years in
captivity and sired 21 calves. Sadly, 11 of them
died before he did, and when he did die,
he was estimated to be worth several
million dollars. I worked with Tilikum
for about two years. I was a senior trainer
at Shamu Stadium, which meant that I did
get to work with him. I mean, he was a good boy. He was responsive, he
was often isolated, and so I think he enjoyed
the interaction that he got. He worked well with
most of the trainers that were working with
him, and I miss him. [sorrowful music] [energetic music] I was taking SeaWorld’s
pledge and putting it into law for two reasons, one, it
made sense to start there. They had already done the
work, but the second reason to take their language was
to test the truthfulness, to test the honestly, to
test their real intent here, which was, “Listen, I have
taken your exact pledge, “word for word, I’ve
changed nothing. “And I’m just gonna
put it into law. “That’s all I’m gonna
do, because SeaWorld, “I don’t want another
company to come in “and do what you’re
pledging not to do. “That’s unfair to you, I’m
gonna prevent that competition.” You would’ve thought they
would’ve jumped all over that, but no, they did
the exact opposite. They made sure it didn’t happen. They viewed actually
media on this issue as a bigger threat
than the bill. SeaWorld’s business model is
to display captive animals, and I think that
that is one reason why SeaWorld fought voraciously
not to get the bill passed in Florida, because I
would not be surprised to see orcas in Texas and
Florida being shipped to China. [intense music] And let me be clear
to SeaWorld right now. Whatever they think
they can get away with, they’re not gonna
get away with it. They start playing around with
this, they start tinkering, finding little holes in the law, they start getting cute,
the public is gonna react, and their reaction is gonna
be swift, and people are not gonna go to the parks that
bear the SeaWorld name if they’re engaging
in this behavior. I mean, corporate
boycotts matter, and you wanna change
corporate behavior, don’t give them your money. In an attempt to turn things
around, SeaWorld introduced this new show called Orca
Encounter, and it was, you know, more
educational than most of its previous
shows had ever been, but a lot of the footage
featured orcas from the wild. You know, how ironic is that? Welcome to SeaWorld’s
Orca Encounter. We’re so honored
to introduce you to this intriguing
and majestic animal. [cheering] When SeaWorld says it’s
providing enrichment to its animals and exercise
programs, it’s nothing new. The animals have a
regimen of sessions that are conducted with
them all week long. Some of those sessions
are called enrichment. Some of them are
called exercise. These are just PR terms. They have very little real
meaning, in my opinion. Corky, ladies and gentlemen, is the oldest whale
here at SeaWorld. She is 53 years old, and
every day, she impresses me with her docile nature
and her sweet personality. Operant conditioning
is certainly an issue, and trainers of animals
use operant conditioning. The problem is, what
are we conditioning the animal to become? And basically, we are taking
them out of their natural way of being, and turning them
into robots who do tricks. And operant conditioning is
very effective for doing that. They’re doing their
show for their food. It’s the only animal
in the zoo that has to do a show in order to be fed. You know, we had the JumboTron
back when I worked there, and we also showed pictures
and video on that big screen of orcas in the wild, and
I can remember the orcas in the front pools while
that video was playing just spy-hopping and looking
at those videos of wild orcas. And I thought,
“What must be going “through their
minds to see that?” ‘Cause they’re clearly
interested in it. The tricks really
aren’t any different. The trainer is telling,
generally, the animals to do it behind the
scenes, they come out, they do their trick,
and then they go back behind the scenes
to get their fish. But what has changed is
the facade for the humans, what we see sitting
in the stadium. We see trees and running
water and fancy rocks and all of this sort of thing. I don’t even get how
somebody can watch that and not see the irony. Thousands of dollars spent
on setting this all up for us, but nothing has
changed for the whales. [suspenseful guitar music] [ominous music] [ominous music] [whales squealing] Over the years, people
have asked me, you know, “What is the worst
thing that happens “to these animals in captivity?” And I very often have responded
