Blackfish Page #7

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when we visited SeaWorld.

It's one of our favorite places.

Yeah, I like the part when Shamu

gets everybody wet.

When the whales get close to the glass

and start kicking out the water?

Whamo!

You're a goner.

Orange County's sheriff's deputies

have identified the 27-year-old man

found dead in a killer whale's tank at SeaWorld.

The victim is Daniel P. Dukes

from South Carolina.

Dukes was found yesterday

draped over the back of Tilikum,

the largest orca held in captivity.

Well, all I know is

the public relations version of it--

he was a young man that had been arrested

not long before he snuck into SeaWorld.

Maybe he climbed the barbed wire fence

around the perimeter and stayed after hours.

Perfect story line--

a mentally disturbed guy

hides in the park after hours

and strips his clothes off

and decides he wants to have

a magical experience with an orca

and drowns because he became hypothermic.

Right.

So that's the story line

and none of us were there

to know the difference.

He was not detected by the night watch trainers

who were presumably at that station.

There are cameras all over SeaWorld.

There are cameras all over

the back of Shamu Stadium

pointing every which way.

There are underwater cameras.

I find it hard to believe

that nobody knew until the morning

that there was a body in there.

They have a night watch trainer every night.

That person didn't hear

any splashing or screaming?

I mean, I just find that really suspicious.

One of the employees--

I don't know if it was

a physical therapist or somebody--

was coming in in the morning

and there was Tilikum,

you know, with a dead guy,

a dead, naked guy on his back,

kind of parading him around the back pool.

The public relations spin on this was that

he was kind of a drifter

and died of hypothermia.

But the medical examiner reports

were more graphic than that.

For example, Tilikum stripped him,

bit off his genitals.

There was bite marks all over his body.

Now, whether that was post-death

or pre-death, I don't know.

But, yeah, all I can comment on

is that the guy definitely

jumped in the wrong pool.

So why keep Tilikum there?

This guy, he has a proven

track record of killing people.

He's clearly a liability to the institution.

Why keep him around?

Well, it's quite simple to answer.

And that is that his semen

is worth a lot of money.

Over the years, Tilikum has been

one of the main breeding whales at SeaWorld.

It's brilliant because they can

inseminate way more female whales,

because they can just

get his sperm and freeze it.

And then he's basically

operating as a sperm bank.

In a reputable breeding program, rule number one

is you certainly would not breed

an animal that has shown

a history of aggression towards humans.

Imagine if you had a pit bull who had killed.

That animal would have likely been put down.

But in the entire

SeaWorld collection--

it's like 54% of the whales

in SeaWorld's collection

now have Tilikum's genes.

The fall is to assume that

all killer whales are like Tilikum.

You have to look at their

learning history from birth.

You have to understand why Tilikum was a hazard

to anybody in the water.

And you have to understand that none

of the other killer whales at SeaWorld

that are in that system are that way.

What about the incident at Loro Parque?

First of all, I-- I can't--

I can't speak with specificity

about Loro Parque.

I wasn't there.

In fact, I know very little about it.

Probably about as much

as the general public knows.

Loro Parque, it's in the Canary Islands,

which is an autonomous region of Spain.

It's the largest tourist attraction

in all of Spain.

And when SeaWorld sent the orcas to Loro Parque,

everybody was always questioning,

like, how did they make

that leap to send four young orcas

to a park off the west coast of Africa

with trainers who-- a lot of them

had never been around orcas before?

Nothing was ready.

The venue wasn't ready.

It wasn't ready for the orcas,

it wasn't ready for a show.

The owner of the park

didn't want to lose revenue

by shutting down the pools and repairing them.

So for three years, the animals ate the pools

and for three years

the animals had problems--

with their teeth, with their stomachs.

So that's the reason why these animals

are enduring the endoscope procedures.

Back up.

Now back up, back up.

Those are still SeaWorld's animals

and they are responsible for those animals.

Loro Parque doesn't have a good reputation.

People that work in the business

know the reputation of places

and Loro Parque does not have a good reputation.

They didn't spend the same amount

of time as the SeaWorld trainers,

did not go through the same regimen

that the SeaWorld trainers went through.

You know, and Alexis really was

the best trainer.

And I did say-- I said,

"You're the only trainer there

that can hold his own

with a SeaWorld trainer."

And I said, "But you need

to be careful."

Anywhere along the line

it could have been stopped

because everyone knew

it was a tragedy waiting to happen.

But no one ever did anything about it.

And in the end,

it was the best trainer who lost his life.

Those were SeaWorld's whales.

They were trained using SeaWorld's techniques.

And their training was being supervised

at the time of the fatal accident

by one of their senior trainers from San Diego.

For somebody to get up and say in a court of law

they have no knowledge of the linkages

between SeaWorld

and this park in Tenerife is well--

either she doesn't know and is telling the truth

or it's just a bold-faced lie.

As trainers, we never forget

Shamu's true potential.

We see it each and every day.

That's why all of our interactions

are very carefully thought out,

especially our water work interaction.

Whoa!

You big dork.

Especially our water work interactions

because they're potentially the most dangerous.

I'd been expecting it

since the second person was killed.

I'd been expecting somebody

to be killed by Tilikum.

I'm surprised it took as long as it did.

First tonight,

a six-ton killer whale

has lived up to its name,

killing an experienced trainer

at SeaWorld, Orlando, today.

A tourist at an earlier show

said the animal seemed agitated.

Trainers complained

the whales weren't cooperating.

The whole show, the main show,

was a disaster that day.

There was, you know, whales chasing each other

and eventually the trainers decided

that they had to stop the show

because they couldn't

get the whales under control.

Tilikum was in the back pool

set up to do a Dine with Shamu

performance with Dawn.

Likely she saw what had gone on

during the main show

and so she had probably felt

more pressure to do a good show.

Yay!

When you watch the whole video, you can see

that Tilikum is actually really with Dawn

in the beginning of the video.

There's a couple of behaviors

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