Requiem For A Whale Rider

 "I can smell death all over my fingers."

Timothy Treadwell

Grizzly Man

SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau died from drowning on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at SeaWorld Florida's Shamu Stadium after the 12,000 pound bull killer whale she was working with (the largest in captivity) grabbed her from the feeding platform and dragged her underwater. Initial eyewitness accounts gave conflicting reports of the incident. One woman claimed that the whale grabbed Brancheau around the waist and shook her, knocking off her shoes, before dragging her into the water. According to another account, the one that became the most accepted, Dawn's long ponytail brushed against the whale's nose setting off some instinctive reaction in the whale, which led to her death.

Once Brancheau found herself in the whale's mouth, there was little SeaWorld personnel could do to save her. The emergency sirens went off; the small number of guests who had paid extra to watch Dawn interact with the whale up close were hustled out of Shamu Stadium, but the other trainers could do nothing to save Dawn's life. The whale continued to swim around the pool with Dawn in his mouth. That the trainers' efforts to stop him were futile should come as no surprise considering the speed and power of killer whales, which can travel over a hundred miles per day in the wild. Eventually, the trainers coaxed the whale into a smaller pool fitted with a lift at the bottom, which allowed them to winch the whale out of the water. It was only after the SeaWorld employees had hoisted the whale out of the water that they could extricate Brancheau's by now lifeless body from its jaws.

Before long, one of the guests at the lunch with the whales crowd produced a video of Brancheau's last minutes with the whale. The video captures her in her killer whale colored wet suit, standing at poolside feeding the whale, scratching its fins and jaw, and dousing him with buckets of water. The film which got released on the internet had been edited so it contains a jump cut to a frame of Dawn now on the other side of the pool lying on her stomach in one of the shallow trays that juts out into the pool looking over her back, smiling at the now aroused and agitated whale. No footage of the events during the moments after that frame has been released.

Every account of what happened after that moment got absorbed into the polemics surrounding Brancheau's death. Before long, both the head trainer and the management at SeaWorld began giving accounts of what happened that subtly indicated that Brancheau was in some sense responsible for her own death. SeaWorld's corporate trainer Chuck Tompkins said that, "the whale was lying in front of Brancheau when her braid swung in front of him and he apparently grabbed onto it. We like to think we know 99.9 percent of the time what an animal is doing," he told The Associated Press on Thursday. "But this is one of those times we just don't know." When a reporter for WFTV asked Tompkins if the whale was bored, Tompkin became defensive.

"That is not accurate at all." Tompkins replied. "We spend our entire day intellectually stimulating these animals. There's learning sessions and play times and relationship sessions and there's just so many things we do."

A former SeaWorld contractor disagreed. Tilikum had been captured as a young whale in the ocean off the coast of Iceland and had not adapted to captivity. He was known to be aggressive." He doesn't get as much social interaction as the other whales and he doesn't get any in-water training interaction," he said.

Sea World's reaction was solemn at the outset, even if unintentionally comic as when they announced that "From now on, VIP visitors will no longer be invited to pet killer whales." If SeaWorld really wanted to redeem itself in the nation's eyes, why didn't they invite, say, Dick Cheney and/or Rahm Emanuel down for the Dawn Brancheau memorial service and fit them up with black and white wet suits and two buckets of fish?

Instead, at a Thursday afternoon press conference, SeaWorld president Dan Brown read a statement from Dawn Brancheau's family.

"Being a trainer was a life-long dream that she achieved. She loved her job; she loved her animals. For her husband, family and friends, Dawn was so much more. She was a compassionate, loving person who lived life to the fullest. Those who knew and loved her have suffered a tremendous loss, one so unexpectedly that it was extremely difficult to even process or comprehend at the time."

But the not so subtle message which began to emerge from the corporate fraternity at SeaWorld is that Dawn Brancheau was to blame for her own death. She violated protocols. By placing the blame on Dawn, SeaWorld hoped to skirt a number of issues that had all been waiting in the wings waiting for this accident to happen. By this point in the story, which is to say, before the sun went down on the day of her death, the sides in battle were clearly if crudely drawn. The crucial issues in the debate revolved around a moral scenario derived from Free Willy. Animal rights activists focused on the whales, claiming that they should not be kept in captivity at all, much less further exploited by having them perform. Celebrities like Matt Damon and the son of oceanographer Jean-Jacques Cousteau began weighing in on the side of the whales. Bob Barker, spokesman for PETA, said Tilly should be returned to his native habitat, or placed in a "coastal refuge," where he would be safe from predators. SeaWorld took the side of the whales as well, claiming that most of them (not including, of course, the one that had killed Dawn) had been born and bred in captivity and simply could not survive in the wild. Releasing the whales was tantamount to a death sentence. And there the debate stuck, like a phonograph needle in the groove of a scratched record.