by saying, “They’re bored.” And people go, “Well,
that’s not so bad.” It’s terrible. If you’re bored all the time,
it can cause depression. It can affect your
health, and eventually, it can cause health problems that might even kill you,
and depression kills. Dolphins and whales and
porpoises are echolocators. They have a very sophisticated
hearing or auditory system, and that’s the system
they depend upon the most. So if we compare it
to our experience, we’re visual animals, so
living in a concrete tank for an orca may be very
much like me living in a 10-foot by 10-foot room
with 10-foot-high ceilings. Echolocation has two purposes. They explore their
environment with it, and they communicate
with each other. At first, they’re
going to get back a lot of echoes, and eventually,
they’re going to realize that there’s no information
coming in at all. There’s nothing
to echolocate on, and at that point,
they simply shut down. And when we say, “It’s
typical for an orca “to travel 100 or
more miles a day,” we mean a straight
line, so basically, they have to circle
over and over and over their tank
before they can get just the exercise they
need to be healthy. It’s not healthy because they’re not swimming in a straight line. They’re not going at speed. These are very dynamic animals. Dynamism isn’t really
accommodated in a tank. Orcas and other cetaceans
in concrete tanks are being imprisoned, and even
though solitary confinement is just traumatizing for humans, it’s at least as
traumatizing for dolphins and whales because
they’re so social. There are definitely parallels between the solitary
confinement of human beings and the captivity
of wild animals. Depending on how social
the animal is naturally, the caging of the
animal destroys their entire way of life,
and that’s very true of the prisoner in
solitary confinement. [Prisoner] If you
could put every emotion of the human spirit, of
hopelessness, pain, agony, hatred, frustration,
a sense of continuous silently screaming,
all these emotions, while you’re locked in this
cage, treated like some animal. [ominous music] Prisoners very
frequently report to me that they are becoming
something other than themselves. So, people who were previously
gregarious find themselves uninterested in relating
to other people. People who were peaceful
and empathic find themselves being bitter and angry and
wanting to hurt somebody. With the orca, what we’re
doing is removing them from their natural habitat,
their family, their community, their complex communication
system, and we’re putting them in a cage where there’s
nothing for them to communicate or no meaningful
activity for them to do. [spouting] -[sorrowful music]
-[squealing] You know, it’s once you
see them in the wild, you see that’s what a whale
is, as opposed to seeing them in a concrete tank doing tricks. That’s not a whale,
that’s not a whale. So the idea that they spend
all this time doing nothing, floating like a log,
we call it logging. It’s very unusual in the
wild to see them do that for more than two or
three minutes at a time. They do it for hours
at a time in captivity. [splashing] Killer whales in captivity
swim circular patterns. They grind their teeth. They also do jaw
popping activities, where they’ll bite down on
the horizontal steel bars that separate animals
between pools. They have deformities that
come directly from captivity, including collapsed
fins and broken teeth, and they’re kept kind of on the
verge of hunger in captivity because that’s a
control mechanism. And it’s one of the
only control mechanisms we have over them as trainers, so they’re always on the
cusp of being hungry. We’ve been telling the same
lie over and over again, and if you keep
repeating the same thing over and over again, somehow
it becomes the truth. And so I see all of
these people at the park applauding something they
should be rebelling against. [Performer] We hope you’ve
gained a greater appreciation for these incredible animals! Have a great rest of your
day here at SeaWorld! Captive killer whales live
in a shallow water column with minimal to no shade
with a black surface. It doesn’t take a rocket
scientist to figure out the damage that is
done to their skin. We used to apply black
zinc oxide as a protectant to not only paint
the animals black to cover up their sunburn,
but also to block the sun. It’s incredibly
pathological to have, you know, bubbled skin, and yet, we would see it on killer
whales at SeaWorld. [sorrowful orchestral music] [upbeat music and cheering] [performer speaking
