Blackfish - The Whale that Killed Storyville

-Orange County Fire Rescue.

-16 600 Sea Harbour Drive.

Shamu Stadium.

OK.

We actually have a trainer in the water with one of our whales.

-The whale that they're not supposed to be in the water with.

-OK.

-We will get someone round.

-Gate number three, Shamu Stadium.

Gate three.

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

Orange County, Sheriff's Office.

We need SO to respond for a dead person at SeaWorld.

A whale has eaten one of the trainers.

A whale ate one of the trainers?

That's correct.

'Do you believe?'

My parents first brought me to a SeaWorld park when I was very young.

From that point forward, I was hooked.

It meant everything to me because I'd never wanted anything more.

I remember probably being in first or second grade,

watching National Geographic specials or Mutual of Omaha's

specials and seeing whales and dolphins

and as a little kid just being really incredibly inspired by it.

I never went to SeaWorld.

I grew up in New York, so I went to the Bronx Zoo.

-Grew up on a lake with horses. We'd swim the horses.

-I grew up around the ocean.

I came from the middle of the country, Flatland Kansas.

From Virginia, travelled down,

did the theme park thing in Orlando when I was 17.

And saw the night show at Shamu Stadium.

Very emotional, you know, popular music.

And I was just very driven to want to do that.

And I saw what the trainers did and I said, "That's what I want to do!"

One of the trainers there goes, "What are you doing out there?

"You should be a trainer." I don't know how to train animals. I never trained animals in my life.

How do you prepare yourself for an encounter with

an 8,000lb Orcinus orca?

I always thought you needed, like, a Masters degree in marine biology to be a trainer.

It takes years of study and experience to meet the strict

requirements necessary to interact in the water

with Shamu.

You come to find out, it really is more about your personality and how good you can swim.

I went and tried out, got the job right away. Like, yeah, so excited. I was so, so excited.

I really wanted to be there. I really wanted to do the job.

I couldn't wait to get in the water with the animals.

I really was proud of being a SeaWorld trainer.

I thought this was the most amazing job.

I showed up there on my first day, not really knowing what to expect.

'I was told to put on a wet suit and get in the water.' Hi, Mom!

Oh, I was scared out of my wits.

First of all, I put my wet suit on backwards

cos I was raised on a farm in Virginia.

My first thought and memory of that time was that dolphins are a

lot bigger than they look, when you get in the water next to them.

Well, I watched this sea lion otter show and this guy, Mike Morocco.

He comes out during the show with a dress on as Dorky,

the alter ego of Dorothy.

In a dress, with a sea lion, the coward sea lion, right?

And he's walking along with his little basket and I go,

"I will never ever do that!"

Two months later, "Hi! I'm Dorky!"

Walking out on stage with the sea lion.

I was overwhelmed and I was so excited.

I mean, just seeing a killer whale...

..is breathtaking.

I was just in awe.

It's shocking to see how large they are and how beautiful they are.

Being in the presence of a killer whale was inspiring and amazing and

I remember seeing them for the first time,

just not being able to believe how huge they were.

You're there because you want to train killer whales

and that's your goal.

I didn't know it was going to happen,

so I wasn't expecting it,

and one day they say, "OK, Sam. You're ready to go.

"You're going to stay on the whale, you're going to dive off the

"whale, the whale's going to swim under you and pick you up again.

"And then you're going to do a perimeter ride around the pool."

They just told me to go do it and I did it.

Wow! I just rode a killer whale!

When you look into their eyes, you know somebody is home,

somebody's looking back.

You form a very personal relationship with your animal.

There's something absolutely amazing about working with an animal.

You are a team.

And you build a relationship together

and you both understand the goal and you help each other.

I've been with this whale since I was 18 years old.

I've seen her have babies. We've grown up together.

That's the joy I got out of it, it's a relationship like I've never had.

I have to know, are you nervous?

I'm scared.

No! Nice hair, Jeff!

LAUGHTER

Jeff Ventre.

Jeff Ventre is going to go over there, he's going to shine...

-Dawn.

-Oh, that's Dawn! Wow!

Probably be my supervisor one day.

I knew Dawn when she was new. She was a great person to work with

and she obviously blossomed into one of SeaWorld's best trainers.

This is Dawn Brancheau.

Dawn is the senior trainer here at Shamu Stadium.

I guess you could say I kind of knew Dawn in a past life.

-It's a tough job, isn't it?

-Yeah, we really do go through a lot of physical exertion.

You can see in the show, we do a lot of deep water work, breath holds.

High energy behaviours with the animals. They're giving out a lot of energy too,

but we're working together and having a lot of fun as well.

She's beautiful, she's blonde, she's athletic, she's friendly.

Everybody loves Dawn.

I mean this so sincerely, watching you perform yesterday,

-you are amazing.

-Thank you.

-You really are!

She captured what it means to be a SeaWorld trainer.

She had so much experience. It made me realise, what happened to her could have happened to anyone.

This is Detective Revere, Orange County Sherriff's Office.

Today's date is February 24th 2010. The time is 4.16.

In the room with me right now is Thomas George Tobin.

-Is that correct?

-Correct.

-So the arm is nowhere...

-Right.

OSHA on behalf of the Federal Government is basically

suggesting that swimming with orcas is inherently dangerous

and that you can't completely predict the outcome

when you enter the water, enter their environment.

That's the crux of the OSHA case.

Stay out of proximity with the animals and you won't get killed.

