Tilikum and Sea World

Without a doubt, this incident is tragic for everyone involved.  But let’s remember nothing in this scenario save Tilikum’s skin color is black and white.  Many rush to blame Sea World for keeping Tilikum despite his involvement in several deaths in previous years.  Many would also blame Dawn, speculating that she “did something to cause Tilikum to attack.”  

I don’t know enough about Orca health and wellness needs, and will not comment on Sea World’s ability to care for those needs.  From what I have read, they seem to take good care of their Orcas.  This is also not the place for a discussion of whether or not these animals should be in captivity.  Captive programs are here to stay for the coming future, so the best we can do is to make sure they are quality programs.

As a humane animal advocate I was thrilled to hear Jim Atchison, president of Sea World, state unequivocally that Tilikum would not see punishment for his actions.  Tilikum and all captive Orcas are victims here and to be punished for the sole reason of being a wild animal just can’t be part of our world any longer.  We have chosen to keep these animals close to us.  Dawn chose to enter the water with a 22-foot, 12-ton killer animal.  She knew the risk.  As a fellow animal trainer, I understand that risk and would probably do the same thing.  I feel sure Dawn would not have blamed Tilikum nor would want him punished.  

We only have to take a moment to remember Montecore, the 600-pound white tiger who dragged his trainer, Vegas performer Roy Horn, off stage during another show nearly killing him.  In 2008, Rocky, a 700-pound grizzly bear killed one of his trainers, Stephan Miller of Predators in Action, a company that trains wild animals for film and photo shoots.  We as a society ask for interactions with wild animals as if they are domesticated pets that can have their instincts trained out of them.  We pay for these interactions.  We purchase tickets to Sea World and Vegas-style stage shows to watch people play with these creatures as if they are windup toys.  We don’t ever stop to think about the emotional toll that living in captivity or the thoughts and feeling that these animals have regarding their care.  They aren’t given the choice to “not do a show today.”  These animals have emotional lives that aren’t considered.  And when they “act out” because they are frustrated or angry at their trainers/keepers, often (and perhaps inadvertently) they kill them.  

I do believe that we are all part of the problem of wild animal attacks in captive scenarios, and we can all be part of the solution.  We can stop paying for tickets to stage shows.  We can demand that places like Sea World be a sanctuary that cares for injured and captive-bred animals only.  We can insist that their shows be much more about conservation and wellness of the total animal, both physical and emotional, and not about how people can get a 12,000-pound orca to mimic us as we bounce back and forth from one leg to the other.

As Courtney Vail of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society said on CBS-TV, we don’t see enough scientific research and conservation work at these places.  They are too focused on creating exciting stage shows and don’t have any room to create proper homes for the animals that are in their forced captive care.  We can create sanctuaries that focus on the animal.  We can create a connection with people and wild animals where respect, scientific research, conservation, and humane education are at the fore-front of what the public pays for.  These places won’t be as flashy as watching an orca pushing a person twenty feet into the air or seeing dolphins jump through hoops in syncopated fashion, but they could be beautiful places.

Kat Berger, APDT

Owner, The Furry Nation

The space between our wicked lives is where I'm waiting for you
nature's essense grows love fertilized by one seed of hope that clung to one leaf at the bottom of my heart hiding so far down I didn't eve know it was there

Love still remains

Love still grows

My heart sprouts like a desert flower after a flood with reckless abandon

Reckless Abandon
Tails wag
Desert flowers sprout to the sky after a summer storm
but my heart hides

As the snow melts
nature sounds the call of love
Chirping
Squealing
breezes flowing through the new life of the earth
but my heart hides

Life carries on
past one generation to another
past vibrant colors of the earth's bounty and the icey cold of her hibernation

a seed is allowed the flourish
fertilized by hope
by the sparkle of you eyes
by the honesty in your smile
by a touch that fills the air with it's warmth

Hercules, A Lesson in Animal Minds

by Kat Berger, 2010 all rights reserved.