foreign language] [applauding] [sorrowful orchestral music] The social structure of
the orcas in the wild is completely different
than the social structure that is manipulated and set
up in the captive environment, so removing animals
from their mother, removing them from their
siblings or half siblings, entirely different
than what would happen and what does happen
out in the wild. [intense music] Separations are gut-wrenching. It involves separating a mother and a baby and using
gates and a crane. These animals are
smart, and they know when a crane rolls up, either
it’s one of two things, someone’s leaving
or someone’s sick, and in other cases,
someone’s dead. [somber piano music] Kalina was the
original baby Shamu, so lots of fanfare
surrounding her birth. I had the opportunity
to work closely with her when she was young. I was honestly
shocked when I learned that we would be moving her
from the park in Orlando, and that she would be
removed from her half sister, from her mother, and
be sent to a park where she would
not know anybody. It was heartbreaking for me. When I spoke out about
it, I was mocked. I was ridiculed, and I
couldn’t get over that. I was ridiculed, and
there was nobody else that seemed to
feel the same way. So the night that
they removed Kalina, I observed Katina, her mother. I have never seen
Katina act anywhere near the way she
acted that night, and it was clear to me that… what I was seeing was grief. I mean, there was no
other word for it. In the corner of a
tank, vocalizing, there’s nothing else to call it but screaming,
screeching, crying. And it was so powerful, you
know, I did my job that night, and I stayed, and I watched
it, and I documented what I saw, and it
wasn’t until I got in my car, sorry
[nervously laughs] to go home, that it
really hit me, like, what I had just
been involved in. And this is what
I ended up doing. I started crying on my way home. And that’s not the only
time that Katina has had to go through this in her life. She’s had five out of her
seven calves removed from her in the time that she
has been in captivity. If someone were to
take away my son when he was younger,
say four years old, five years old, I
would be entirely lost. I would have no will
to live anymore. It’s something I
really can’t imagine, and I don’t think
most parents would ever even want to
think about it, let alone experience
something like that. It would just be
unfathomable to me. [contemplative music] I’ve said that orcas are
the brainiacs of the planet way before humans were,
and that’s absolutely true. That’s a fact. Orcas and other cetaceans
have had their big brains for a lot longer than
our ancestors have. The parallels between orca
and humans is almost uncanny, constantly reaching out
and touching each other and reassuring each other,
and this tactile behavior, it doesn’t matter
whether they’re even in captivity,
you still see that. The kind of a mind that
an orca brain produces is a mind that is sophisticated, complex beyond even
our comprehension, a mind that integrates feeling
and emotions with thought, a mind that integrates
vision and hearing in ways that we
don’t understand. When I looked into
the eyes of the whales that I was working with,
especially the ones that I was working with the most and I was most connected
to, I saw a friendship. I saw, “Hey cool,
something to do, “somebody to interact with.” I saw intelligence, I saw, “What
do you want me to do next?” I saw, “How can I
make you happy?” I saw all those things. I mean, they’re looking back. They’re tracking you. They’re watching
everything that you do, and you definitely
know somebody’s home. So Shamu, if you’re
ready, let’s go for it! And they’re
communicating with you using nonverbal communication
just like two humans, and they each have their likes and their dislikes, and
one of the coolest things about working
there is developing your own personal relationship
with your particular whale. [intense piano music] When you look at the orca
brain through an MRI image, what you see are many
features that actually exceed the human brain, in
terms of elaboration. So if you look at a
part of any brain, and you see a lot of
tissue packed into an area, you know that is important
for that species, that they’re doing
something really exceptional or really sophisticated
or complex. So, when we talk
about the human brain having gray matter and
wrinkles, they have more. Killer whales are such
an intelligent animal, and when we’re
working with them, whether it’s in
captivity or in the wild, it’s like playing