It will have a ripple effect through the whole industry.

This was national headline news.

SeaWorld's whale performances may never be the same.

Right now, the theme park is arguing in court to keep whale

trainers in the water, something OSHA says is extremely dangerous.

These are wild animals and they are unpredictable because we don't

speak whale, we don't speak tiger, we don't speak monkey.

And tempers flared between the two sides today

when OSHA's attorney suggested that SeaWorld only made changes

after trainer Dawn Brancheau's death outraged the public.

OSHA doesn't want the trainers going back in the water without

a physical barrier between them and the whales.

Being in close proximity to these top predators is too dangerous.

They won't then be getting in the water, riding on the whales, things like that?

If you were in a bathtub for 25 years, don't you think you'd

get a little irritated, aggravated, maybe a little psychotic?

The situation with Dawn Brancheau, it didn't just happen,

it's not a singular event.

You have to go back over 20 years to understand this.

It was a really exciting thing to do until everybody wanted to do it.

What were they telling you you were going to do?

Capture orcas.

They had aircraft, they had spotters, they had speedboats,

they had bombs they were throwing in the water.

They were lighting their bombs with acetylene torches in boats

and throwing them as fast as they could to herd the whales into coves.

But the orcas had been caught before and they knew what was going on

and they knew their young ones would be taken from them.

So the adults without young went east into a cul-de-sac

and the boats followed them, thinking they were all going that way,

while the mothers with babies went north,

but the capture teams had aircraft

and they have to come up for air eventually and when they did,

the capture teams alerted the boats and said, "Oh, no.

"They're going north, the ones with babies,"

so the boats, the speedboats, caught them there and herded them in.

And then they had fishing boats with nets that could stretch across,

so none could leave, and then they could just pick out the young ones.

We were only after the little ones.

And the little ones are a big animal, still, but I was told

because of shipping costs, that's why they only take the little ones.

They had the young ones that they wanted in the corrals, so they

dropped the nets and all the others could have left, but they stayed.

We were there, trying to get the young orca into the stretcher,

and the whole family is 25 yards away maybe, in a big line.

And they're communicating back and forth.

Well...you understand then what you're doing, you know?

I lost it. I mean, I just started crying.

I didn't stop working, but I...

You know... Just couldn't handle it.

Just like kidnapping a little kid away from a mother.

Everybody's watching. What can you do?

The worst thing I can think of.

I can't think of anything worse than that.

Now, this really sounds bad, but when the whole hunt was over,

there were three dead whales in the net.

So they had Peter and Brian and I cut the whales open,

fill them with rocks, put anchors on their tails and sink them.

Well...

Really, I didn't even think about it being illegal at that point.

I thought it was a PR thing.

They were finally ejected from the state of Washington

by a court order in 1976.

It was SeaWorld by name that was told - do not come back

to Washington to capture whales.

Without missing a beat, they went from Washington to Iceland

and began capturing there.

I've been part of the revolution

to change presidents in Central South America.

And seen some things that are hard to believe.

But this is the worst thing that I've ever done...

..is hunt that whale.

'Sealand has been a part of Victoria for over 20 years.

'We specialise in the care and display of killer whales.'

By the time I started, he was four.

He was up to 16ft long and weighed 4,000lbs.

I had actually seen Tilikum quite a number of times.

He was right across the strait here in Victoria.

All Sealand was was a net hanging in a marina with a float around it.

Tilikum was the one we really loved to work with.

He was very well-behaved and he was always eager to please.

When he was first introduced, everything just went fine and dandy.

But the previous head trainer used techniques that involved punishment.

He would team a trained orca up with Tilikum, who was untrained.

He would send them both off to do the same behaviour.

If Tilikum didn't do it, then both animals were punished.

Deprived of food to keep them hungry.

This caused a lot of frustration with the larger animal,

the established animal, and would in turn get frustrated with

Tilikum and would rake him with his teeth.

There would be times during certain seasons that Tilikum would be

covered, head to toe, with rakes.

Rakes are teeth on teeth and raking the skin and from head to toe,

you could see blood and you could see scratches

and he would just be raked up.

Both females would gang up on him. Tilikum was the one we trusted.

We never were concerned about Tilikum.

The issue was really that we stored these whales at night in what

we called a module, which was 20ft across and probably 30ft deep.

As a safety precaution, because we were worried about people cutting the net and letting them go,

the lights were all turned out, so no stimulation,

they're just in this dark metal 20ft by 30ft pool

for two-thirds of their life.

When we first started, they were quite small and quite young, so

they fit in there quite nicely, but they were immobile for the most part.

It didn't feel good.

It just didn't.

And it was just wrong.

We started having difficulty getting them all

into this one small steel box, to be honest, that's what it was.

It was a floating steel box.

That's where food deprivation would come in.

We would hold back food and they would know

if they went in the module that they would get their food. So if they're hungry enough, they go in there.

And during the winter, that would be from five at night till seven in the morning.

When you let them out, you'd see these new tooth rakes and sometimes you'd see blood.

Closing that door on him

and knowing that he's locked in there for the whole night is like...

It's a stab, it's a... Whoa!

If that is true, it's not only inhumane and I'll tell them so,

but it probably led to what I think is a psychosis

that...he was on a hair-trigger.

He'd...kill.

SIRENS

'An employee is dead after an encounter...'

'..at a Canadian park called Sealand of the Pacific.'

