A Tale of a Whale on the movie Blackfish - by Randy Malamud, Truthout

[Beringia]

28 September 2013

In Blackfish, Gabriella Cowperthwaite's sleeper hit documentary about a tragedy at Orlando's SeaWorld, audiences are tempted (or at least I was) to empathize with Tilikum, the orca who killed his trainer Dawn Brancheau during a 2010 performance. The whale had been abused for decades in the service of mindless human entertainment masquerading as environmental education. ("SeaWorld artfully combines education and entertainment in a way that connects people to the sea and sea life like nowhere else," their webpage boasts.)

I felt a kind of poetic justice in the whale's eventual revolt against the handler, who must have epitomized, for him, the humiliating institutions of captive animal displays where he had had the misfortune to spend his life.

He was a "killer whale," and he killed - what part of this was unexpected?

In nature, actually, orcas are not inherently threatening to people, simply because under normal circumstances, they rarely come into contact with people. They are curious, playful, clever, highly social, keenly emotional and profusely communicative animals. Indeed, their complex social structures and bonds make it all the more debilitating for them to be removed from their natural habitats, from their communities, and cooped up - as Tilikum was - in small, dark, steel aquarium tanks, where they are deprived of their freedom and their roaming and grouping habits. In this claustrophobic imprisonment these whales become very disturbed, and consequently, violent because they cannot conduct their lives as they would choose to do. If they attack humans under these circumstances, it is because we have driven them mad.

"Killer whale," a loaded human label that reveals more about the namer than the named, constructs a human narrative that reflects a human perspective. Consider, along the same lines, "killer bees": like killer whales, the phenomenon is our fault. They didn't start killing us until we started interfering with their natural lives and transforming them from how they were to how we wanted them to be, so that they could be of greater service to us. Africanized bees were interbred with European bees in an effort to generate more honey for people to harvest: a selfish and short-sighted motive with dire ecological consequences. Killer bees were accidentally released in Brazil in the 1950s and have moved steadily north, invading much of South and Central America and the United States. While their stings are no more potent than those of other bees, they are more tightly wound, more defensive, and thus more likely to attack more quickly and in greater numbers.

full article
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/18954-a-tale-of-a-whale


Randy Malamud is an English Professor of English at Georgia State University
He has written eight books including:
Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity
Poetic Animals and Animal Souls
He is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics







Blackfish in theatres now and on CNN October 24th

[XemaSab]

1. They attack and kill seals and young whales

The "killer" name isn't a total misnomer.

[Beringia]

2. Yes that is true

For some reason, they leave humans alone in the wild, except if they at first think it is a seal, but when they find out it is not, they leave the person alone.

[riderinthestorm]

3. That documentary film is definitely going on my list. Looks excellent

As a professional animal trainer in real life, I'm always fascinated to read and learn about other experiences.

Big K&R