three-dimensional chess. You just don’t know what
they’re gonna do next. Well, intelligence, I
wrestled with that word for many years during
the Flipper TV series. I lived with those
dolphins for five years, and I’ve come to believe
that dolphins are not more intelligent
or less intelligent. They’re simply
different than we are. What’s really clear
is that feelings and emotions come into play in
orca and cetacean psychology in a very, very intense and
very, very fundamental way. [suspenseful string music] Researchers spotted the
orca known as J35 yesterday. She was still holding
on to her calf in what is being
called a tour of grief. And for the first time, we
are hearing what’s believed to be calls from the
mother to her dead calf. And experts say this
is a sound of mourning. It was recorded by one of The Whale Museum’s
underwater microphones. [sorrowful cries and squeals] I don’t know if we
can say one species is smarter than the other. What I can say is that
orcas are comparably complex and intelligent on
a par with humans. It is a mind that is so complex that it can not survive
in a concrete tank. It doesn’t fit. It’s like putting a square
peg in a round hole. It doesn’t go. [intense driving music] I had the privilege of
managing the Keiko project in Iceland and got to
experience firsthand how whales communicate
and socialize together. One day, when I was
in a helicopter, and Keiko was about
10 miles offshore adjacent to our boat, and
I noticed that there were some whales about
two miles from Keiko. It was a group of 15, and
they were swimming toward him, and this is always what we
wanted because we wanted to see if Keiko would
approach the whales and stay with them in some way and if they would
accept him as he did so. So this was a beautiful
experience for us. And as I watched, they
divided into three groups with five continuing
directly toward Keiko, five going wide to the east, and five going wide to the west. And as the five
got close to Keiko, they all thrashed around
for a few minutes. They weren’t
terribly interested. He wasn’t, he came
back to the boat. They swam on, and as
they got further away, the five from the east,
five from the west rejoined, and they all swam off. Well, what had we witnessed? We’d witnessed a plan
to deal with something or someone unknown to the group, communication of the
plan, and execution of the plan without
putting the whole group at risk, kind of a classic
military pincer movement. Now, we had hydrophones in
the water the whole time, and we didn’t hear a
single sound from Keiko or the wild whales in
advance of the interaction at the boat, near the boat,
yet they knew he was there, and they dealt with it as
a group, pretty remarkable. [intense music] I think what the
National Aquarium in Baltimore is
doing is incredible. I think they are
showing the leadership that needs to happen within
the captivity industry. They recognize the fact that
this is a dying industry. This isn’t something people
want to be a part of. People don’t wanna see
dolphins in concrete tanks. They don’t wanna see
orcas jumping around, doing circus tricks, and
they’re taking that initiative, and they’re creating a
sanctuary for their dolphins. We need to get out of that
awful era that we’ve been through for the last 100
years of caging animals. It’s an exciting experiment
because everything we’re doin’ is groundbreaking,
and there’s something about that that’s, you
know, very satisfying, to give these dolphins the
opportunity to truly thrive. [lively music] [suspenseful music] The Animal Legal Defense
Fund devotes a part of its work to addressing
the fundamental problem for animals under the
law, which is that the law still considers them
property, essentially “things.” The Nonhuman Rights Project, who we work closely with,
Steve Wise has a vision that he can end that
with one big case that would recognize
personhood, specifically. Mr. Wise, I believe
you’re arguing. Thank you,
Your Honor. Every time I walk
into a courtroom, we are concerned that we’re going to
be encountering a judge who believes that
the term “person” is synonymous with
the word “human.” “Person” means
that an entity has the capacity for legal rights. [Anchor] A landmark
lawsuit was brought on behalf of Tommy,
who lives caged on his owner’s property
in Gloversville. The first client that the
Nonhuman Rights Project had was a chimpanzee
named Tommy. In fact, Tommy
still is our client, and the latest
decision that came down in one of his cases
was just two weeks ago. It’s, “Are you a human?