'The victim, Keltie Byrne, was a championship swimmer

'and a part-time worker at Sealand.'

'As seen in this home video, rescuers used a huge net...'

'Rescue workers' efforts were hindered by the agitated whales.'

I'd like to make the team this summer,

but my more immediate goal is just to swim fast at Nationals.

It was sort of a cloudy, grey day

and we were looking for something to do,

so we thought, why not go to Sealand?

It was kind of like this dingy pool with these whales.

It just felt a little bit like an amusement park that was

kind of on its last legs and everything was a bit grey.

-It was like a swimming pool. Three whales in a swimming pool.

-Yeah.

And they would come up and touch the ball

and I think there was some tail splashing and there was...

-Some jumping.

-With the fish.

They hold the fish and the whales jump up.

I remember saying, "What a fun job. She's so lucky."

And then I saw her walking with her rubber boots and she tripped

and her foot just dipped into the edge of the pool

and she lost her balance and fell in.

And then she was pushing her way up to get out of the pool

and the whale zoomed over, grabbed her boot and pulled her back in.

At first, I didn't think it was that serious because you see

the trainer in the pool with the whale and you think,

"Oh, well. The whales are used to that."

And then all of a sudden, it started getting...

There was more swimming, more activity, more thrashing.

And she was starting to get panicked and then as it progressed,

you started to realise - something's not right here.

She started to scream and she started looking around

and her eyes were like bigger and bigger and realising -

I really am in trouble here.

And then they would pull her under.

They would come up and then when she came up, she'd be, "Help me!

"Help me!" And then they'd take her down again.

And she would be submerged for...several seconds, up to,

I don't know, maybe a minute. You're not keeping track.

So it was harder and harder for her to, you know, get the air in

because she was screaming.

And my sister remembers her saying, "I don't want to die."

Condolences to Keltie's family.

Yeah.

We couldn't help her.

It was pretty wretched.

Sealand closed, it's probably a good thing. I mean, it was a little pond.

I think the owner made the right decision, for whatever reasons.

I don't believe he's a bad guy, a bad man.

I think he was shocked by the whole affair too.

The blush was gone from the business and he decided that that was it.

We should set down.

No-one ever contacted us. There was an inquest.

No-one ever asked us to say what happened. We just left.

There was no big lawsuits afterwards. There's no memorial.

The only thing remaining of Keltie Byrne...

..is what's left in the folk's minds who recalled the case.

So in the newspaper articles, the cause of death was that she

drowned accidentally, but she was pulled under by the whale.

Well, there's a bit of smoke and mirrors going on.

One of the fundamental facts is that none of the witnesses were clear

about which whale pulled Keltie in.

Yes, yeah, it was the large whale, Tilikum.

The male is the one that went after her.

The other two just circled around,

but he was definitely the instigator.

We knew it was that whale because he had a flopped over fin.

It was very easy to tell.

Sealand of the Pacific closed its doors and was looking,

I guess, to make a buck on the way out.

These whales are worth millions of dollars.

When SeaWorld heard that Tilikum was available after this

accident at Sealand of the Pacific, they really wanted Tilikum

because they needed a breeder.

So I don't even think that anybody was even questioning, like,

"Is this a good idea?"

My understanding of the situation was that Tilikum and the others

would not be used in shows, they would not be performance animals.

Our understanding of their behaviour was

that it was such a highly stimulating event for them

that they were likely to repeat it.

Sealand was... We were all young and a bit of sea cowboys.

We weren't so technical and scientific as SeaWorld,

so we all had this vision that they knew more than us

and they were better than us and Tilikum would have a bigger pool

and he'd have a better life, he would have better care,

he would have better food and it'd be a great life for him.

So it was like, "OK, Tilikum. You're going to Disneyland."

Lucky you.

The orca's intelligence may be even superior to man's.

As parents, they are exemplary - better than many human beings.

Like human beings, they have a profound instinct for vengeance.

Dino De Laurentiis presents...

If you go back only 35 years, we knew nothing.

In fact, less than nothing.

What the public had was superstition and fear.

A fight to the death...

..between the two most dangerous animals on Earth.

Where the hell are you?!

These were the vicious killer whales that had 48 sharp teeth

that would rip you to shreds if they got a chance.

What we learned is that they're amazingly friendly

and understanding, and intuitively want to be your companions.

Are you recording this?

And to this day there is no record of an orca doing any harm

to any human in the wild.

They live in these big families.

And they have life spans very similar to human life spans.

The females can live to about 100, maybe more.

Males to about 50 or 60,

but the adult offspring never leave their mother's side.

Each community has a completely different set of behaviours.

Each has a complete repertoire of vocalisations with no overlap.

You could call them languages.

The scientific community is reluctant to say,

any other animal but humans uses languages,

but there's every indication that they use languages.

The orca brain just screams out intelligence, awareness.

We took this tremendous brain

and we put it in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.

What we found was just astounding.

They've got a part of the brain that humans don't have.

A part of their brain has extended out

right adjacent to their limbic system.

The system processes emotions.

The safest inference would be -

these are animals that have highly elaborated emotional lives.

It's becoming clear that dolphins and whales have a sense of self,

a sense of social bonding that they've taken to another level.

Much stronger, much more complex than any other mammals, including humans.

We look at mass strandings, the fact that they stand by each other.

Everything about them is social. Everything.

It's been suggested that their whole sense of self

is distributed among the individuals in their group.