Missing from the debate was any mention of the SeaWorld employees who risked their lives for the entertainment of a nation whose tastes had been jaded by a steady diet of special effects movies. The only thing that anyone could think to say about Brancheau was that she "died doing what she loved." After saying exactly that, Diane Gross, Brancheau's sister, who lives in Schererville, Indiana, assured one of the many reporters who called her for comment that "Dawn wouldn't want anything done to the whale now blamed in her death."

There is a certain irony in all this, considering Dawn Brancheau's background. Dawn grew up in northern Indiana as one of six children from a Italian Catholic family. Brancheau was student body president at Andrean High School in Merrillville, Indiana, a bedroom community for ethnically cleansed Catholics from Chicago's South Side. She is remembered as "a huge animal lover" and the "face of SeaWorld," the corporation that made millions from her performances with killer whales like Tilly, but her father, the late Charles Lo Verde, was a union man; he was, in fact, president of Laborer's Local Union 1092, which represents Chicago's water and sewer workers. Her brother is president of the same union local today. Presumably, Dawn's father and brother fought for safe working conditions for Chicago's water and sewer workers when they had to descend into the sewers of Chicago. If similar provisions were made for the safety of the employees of SeaWorld who had descend into the killer whale tanks, no one was talking about them. Celebrities were talking about the conditions of captivity for the whales at SeaWorld, but no one was talking about working conditions for the employees there. If anything, the Killer Whale corporate establishment was talking as if Dawn Brancheau had no one to blame but herself. All subsequent debate focused exclusively on the whale and came down to a question of who was the more ardent defender of Tilly's welfare: 1) the animal rights crowd, which wanted Tilly released or 2) the SeaWorld Corporate interests who claimed that Tilly was well cared for and couldn't survive in the wild anyway. The SeaWorld website went out of its way to express concern for the whale that killed Brancheau.

"Many people are asking about the future care of Tilikum, the whale involved in the incident," a SeaWorld blog post said. "We have every intention of continuing to interact with this animal, though the procedures for working with him will change." The news report went on to say that, "Chuck Tompkins, who is in charge of training at all SeaWorld parks, said Thursday that Tilikum will not be isolated from [the Seaword] Orlando location's seven other whales. He fathered some of them and will continue to mate with others."

Once again the story line of Free Willy got invoked by the very people who are the villains in the Free Willy movies, namely, the capitalists who own the whales and exploit them for profit. According to SeaWorld's version of the story, the Dawn/Tilly story is all about family. The treehuggers (or in this instance, the whalehuggers) wanted to break up Tilly's family by sending him off to a "coastal refuge," where he didn't know anyone. Images of Tilly pining away for all of the children he sired at SeaWorld leapt immediately to mind.

"We want him to continue to be part of that social group," Tompkins continued. According to the news report, "Trainers will review safety procedures and change them as needed, but Tompkins said he doesn't expect much about the killer whale shows to change."

Tompkins was, indeed, prophetic. After suspending the killer whale shows in the wake of Brancheau's death, SeaWorld resumed them two days later, after a sentimental video presentation on Dawn's life as an animal trainer who "died doing what she loved." The fact that SeaWorld seems more concerned about the whale than about the women who feed the whales (or end up as whale food) is hardly surprising. Tilly is worth millions. Woman trainers are expendable. When one intrepid reporter asked how much Dawn had been paid, SeaWorld refused to discuss her salary. One representative of the industry said that "the positions for trainers who are allowed in the water with the whales are highly-coveted and strictly supervised." In terms of salary, that means that Dawn could have been paid anywhere from $40,000 to $250,000 to risk her life for the entertainment of the masses. The 1993 film Free Willy puts a human face on the despicable capitalists who run places like SeaWorld, but it totally ignored the risks which the trainers ran in dealing with the whales. In fact, Free Willy, if anything, promoted child labor and working conditions even less safe than those at SeaWorld—as when, for example, they portray the 10-year-old hero of the film dangling his legs in the killer whale tank. No matter what it did for whales, Free Willy did nothing to bring about safer working conditions for the people who worked with the whales. The premise of the movies—which is to say, "that whale is more human than you are," which is to say, the killer whale is a benign ultimately spiritual creature—virtually guaranteed that anyone who accepted this premise was going to get hurt. Dawn Brancheau, who referred to the whales as her "children," accepted this premise without reserve, and it was that lack of reservation that led to her death.