You have rights.” “You’re not a human, you don’t.” Now the high court of New
York rejects 96 percent or so of all the cases brought before
them, not on their merits. They just decide that they
aren’t gonna accept it. That was on May 8th of 2018. However, along with that,
came an extraordinary concurring opinion by
Judge Eugene Fahey. Judge Fahey called the
situation in which a chimpanzee can essentially be,
you know, confined to a cage for life a
“manifest injustice” and said that the courts of New York
needed to hear the case, and he chastised the courts
who had not heard the case. Judge Fahey’s
decision, we think, will have influence beyond
the state of New York. [driving electronic music] We’ve been litigating
rights cases now for three and a
half years, so far, on behalf of chimpanzees
and elephants. We have not litigated a case,
so far, on behalf of orcas. One reason being is that
there’s no place to put them. The Whale Sanctuary
Project, we’re hoping, is going to be
highly successful, and so once it’s up and
running, at that point, that major obstacle
to us being able to file a lawsuit against
SeaWorld will have been removed. The fact that killer
whales are still being used in shows like at
SeaWorld is a disgrace. You know, it ought
to be illegal. By the time the
Nonhuman Rights Project is finished, it will be illegal. [lively electronic music] Many of us in the marine
mammal scientific community realized for a long
time that orcas and other cetaceans can’t
thrive in concrete tanks. They get stressed, they
get sick, they die. But, there’s no alternative for
them because if they’re born in concrete tanks, they
can’t just be dumped back in the ocean, and
we realize, from looking at what exists
for other animals, that the step that needs
to be taken is sanctuary. [lively music] 50, 60, 100 acres of water space that you can net off, where
a whale can be provided with lifetime care, 24/7
veterinarian on call if needed, but no requirement to perform. Do what you want while
we provide enrichment, a sanctuary that would
be, at minimum, 300 times as large as the largest tank
that orca are performing in. And so, in 2016, I amassed
a group of people together, experts, and said,
“Okay, how do we do this? “How do we create something
that doesn’t exist now “that’s this
permanent sanctuary?” I can tell you, unequivocally,
that we have a dream team on The Whale Sanctuary Project. If we can’t do it, nobody
can do it, and we’ll do it. We have sanctuaries for
tigers and elephants and all of the other animals that maybe
get retired out of a circus or some sort of wildlife park. But there are no sanctuaries
for whales, dolphins, and porpoises that have
come from captivity, cannot be released
back into the wild because they’re not competent. They don’t know how to hunt. They don’t know how to kill. We want to have an alternative. But how do you find it? And so we started out
looking in Google Earth and looking at nautical charts
on the Pacific Northwest and of the Atlantic
coast, British Columbia and Washington, Maine
and Nova Scotia. We had 15, 16 physical
criteria for the space, in terms of size, salinity,
likeliness of ice flow, flushing, all of those
elements that we knew ought to be minimum
requirements. And if we can give
these animals a chance to be linked to their
natural environment so they can hear
the sounds and deal with the weather conditions
and see fish in their pen and kelp and other things
that we just take for granted in the wild, that in
captivity, they don’t have. It’s a much, much more
stimulating environment. [driving upbeat music] We see opportunities
for research, noninvasive research, that
you would do with whales, see how they acclimate
to this new environment. Observationally,
scientists can learn about that and join
us, help us learn. And in addition, we
see the opportunity for rescue and rehab. So we could design
our sanctuary in a way that partitions off areas that
could be specifically used to rehab stranded
or injured animals and offer any kind of
necessary medical intervention. So every decision that is
made about a sanctuary takes the welfare and the
wellbeing of the animals into account,
first and foremost. And we want the community
to be part and parcel of it every way, so we look for
sites where that can happen. [driving upbeat music] This site here is almost
2/3 of a mile long. It’s probably about 100
to 150 meters across, and it has an average depth
of about 50 to 60 feet. The deepest part and
point is out at the mouth. It’s about 120 feet at the mouth and varies between 40 to 90