Five of them.

These orca are going to attack this seal.

They've been breaking the ice off and swimming around him.

Oh, here they come, two of them.

Look, underneath there, you can see them underneath.

They made a big wave. Look at that. Big wave.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, God. No! No, no!

Oh, I can't stand it.

If you can't watch the bull fight, you better leave.

Here they go, look at this. Three of them.

Oh, God. Oh, no!

-Oh, God!

-It's all over.

-No, not quite.

-Nope.

Yeah, it's all over.

It's all over.

The first nation's people and the old fishermen on the coast,

they call them black fish.

They're an animal that possesses great spiritual power.

They're not to be meddled with.

I've spent a lot of time around killer whales

and they're always in charge.

I never get out of the boat. I never mess with them.

The speed and the power is quite amazing.

The rules are the same as the pool hall -

keep one foot on the floor at all times.

Even after seeing them thousands of times...

..you see them and you, you know, wake up.

MACHINERY WHIRRS

He arrived, I think, in 1992.

I was at Whale and Dolphin Stadium when he arrived.

And he's twice as large as the next animal in the facility.

Guys, right in at about 12,000lbs. That's-that's incredible.

He looks fantastic.

When Tilikum arrived at SeaWorld, he was attacked viciously,

repeatedly, by Katina and others.

In the wild, it's a very matriarchal society.

Male whales are kept at the perimeter.

In captivity, animals are squeezed into very close proximity.

Tilikum, the poor guy is so large he couldn't get away because

he just is not as mobile, relative to the smaller, more agile females.

Where was he going to run? There's no place to run.

I think he spent a lot of time in isolation.

SeaWorld claims that, "Oh, no, he's always in with the females,"

but from what I saw he was mostly put with the females

for breeding purposes and he didn't spend a lot of time

with the other whales.

It's for his own protection. You know, he gets beat up.

And so, by segregating him,

it provides a physical barrier so the females can't kick his butt.

Tilikum is pretty much kept in the back

and then brought out at the very end as like the big splash.

He was...always happy to see you in the morning.

-There we go.

-That's a boy.

-Look at his chompers.

'Maybe because he was alone, maybe because he was hungry,

'maybe because he just liked you.

'Who knows what was going on in his head?'

Want to whistle?

TILIKUM WHISTLES

That was really loud.

Come on, big boy.

He seemed to like to work, he seemed to be interested.

He seemed to want to learn new things.

He seemed to be enjoying working with the trainers.

He, for me, was a joy.

He really responded to me and I...

Every day I went to work, I was happy to see Tilly.

That's cute.

You're being too cute.

I never got the impression of him, while I was there, "Oh, my God.

"He's a scary whale." No, not at all.

Maybe some of it's just our naivety or whatever.

You know...

Because we weren't given the full details of Keltie's situation.

Turn around. Smile, buddy.

I was under the impression

that Tilikum had nothing to do with her death specifically,

that it was the female whales responsible for her death.

What I found really odd at first was the way

they were acting round this whale and what they had told us

seemed to me to be two different things.

The first day he arrived,

I remember one of the senior trainers at SeaWorld...

Tilikum was in a pool and she was walking over a gate.

She had her wet suit unzipped and it was tied around her waist.

She was making cooing noises and was going,

"Hey, Tilikum, what a cute little whale."

She was just play talking at him and one of the supervisors said,

"Get her out of there!" Just screamed at her.

"Get her away from there,"

like they were so worried that something was going to happen.

I remember thinking, "Why are you guys making such a big deal

"out of this when he didn't actually kill her?"

Well, clearly management thought that there was some reason

to exercise caution around him.

Clearly they knew more than they were telling us.

Ladies and gentlemen, the next few behaviours you're going to be seeing,

you can only see here right here at SeaWorld.

Jeff was out in the audience, filming one of the Shamu shows.

It was a perfect show.

All the hot-dog sequences, the waterworks sequences went off great.

I was really excited just to be capturing this

cos it was kind of turning out to be a great show.

A show that's kind of complete.

It probably only happens a few times a week.

At the very end of the show, Liz was working Tilikum,

and apparently Tilikum lunged out the water at her.

I captured Tilikum coming out of the water, kind of turning sideways,

and appeared to me to try to grab Liz.

At that moment, the tape became unusable.

I was just kind of basically instructed to get rid of the tape.

Wanting to kind of preserve the tape, I actually used the editing equipment

and snipped out that little half second or second

when he did that and stitched it back together,

so it just looked like a glitch in the tape.

I was like, "Look at this."

And it was like, "No, this is no longer useable."

So we had to destroy the tape.

It's pretty outrageous that SeaWorld would claim

there was no expecting Tilikum to come out of the water

because they had witnessed him coming out of the water

and it's written into his profile.

He lunges at trainers.

When we visit SeaWorld, we tend to take for granted the fact

that Shamu has been provided with a safe and comfortable habitat.

And everything trained is to make sense to them -

the killer whales' natural behaviour.

I spewed out the party line during shows. I'm totally mortified now.

There was like, something like... "Look at Namu.

"Namu's not doing that because she has to.

"Namu is doing this because she really wants to."

Oh, my gosh.

Like, some of the things I'm embarrassed by. So embarrassed by.

At the time, I think I could have convinced myself

that the relationships we had were built on something stronger

than the fact that I'm giving them fish.

You know, I like to think that.

But I don't know that that's the truth.