The press accounts called Brancheau's death a "tragic accident," but Tilikum had already killed two other people. Tilly was one of three killer whales blamed for killing a trainer who lost her balance and fell in the pool with them in 1991 at Sealand of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia. Sealand got closed down, but Tilly got rewarded by being giving a promotion and sent to SeaWorld, where he was involved in the death of a man who climbed into his tank to swim with the whales in 1999. Dead men, they say, tell no tales, so it's impossible to know if this man had ever watched Free Willy. Even if it's impossible to ascertain, it seems unlikely that anyone who would attempt a stunt like this had never seen the movie. In each instance, the industry spokesmen were quick in their defense of the whale, a creature which is their biggest asset as well as their meal ticket, if you'll pardon the expression. Billy Hurley, chief animal officer at the Georgia Aquarium said that working with killer whales is like driving racecars or piloting jets. There are risks involved, and Brancheau "knew the risks." Of course, there are risks involved in getting out of bed in the morning too, but, as Hurley puts it, "In the case of a killer whale, if they want your attention or if they're frustrated by something or if they're confused by something, there's only a few ways of handling that. If you're right near pool's edge and they decide they want a closer interaction during this, certainly they can grab you," and "At 12,000 pounds there's not a lot of resisting you're going to do."

So was Dawn Brancheau's death a tragic accident, or was it an accident waiting to happen? Was Dawn at fault? Was it her ponytail? The former contractor, who spent hours with the whales, said long hair was identified as an issue in another deadly attack and says Dawn's ponytail might have triggered the killer whale's hunting instinct, or he could have thought it was a toy.

Or, as the quote about "the killer whale's hunting instinct" indicates, was her death the result of a killer whale acting like a killer whale? When all is said and done, killer whales are wild animals, which is to say, creatures which are not rational, which is to say, creatures who function according to instincts as manifested by strict stimulus/response mechanisms. The trainers at Sea World try to engineer these stimulus/response mechanisms by reinforcing "good" behavior (i.e., what the trainers want the whales to do) and ignoring "bad" behavior, but the instincts which control the mechanisms the trainers manipulate are always there beneath the surface of learned behavior waiting to go off at moments that no one can predict.

It is usually unfamiliar actions which trigger the reaction in the wild animal. Florida, which is the home of O. J. Simpson and notorious for all sorts of deregulation, has more lions and tigers in residential dwellings than any place else on earth. One tiger owner was in the habit of having neighborhood children come into his home to be photographed with his tiger. Everything went fine until one day one little girl dropped something when she was waiting to have her picture taken. Bending over to pick up what she had dropped, the little girl exposed the back of her naked neck to the tiger, who instantly reacted to this stimulus by doing what God has programmed tigers to do. He bit the girl on the neck severing her spine and killing her instantly. Tea pickers in India know this. That is why they wear masks on the back of their heads while picking tea.

The seal is a staple of the killer whale's diet. Unlike sharks, which also eat seals, the killer whale can travel on land, as far as 10 yards, to catch seals sunning themselves on the beach. One of the videos linked to the Dawn Bransheau story shows two killer whales doing something akin to walking onto the beach to kill a seal. The video shows two whales as they heave themselves up on to a ledge and lunge at the birds at the side of their pool. This is also precisely the position in which trainers like Dawn inevitably find themselves, even if they follow protocols and don't swim with the killer whales. Whether they get in the tank with whales like Tilikum or not, the trainers have to shovel 300 pounds of fish into the mouths of their charges every day. They become, as a result, associated with food in a situation which killer whales have been programmed to go after seals. Dawn's actions on that unfortunate Wednesday in February set off that behavior.

The Internet is full of videos showing the dangerous nature of what trainers at Sea World are involved in. In addition to the video showing Tilly killing his trainer in British Columbia, another shows how in 2006 one male SeaWorld employee was nearly drowned by killer whales running (or swimming) amok. This particular trainer was lucky enough to escape from this encounter with a broken foot; the foot was broken, of course, because it ended up in a killer whale's mouth.

So why did Dawn put herself in harm's way. The short answer to that question is that the culture—and by this we mean media, school and family—had persuaded her that swimming in 50 degree water with a 12,000 pound killer whale was "a dream job." Dawn was the model high school student. She was both student body president and homecoming queen, which is to say, a sex object upon whom the culture had superimposed the simulacrum of a leader. She was everything a girl who graduated from high school in 1987 should aspire to be. One of her coaches described her as Andrean High School's "golden girl":

"Dawn was a varsity cheerleader, a member of the golf team that I coached when we won the first sectional, student council president, homecoming queen, and if that wasn't enough, she did everything possible for the school. She was at every sporting event."

REQUIEM FOR A WHALE RIDER

By E. Michael Jones