feet all the way through. And many people say,
“Well, what kind “of a wall do you have? “How do you keep them in?” Well, it’s interesting to
note that if you just have a buoy line with a net down
to the bottom of the water to the subsurface, the whales
never jump over the buoys. Could they? They have the capacity,
but they never have. People often ask me,
“What’s the likely cost “of a whale sanctuary?” It’s probably a 15 to 20
million dollar capital cost to create a sanctuary, and
the operating costs would run maybe two million dollars
a year, give or take, depending on the number of
animals that are in a sanctuary. And that means actually
building the permanent facility, having staff, having
veterinary facilities, and transporting
the first residents. For orca, that’s probably
five to eight orca, at most. I think the whales that
would end up at a sanctuary like the ones proposed for
The Whale Sanctuary Project would adjust to their new
environment just fine. And I think they’d actually
just thrive in that environment. We have sanctuaries for all
sorts of different species, so why not for
whales and dolphins? And it’s time. We’re on the right
side of history. It’s never gonna be
perfect, but it’s gonna be a hell of a lot better
than a concrete tank. [uplifting orchestral music] At some point, we need to
be doing this hand in hand with people in marine
parks who want to join and move their animals
to sanctuaries. Crittercams are
not uncommon today. We can have a Crittercam
experience as part of this environment, not only
underwater, but above water, and it’s a natural experience,
and it’s teaching children and adults about
nature from nature. They would still
need to be trained for husbandry behaviors
and veterinary behaviors. There would still be
jobs for trainers, and there would be
footage to show people. And it would all be in
this natural habitat, and the whales
would be better off, in terms of their welfare. How can that not be a
win-win solution for them? [contemplative piano music] [Narrator] Some say,
“Free the whales.” For them, nothing
else is acceptable, but nothing could be
worse for the whales. Most of the orcas at
SeaWorld were born here. Sending them into the
wold wouldn’t be noble. It could be fatal. When they freed Keiko, the
killer whale of movie fame, the effort was a
failure, and he perished. As a retirement project, it
was a 100 percent success. He lived in his natural habitat. He was born in Iceland. The health problems he
suffered from all cleared up. He thrived for five plus years. How is that a failure? [intense music] [splashing and spouting] [driving guitar music] China’s now in its
heyday of setting up marine parks on every
corner, practically. I mean double-digit
increases in numbers of facilities from year to year. It’s frightening how fast
they’re building these places. The idea that you’re
taking naive trainers, so to speak, and dropping in
freshly caught killer whales in the parks in
China is terrifying. I’m not sure we’ll
ever hear about it if something happens, but
something will happen. And we don’t even have
a count of how many die in the tanks or
in the transport, but they just keep coming. There’s no functional
breeding program. They are getting all of
their animals from the wild, belugas, bottlenose
dolphins, and now orcas. It’s absolutely a
disaster in the making. [screaming and splashing] It seemed to me that the
Chimelong park is being built and marketed to and
for Chinese people. It’s built for the middle class, for those 800 million
who will be here. That’s what they’re
serving up to them. We know they brought in nine
from Russia, nine orcas, and the plan is to breed them. In captivity, they will start
breeding them, artificially or naturally, as soon as
they’re %*#ly mature. And the way I think of it is as, “It’s children
having children.” [tense music] They’re in a building,
in a warehouse, somewhere right now,
but how many survived the capture and the
transport, we don’t know. We have the warehouse
coordinates. We know exactly where it is. They have an army
of security people there to keep people out,
so they’re on high alert. [speaking foreign language] [contemplative piano music] We’d got on the right
road, and we’re met by one security guard
who turned us away. He was quite rude and
angry ’cause we’re there. We found another way in. We talked to a
construction worker who was very open
and honest about it. He said, “Yeah,
right over there. “That’s where the marine
mammals are held.” Well, this is the right area. It could be that
building right there. That’s the GPS coordinates