When speaking with animal professionals they will each and every one of them quickly begin to tell you stories of their precious ones (both alive and passed) and the lessons they’ve learned from them.  This is just such a story and although we’ve all read and heard many of these stories please take a moment to read this one as well.

Hercules came to me in the summer of my twenty-second year.  I excitedly went to a local shelter ready to find a partner and friend. This would be my first dog.  My family always had cats in the house while growing up. Hercules and I clicked the moment our eyes met.  A shelter staff member mentioned “that dog doesn’t ever come out of his corner to greet people” and my decision was solidified.  Hercules chose me to help him have a better life.  We went home and things were wonderful for a couple weeks.

At the time I knew nothing of animal emotions, dog behavior or even of training.  Hercules training progressed well in some ways and the two of us had clearly bonded but other issues began to creep up.  Hercules clearly didn’t like some strangers.  First he growled at a man on the street.  No big deal in my mind, he could protect me.  Then he got scared of the UPS guy walking up the driveway.  Little issues creep in all over.  Once when trying to clip Herc’s nails he got scared/hurt and bit my hand.  Upon biting me, and my reactionary scream, he immediately ran to a corner urinated on himself and shook for thirty minutes while I tried to calm him down.   Over the coming year his bond to me strengthened and his aggression to weird and unknown situations/people/things grew.  

I finally went in search of a trainer to help solve Hercules’ problems.  Trainer after trainer would tell me how Hercules needed more discipline and I was too soft on him.  I wasn’t being the leader and so he was taking a dominant stance and in dogs that means aggression.  I had to take control.  Everything in my gut screamed that they were wrong that Hercules was scared but I had no where else to go.    I would try a method they gave me once or twice but couldn’t follow through.  I just didn’t have it in me to shock a living creature.  I could feel/smell/see the pain in Hercules with each punitive correction.  And it’s honestly seemed to be making him worse.

In the end I failed Hercules.  I killed him by lethal injection on December 23, 1999 for the protection of other humans.  I’ve learned much about the behavior and emotional needs of dogs since then and can say my training has helped save many dogs from the same fate but the trust Hercules had given to me and my failure to provide a good life for him will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Hercules is just one example of our failure as a culture to provide for animals’ needs.  We use and abuse animals in so many ways from neglected dogs and cats to horrendous abuse in medical laboratories across the country.  We use outdated and truncated research to explain their behavior.  We claim they don’t have developed brains or emotions, as we human animals do, but then turn around and use them in research study to explain and understand human animal brains and emotions better.  Our clear lack of a connection to the earth and it’s creatures as sent a disconnect in our entire society which only increases our own violence first to animals and as we now see to human animals as well.

Ethology teaches us that there must be a connectedness to all creatures on an evolutionary stage.  We all agree that physical traits have developed slowly from one animal to the next.  So if such things as the the spine, legs and  arms have developed through evolutionary changes then why not the brain and internal states.  Tinbergen claims just this that animal behavior is informed by internal states of instincts, drives, motivational impulses, and outward flowing nervous energy.  Even if we continue to falsely assume that dogs behave almost solely based on a desire to continue to climb an imaginary hirarchy system through violence/aggression alone we still have given them an emotion of desire.  

Cognitive Ethology continues today to explore and document how varied the evolutionary development of the brain is in all creatures.  It strives to help us understand the emotional and internal states of the amazing creatures we share this earth with.  I believe that until we allow all people to feel valid in knowing these states we have doomed our own species.  Until my gut understanding of Hercules’ fear and pain is documented in a clear understanding of facial/body muscle movement and physiological  states then we are doomed to fail again and again.  Until we approach Hercules’ decendants with kindness and understanding of their internal states and gear our reactions to them with humane understanding and approaches that help to communicate between species then we are doomed to fail.  In my part I hope to bridge the research of cognitive ethology to manageable bits that people can digest and use in their own lives.  Giving them space to understand a new way of thinking about animals so that they can begin to heal their own heart while healing the animals they interact with as well.