I had been there a while and I had seen a few other things

along the way that made me question why I was there

and what we were doing with these animals.

November 4th, 1988.

A killer whale at SeaWorld gave the performance of a lifetime.

Don't miss this small miracle. Come see our new baby Shamu.

I know it was naive of me, but I thought that...

..it was our responsibility to do as much as we could

to keep their family units together

since we knew that, in the wild, that's what happens.

# Yes, sir, that's our baby. #

Kalina was the first baby Shamu.

Baby Shamu, SeaWorld's newest star.

She had become quite disruptive and challenging her mum a little bit

and disrupting some shows and that kind of thing.

# She's got the whole place jumping

# Shamu, she's our baby whale. #

It was decided by the higher-ups

that she would be moved to another park

when she was just four, four-and-a-half years old.

That was news to us as trainers that were working with her.

To me, it had never crossed my mind

that they might be moving the baby from her mom.

The supervisors basically were kind of mocking me,

"Oh, you're saying, 'poor Kalina'?" You know?

"What's she going to do without her mommy?"

And that, of course, just shut me up.

So the night of the move, we had to deploy the nets to separate them

and get Kalina, the baby, into the med pool.

Katina was generally a quiet whale. She was not an overly vocal whale.

After Kalina was removed from the scene and put on the truck

and taken to the airport and Katina, her mum, was left in the pool,

she stayed in the corner of the pool, literally just shaking

and screaming, screeching, crying.

I'd never seen her do anything like that.

The other females in the pool,

maybe once or twice during the night,

they'd come out and check on her.

She'd screech and cry and they would just run back.

There was nothing that you could call that, watching it,

besides grief.

Those are not your whales.

You know, you love them and you think,

"I'm the one that touches them, feeds them, keeps them alive,

"gives them the care that they need."

They're not your whales.

They own them.

Kasatka and Takara were very close.

Kasatka was the mother, Takara's the calf.

Takara was special to me.

They were inseparable.

When they separated Kasatka and Takara,

it was to take Takara to Florida.

Once Takara had already been stretchered out of the pool,

put on the truck, driven to the airport...

..Kasatka continued to make vocals that had never been heard before.

They brought in the senior research scientist to analyse the vocals.

They were long-range vocals.

She was trying something that no-one had even heard before -

looking for Takara.

That's heartbreaking.

How can anyone look at that

and think that that is morally acceptable?

It's not.

It is not OK.

Stand by, Dean.

Let's go live to SeaWorld where Dean is joining us for a sneak peak.

Hi, Dean, tell us about the new show.

Good afternoon, Richard.

The new show is the Whale and Dolphin Discovery.

What it does is it shows the relationship

we have between all our animals...

'There's so many things that were told to us'

that they tell you so many times that you start believing it.

All the animals here get along very well.

It's just like training your dog, really.

'I was blind.

I was a kid, I didn't know what I was doing, really.

-HE LAUGHS Nice!

-Good job!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is David from Maryland.

Go ahead and wave at everyone, David.

I just really bought into what they told us.

I learned to say what they told us to the audience.

Hello out there. Children are some of Shamu's biggest fans.

We can do just about anything we want.

I thought I knew everything about killer whales when I worked there.

Everything about these animals.

I really know nothing about killer whales.

I know a lot about being an animal trainer or a killer-whale trainer,

but I don't know anything about these animals' natural history

or their behaviour.

In some ways I believed a lot of what I was learning from them

because, "Why would they lie?"

Because the whales in their pools die young,

they like to say that all orcas die at 25 or 30 years.

-25-35 years.

-25-35 years.

They're documented in the wild living to be about 35, mid-30s.

They tend to live a lot longer in this environment

cos they have all the veterinary care.

Of course, that's false.

We knew by 1980, after a half a dozen years of the research,

that they live the equivalent to human life spans.

Every other potentially embarrassing fact is twisted and turned

and denied one way or another.

-So in the wild they live...?

-Less.

Like the floppy dorsal fins.

25% of whales have a fin that turns over like that as they get older.

Dorsal collapse happens in less than 1% of wild killer whales.

We know this.

All the captive males, 100% have collapsed dorsal fins.

And they say that they're a family

cos the whales are in their family, they have their pods.

But that's just an artificial assemblage of their collection,

however management decides they should mix them.

Whichever ones happen to be born or bought or brought in.

That's not a family. Come on.

You've got animals from different cultural subsets

that have been brought in from various parks.

These are different nations.

These aren't just two different killer whales.

These animals, they've got different genes. They use different languages.

What can happen as a result of them

being thrown in with other whales that they haven't grown up with,

that are not part of their culture, is there's hyper aggression.

A lot of violence,

a lot of killing in captivity that you don't ever see in the wild.

ANNOUNCER: For the health and safety of the animals,

please do not put your hands in the water.

There was always this backdrop,

this underpinning of tension between animals.

Whale-on-whale aggression was just part of the daily existence.

We ask that you use the stairs an aisleways as you exit.

Please do not step on the seats.

These areas may become wet and therefore slippery to some footwear.

Thank you.

In the wild, when there's tension, they've got

thousands of square miles to exit the scene and they can get away.

You don't have that in captivity.

Can you imagine being in a small concrete enclosure for your life

when you're used to swimming 100 miles a day?

Sometimes this aggression became very severe.

In fact, whales have died in captivity

because of this aggression.

I think it was 1988.

Kandu, trying to assert her dominance over Corky, rammed Corky.