of the nine orcas we’re looking for, right there. We walked through the
construction site, which looked like it’s going to be a
huge tank in the future, made our way to the
exact coordinates, and we knew we were
in the right place ’cause we kept finding evidence
of marine mammal transport, transport boxes, stretchers,
frozen fish containers, buckets, and all
the usual stuff. We just saw a truck going by. It’s a refrigerated truck. One of the things
you wanna look for is refrigerated
trucks carrying fish. It takes 1,000 pounds
of fish every day to feed these nine whales. That looks like a tank,
found a tank, right? [contemplative piano music] As we got closer
to the facility, I noticed a filtration system. It’s clearly a
filtration system, so I knew we were
very close, and over to the right were
several walk-in freezers. This matches exactly the GPS
coordinates, and this is it. We’re there. The orcas are here someplace. We were about to go
inside and work our way into the building with a
camera to photograph the orcas, and we were spotted by two
Western trainers I saw there, whipped out their
cell phones, and now, there are several
trainers with cell phones. [intense piano music] [speaking foreign language] Well, they kept us
for about an hour and a half, something like that, asking the same questions
over and over again. We were very concerned
about going to jail. Going to jail in China
could be pretty ugly. The reason they
didn’t call the police is they would look incompetent
because, somehow, we got through their security and got to the building,
and they didn’t want the authorities to
reprimand them for it. [contemplative piano music] A lot of people ask
me, “How are we gonna “solve this problem with China? “How are we gonna
convince so many people?” But I think it might be
a lot simpler than that because we actually only
have to convince one person, the one person who
controls the whole of China because he says what goes. Animals used to perform in zoos. They ended that
overnight because there was enough
controversy about it and enough information
coming from the West, that the Chinese government
said, “Okay, we’re gonna make “that illegal,”
and it was illegal. And I think that, you know,
there’s the ivory trade, for example, a similar
thing has happened. They go to these
International Treaty Forums, they hear it, they know that
they are looking regressive, and they don’t like
that, they want to lead. The trick will be to
get to that one man, and I’m not quite sure
how we’re gonna do it, but China watches what we do,
and they’re not foolish people by any means, and if we
show how wrong that is, then maybe they’ll just
do the right thing. It’s about those children
who are sitting next to their parents, who are
endorsing this whole thing just by their presence,
and those children walk out of that stadium believing
that’s what dolphins are for, that’s what orcas are
for, to entertain us. That is dangerous to the
young mind of the Chinese. But we have to put our hope in children to stand
up and say, “No,” to children who will cheer
for the animals in the wild and will demand of
their parents, no matter where they live on the planet, that
we treat these animals with understanding and care
and keep them in the wild. If I were able to speak
Chinese or Russian, and I was talking to
a group of children who thought they might want
to grow up and be a trainer, I would tell them
everything that I know and everything that I
learned about the realities and the suffering
for the animals that they would be working with. And I would want them
to think carefully about why they were
doing that, right? I would want them to
have an understanding that it’s not in the best
interest of the animals. [sorrowful piano music] [squealing and clicking] The only hope of
winning this war is for the public to
stop buying tickets. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t buy a ticket at SeaWorld. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t buy a ticket. Don’t ever, ever buy a ticket. Don’t buy a ticket. [“When I’m Home” by
Katya & Moodlite] ♪ Do a trick for me ♪ ‘Cause I told you to ♪ I know you’d rather
be in the sea ♪ ♪ That’s old news ♪ Why couldn’t you let me be ♪ Don’t you know ♪ I was supposed to
be swimmin’ free ♪ ♪ But now I’m just a show ♪ [child giggling and
speaking foreign language] [child gasping and giggling] ♪ I’ll show you it’s okay ♪ That there is a
new way to share ♪ ♪ My beauty with
you everywhere ♪ ♪ And I’ll show you
how if you let me oh ♪ ♪ You’ll know I’m more
magical when I’m home ♪