It fractured her jaw, which cut an artery in her head

and then she bled out.

That's got to be a hard way to go down.

I saw that there were just a lot of things that weren't right.

There was a lot of misinformation. Something was amiss.

I sort of compartmentalised that part of it

and did the best that I could with the knowledge that I had

to take care of the animals that were there.

I think all the trainers there have the same thing in their heart -

they're trying to make a difference in the lives of the animals.

You think, "If I leave, who's going to take care of Tilikum?"

That's why I stayed, cos I felt sorry for Tilikum.

I mean, if you want to get down to the nuts and the bolts of it,

I stayed because I felt sorry for Tilikum.

I couldn't bring myself to stop coming

and trying to take care of him.

Gosh, do I love coming out here every day

and having the audience just love what we're doing with the animals?

How do I make this animal as beautiful as they are

and have people walk away loving this animal?

They're touched and they're moved

and I feel like I made a difference to them.

I left in January of 2010.

A month before Dawn passed away.

She was like a safety guru.

She was always double-checking,

making sure that everyone was doing the right thing.

She would record every show that she did and she would watch it

and critique herself.

And she was constantly trying to be better.

When I found out it was Dawn, I was shocked.

That could have been me, I could have been the spotter.

What if I was there and I could have saved her?

All these things go through your mind.

John Sillick is the guy who, in 1987,

was crushed between two whales at SeaWorld of San Diego.

Now, even though I'd been working at SeaWorld for six months,

I had no idea that that had even happened.

I never even heard that story.

The SeaWorld party line was that it was a trainer error.

It was John's fault. He was supposed to get off that whale.

For years, I believed that. I told people that.

I actually started at SeaWorld five days after that event occurred.

We weren't told much about it, other than it was trainer error.

Especially when you're new into the programme,

you don't really question a whole lot.

Years later, when you look at the footage, you go,

"He didn't do anything wrong. That whale just landed on him."

That whale just went to the wrong spot.

It could have been aggression, who knows?

But it was not the trainer's fault at all, watching that video.

When I saw the video of the killer whale landing on John,

it just absolutely took my breath away. I gasped.

I watched it two or three times and every time I saw that,

I just gasped. I could not believe what I was seeing.

What kept his body together is his wet suit basically held him together.

I know he's had multiple surgeries

and he's got tonnes of hardware in his body.

It's hard for me to believe that I didn't actually see that video

while I was actually an animal trainer,

cos it seems to me that every person who works with killer whales

should have to watch that video.

Tamarie.

Tamarie made mistakes.

The most important one was interacting with whales

without a spotter.

So she's putting her foot on Orkid.

She's taking her foot off, she's putting her foot on Orkid,

her rostrum, she's taking it off.

Watching the video knowing Orkid, your stomach drops

because you know what's probably going to happen.

She grabbed her foot.

Tamarie whips around and she grabs the gate.

You see her just ripped from the gate.

At this point, Tamarie knows that she's in trouble.

She's under the water. Splash and Orkid both have her.

She's totally out of view. No other trainer knows that this is happening.

People start to scream, you know, the park guest that was filming it.

You hear... You don't see her, but you hear Tamarie surface.

You hear her just scream out, "Somebody, help me!"

The way she screamed it was just such a blood-curdling...

She knew she was going to die.

Rob, when he ran over, he made a brilliant decision.

He told the trainer to run and take the chain off Kasatka's gate.

By taking that chain off, it would give the precursor to Orkid

that Kasatka was coming in.

Kasatka's more dominant than Orkid, so Orkid let her go.

Her arm...it was U-shaped.

It was compound-fractured.

She's very lucky to be alive, that's for sure.

I believe it's 70 plus, maybe even more.

Just killer whale trainer accidents.

Maybe 30 of them happened actually prior to me being hired at SeaWorld.

And I knew about none of them.

I've seen animals come out at trainers.

Something's wrong.

I've seen people get slammed.

The whales...either they're just playing

or they're upset for a second.

It was just something that happened, you know?

There was this culture of,

"You get back on the horse and you dive back in the water.

"If you're hurt, then we've got other people that will replace you.

"You came a long way, are you sure you want that?"

A SeaWorld trainer is recovering today after a terrifying ordeal

in front of a horrified audience.

For some reason, the whale just took a different approach

to what it was going to do with

a very senior, very experienced trainer, Ken Peters,

and dragged him to the bottom of the pool and held him in the bottom.

Let him go. Picked him up, took him down again.

And these periods he was taken down were pretty close to the mark.

You know, a minute, a minute 20.

When he was at the surface, he didn't panic,

he didn't thrash, he didn't scream.

Maybe he's just built that way. But he stroked the whale.

The whale let go of one foot and grabbed the other.

That's a pretty deep pool.

He took him right down. I think that's to two atmospheres' pressure.

Apparently, Mr Peters is an experienced scuba diver

and I think that knowledge probably contributed to how he was able

to be hauled down there that quickly and stay calm and know what to do.

He knew what he was doing.

You can see him in the film - the def is so good - see him ventilating.

See him ventilating really hard.

So he knows about swimming and diving and being underwater.

He may have been assuming he was going under again.

I did not walk away unimpressed by his...

his calm demeanour during that whole affair.

I would be scared shitless.

He was near to the end.

Presumably, Ken Peters had a relationship with this whale.

Maybe he did - maybe that's what saved him -

but Peters got the whale to let him go...

..and they strung a net across.

And Ken Peters pulled himself over the float line

and swam like a demon to a slide-out,

because the whale was coming

right behind him!

The whale jumped over it and came after him!

He tried to stand up and run but his feet were damaged.

He just fell. He scrambled.

They take this as a prime example of their training working.

They say, well, "Stand back and stay calm" and that did work.

They claim this as a victory of how they do business.

And...maybe so. But it can also be interpreted

as a hair's-breadth away from another fatality.

-ALL:

-Hi, Shamu! Hi, everybody. We're the Johnsons from Detroit, Michigan.

We had a great time when we visited SeaWorld!

It's one of our favourite places.

Yeah! I like the part where Shamu gets everybody wet!

When the whales get close to the glass,

and start kicking up the water?

Whamo! You're a goner!

SQUEALING

Orange County's sheriff 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.

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 storyline - 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

with a dead, naked guy on his back...

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.

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 all I can comment on

is that the guy definitely jumped in the wrong pool.

So why keep Tilikum there?

This guy, he's got a proven track record of killing people.

He's clearly a liability to the institution.

Why keep him around? Well, it's quite simple.

The answer 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.

He's basically operating as a sperm bank.

In a reputable breeding programme,

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've 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.

CROWD APPLAUDS

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, or in that system, are that way.

What about the incident at Loro Parque?

First of all, I can't...

I can't...speak with specificity about Loro Parque.

I wasn't there.

I... I... In fact, I know very little about it.

Probably about as much as the general public knows.

SPEAKS SPANISH

Loro Parque is in the Canary Islands,

which is an autonomous region of Spain.

It's the largest tourist attraction in all of Spain.

TRAINER SPEAKS SPANISH

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 were enduring

the endoscope procedures.

Those are still SeaWorld's animals.

They are responsible for those animals.

HIGH PITCHED CALL

CLICKS AND WHINES

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 SeaWorld trainers went through.

Alexis really was the best trainer.

And I did say, "You're the only trainer there

"that can hold its own with a SeaWorld trainer."

And I said "But you need to be careful."

Anywhere along the line it could've been stopped.

Because everyone knew it was a tragedy waiting to happen.

But no-one 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

that 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 bald-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 interac... WHOA!

HE LAUGHS

..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 co-operating.

The whole show - the main show - was a disaster that day.

There was whales chasing each other.

Eventually, the trainers decided 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 probably felt more pressure to do a good show.

When you watch the whole video,

you can see that Tilikum is really with Dawn

in the beginning of the video.

There's a couple of behaviours that she asks him to do,

where Tilikum just jumps right in

and he does exactly what she asks him to do.

There seemed to be a point in the session

where things went south, so to speak.

And in my humble opinion it was at that missed bridge - whistle bridge -

on the perimeter pec wave.

She asked him to do a perimeter pec wave -

where she asked him to, basically, go all the way around the pool

and wave his pectoral flipper.

And she blows her whistle...

which is a bridge which tells the animal that -

"OK, you've done a good job, come back and get food."

But he missed that cue.

And he went all the way around the pool on this perimeter pec wave.

My interpretation is that he didn't hear the whistle.

So not only did he not hear the bridge,

then he went and did a perfect behaviour and came back

and what he got was what we call three-second neutral response -

which is a way to let the animal know

"No, you didn't do the correct thing,

"you're not going to get rewarded, and then we move on."

And you can also see through the video

that Dawn is running out of food.

The animals can sense when you're getting to the

bottom of your bucket of fish,

because they can hear the ice clanging around

in the fishy, soupy water at the bottom.

And the handfuls of fish that they're getting delivered

by the trainer are all getting smaller.

So they know that they're coming down to the end of session.

When you see the difference between

the beginning and the end of the video,

you can see that he is just not quite on his game any more.

There was no food left,

she kept asking for more and more behaviours,

he wasn't getting reinforced for the behaviours he was doing correctly -

he probably was frustrated towards the end.

And then she walked around the perimeter of G pool.

He followed her.

And then continued over into the rocky ledge area

where she lay down with him

to do a relationship session.

Which is quiet time, basically.

Tilikum, at some point, grabbed a hold of her left forearm

and started to drag her,

and eventually did a barrel roll and pulled her in.

It may have started as play,

or frustration, and clearly it escalated to be

very violent behaviour,

that I think was anything but play.

In the end, he even, basically, just completely mutilated

that poor girl.

They were gathering all of the trainers at the Texas Park.

He said there's been an accident at the Florida Park,

and a trainer was killed.

Hearing that it was Dawn, I was... I couldn't believe it.

I just remember saying to myself "Not Dawn, it can't be Dawn."

He said that, erm... "..and he still has her."

And I just...

..was so disturbed by that

and the reality of how powerless we are.

Avulsion, laceration, abrasion, fractures.

Fractures and associated haemorrhages.

Blunt-force traumas

to the main body, to the extremities.

To see this meted out against a trainer,

and I cannot fathom the reason.

It's shocking.

A lawyer for OSHA asked me what I thought we'd learned,

and I was sitting in the courtroom

and I've got the Keltie Byrne case file in one hand,

and I've got Dawn Brancheau in the other,

and they are almost to-the-day 20 years apart

and I'm looking at these two things - my only answer is "Nothing".

In fact, it's not a damn thing.

We have not learned a damn thing

for something like that to happen 20 years apart.

Could you tell us if it was an accident, or if this...?

Did this female trainer work with this whale on a regular...?

What apparently happened was we had a female trainer

back in the whale-holding area.

She apparently slipped or fell into the tank,

and was fatally injured by one of the whales.

At first, SeaWorld reported that a trainer slipped and fell

in the water and was drowned.

So that was the first report.

It wasn't until eyewitness accounts disputed that

that they had to go back in their huddle and say,

"We gotta come up with a new plan."

SeaWorld has confirmed the killer whale

pulled the woman into the water.

She didn't fall into the tank,

as the Sheriff's Department initially reported.

The new plan is that... he grabbed her ponytail.

This is a subtle way of placing the blame on Dawn's shoulders.

She shouldn't have had a long ponytail,

or if she did have that ponytail it should've been up in a bun.

Dawn, if she was standing here with me right now,

would tell you that it was her... That was her mistake.

In allowing that to happen.

They blamed her.

How dare you!

How disrespectful for you to blame her

when she's not even alive to defend herself.

He grabbed her ponytail and pulled her into the water.

That's as simple as it gets.

There are photographs of plenty of other trainers

doing exactly the same thing that she was doing.

So, I knew that SeaWorld was lying about the fact

that this was her fault.

The ponytail in all likelihood is just a tale.

Erm...

The safety spotter, who apparently didn't actually see the take-down,

came up with that.

And during the spotter's testimony,

OSHA pushed him to say that he wasn't really sure

that it was her ponytail that was in the whale's mouth,

that he just saw her underwater and he assumed it was the ponytail.

OSHA contends that the whale came up and grabbed Dawn Brancheau's arm,

saying that that was another level of aggressiveness.

SeaWorld is saying it was not an aggressive move.

One of SeaWorld's top curators, Chuck Tompkins,

said when Dawn Brancheau was pulled off the ledge

it wasn't necessarily aggressive behaviour by the whale.

The initial grab was not an act of aggression.

This is not a crazed animal.

The industry has a vested interest in spinning these

so that the animals continue to appear like...

cuddly teddy bears that are completely safe, you know?

'That sells a lot of Shamu dolls, it sells a lot of tickets at the gate,'

and...that's the storyline that they're going to stick with

for as long as they can.

Recognise that those that say this is a crazed animal that acted out

and grabbed on maliciously,

they want to prove the theorem that captivity makes animals crazy,

and that is just false.

All whales in captivity have a bad life,

they're all emotionally destroyed,

they're all psychologically traumatised.

So they are ticking time bombs. It's not just Tilikum.

We have to separate what happened to Dawn,

and, as tragic as it is, no-one wants to ever see it happen again.

Can SeaWorld create an environment where it never happens again?

Yes, I absolutely believe they can.

What if there were no SeaWorlds?

I can't imagine a society with the value we put on marine mammals

if those parks didn't exist.

I'm not at all interested in having my daughter, who is 3½,

grow up thinking that it's normalised

'to have these intelligent, highly evolved animals

'in concrete pools.'

I don't want her to think that's how we treat the kin

'that we find ourselves around on this planet.'

I think it's atrocious.

This hearing's expected to last all week,

with OSHA continuing to work towards this theory

that SeaWorld knew there was a calculated risk of injury or death

'but put trainers in the water with the whales anyway,

'while SeaWorld will say that Dawn Brancheau's death

'was an isolated incident.'

Reporting live at Seminole County, Dave McDaniel, WESH 2 News.

There's something wrong, you know, with Tilikum, that there's...

There is something wrong, and that's, uh...

When you have a relationship with that animal and you...

HE SNIFFS

..you understand that he's killing not to be a savage,

'he's not killing cos he's just crazy,

'he's not killing cos he doesn't know what he's doing.

'He's killing because he's frustrated and he's got aggravations

'and he doesn't know how to...

'He has no outlet for it.'

'Now, Tilikum is spending a great deal of time by himself'

and basically floating lifeless in a pool.

-WOMAN:

-Three hours now...

and he hasn't moved.

They try to sugar-coat it by saying,

"He comes out in the front pool every once in a while. He's doing shows."

You know what he does in his show?

'He does a few bows,'

then he goes back in to his little...jail cell.

That's his life.

'I feel sad for Tilikum.'

A regal thing like him,

'swimming around a tank with his fin flopped over like that.

'Compared to a wild bull killer whale that size,'

which is one of the most kinetic and dynamic things you can imagine.

'I feel sad when I see him.'

'It's time to stop the shows,

'it's time to stop forcing the animals to perform in basically a circus environment,'

and they should release the animals that are young and healthy enough

to be released, and the animals like Tilikum who are old and sick

'and have put in 25 years in the industry should be released'

to an open ocean pen so they can live out their lives

and experience the natural rhythms of the ocean.

This is a multibillion-dollar corporation that makes its money

'through the exploitation of orcas.'

They're not suitable to have in captivity.

The whales are really bored.

'You deprive them of all this environmental stimulation.'

'I think that in 50 years we'll look back and go,'

"My God, what a barbaric time."

Dawn Brancheau, DB, Dream Big.

'Dawn was the most loving, giving person you ever met.

'Her smile just radiated.'

She's... She fulfilled her life.

'We saw whales swimming in straight lines with straight dorsal fins.'

'I was so honoured to be there.'

'And I was so thankful that I had sunglasses on,'

cos...the tears were kind of coming out, and, erm,

it was moving.