Jonah is the Whale (Cont.)

Outside Magazine August 2001

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	Operation Keiko Lift: South Carolina's 15th Airlift Squadron of the U.S. Air Force flies Keiko, the five-ton orca star of Free Willy, to Iceland aboard a C-17 cargo jet.

LIKE EVERYONE else, I heard of Keiko's legendary charm from some of the thousands of print and television pieces that cheer-led the Free Willy movement. Caught in 1978 or 1979 off the south coast of Iceland by an American team that collected orcas for the marine-mammal trade, the two- or three-year-old killer whale atrophied for a year in an aquarium pool near Reykjavík, where he had been stashed because, rumor had it, his capture exceeded the number permitted that year. (Because of poor record keeping, it's difficult to confirm when, exactly, he was caught.) Then he shipped out to Marineland of Canada, where run-ins with an aggressive male orca made for an unhappy home. From there, he got exiled to the boondocks--a cramped, smog-ridden amusement park called Reino Aventura in Mexico City that gave him top billing, but also skin lesions--caused by the whale equivalent of papillomavirus.

Keiko's big break came in the early 1990s when SeaWorld--which owns most of the 52 killer whales in captivity--rebuffed the casting call for orcas to star in the Warner Bros. flick Free Willy, the story of a troubled teenager's struggle to liberate an oceanarium's trophy whale and reunite him with his family. Apparently, unlike the SeaWorld execs, Keiko's Mexican owners hadn't read the screenplay. They signed the ailing, severely underweight Keiko up for the role, unprepared for the 1993 film's smash success and the real-life fight it would trigger between animal-rights activists and the marine-park lobby over liberating the movie's star. The hot property then went on tour. First, in 1995, he was donated to the Free Willy Keiko Foundation, and upgraded to four-star accommodation at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport; later, in 1998, after a lengthy lawsuit (the Oregon Coast Aquarium sued to keep Keiko, arguing he was too ill to fly), he was flown in a fiberglass tank aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo jet to the North Atlantic waters whence he came; in 1999, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation merged with the Jean-Michel Cousteau Institute (run by the son of Jacques) to form Ocean Futures, a nonprofit with 18,500 members, based in Santa Barbara. Today, a retinue of 16 foreigners and 13 locals works round the clock to keep Keiko happy and to reintroduce him to the wild.

Keiko's keepers say they have no agenda beyond freeing the celebrity--as soon as this August if Keiko will go. They say it's a simple act of humanitarianism for a beloved whale.

His emancipation isn't coming cheap--$3 million per year--but seeing his charms in the flesh, I understood how the cult of Keiko had grown to more than 1.2 million, mainly children, who made phone calls or wrote letters and donated their dollars and pennies to the cause. VIP devotees include Jimmy Buffett (who sent in $500), Michael Jackson (who offered him a home at Neverland), and telecommunications billionaire Craig McCaw, whose namesake foundation has put up most of the project's spending money.

Orcas are not an endangered species, and Keiko's keepers say they have no agenda beyond freeing the celebrity--as soon as this August if Keiko will go. It's not a science experiment or a potential model for busting other orcas out of their tanks; it is, insists Charles Vinick, executive vice-president of Ocean Futures, a simple act of humanitarianism for a beloved whale.

"This would never have happened if Keiko wasn't a movie star," he says. "The movie brought this whale into the hearts of millions of children who were able to give conscience to a movement about what we as humans can do to protect the environment. This is not about what could happen to other captive animals. We're talking about this one whale."

When I starting looking into it, I loved the idea that whales--or one whale--could go home again. The story line reminded me of Born Free, the tale of Elsa, the tame lion who returned to the veld and went on to raise her own wild cubs. Yet what finally got me to Heimaey Island was not the life-imitates-art scenario, but the rumors that the project wasn't working out. By all accounts, Keiko didn't want to go native. Five years and approximately $20 million later, even the optimists admit that chances are slim for tame Keiko to swim off with his wild brethren this summer. For one thing, there isn't much time. Keiko is in the autumn of his years. Male orcas in captivity tend to live 20 years or less; in the wild, up to 45 years. Keiko is at least 25.

"Keiko is already living on extremely borrowed time, past the age when most males in captivity have lived," says Erich Hoyt, author of the orca ur-text Orca: The Whale Called Killer and a senior research consultant for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, a UK-based charity with 70,000 members. "They have only themselves to blame. They have stalled and stalled. Every day and week and month that goes by makes success less likely."

Other pessimistic observers are second-guessing the whole program. There's even a conspiracy theory circulating that the Keiko freedom ride has been designed to fail, so that kids won't clamor for more show whales to be let go. I don't take this seriously, but it is a bit strange that everyone involved in Keiko's rehab is an expert in training captive orcas and that they are relying on tried-and-true taming methods to "condition" him for the wild. Hiring specialists in animal subjugation to undomesticate what is essentially a house pet sounds about as logical as enlisting R. J. Reynolds execs to run Smokenders. In a further irony, Foster, Keiko's chief warden, suspects he may have been one of the animal's original captors; in the 1970s, his father-in-law, a pioneer of whale-catching, sent Foster here to collect orcas.

And don't even get the locals started. Iceland ceased commercial whaling operations in 1989, and former whalers remain bitter that their well-being comes second to that of a washed-up show-biz cetacean. They even have their own conspiracy theory: that Keiko is a Trojan Whale sneaked into Iceland by Greenpeace to ensure that the country that welcomed its lost orphan back home can't turn its new eco-friendly image upside down by reintroducing whaling. Other Icelanders, disillusioned by the hype that had promised the now off-limits Keiko as a million-dollar tourist magnet, see the whale as proof that Americans have nothing better to do than extend human rights to fish. For cartoonists, stand-up comedians, and amateur jesters on the mainland, Keiko's the national joke.

"Female whales have swum by him, but when Keiko gets horny, he humps the tires strung along his bay pen instead," Iceland's top chef, Siggi Hall, teases me one night in his restaurant in downtown Reykjavík when he learns that I have a date with the infamous whale. "His trainers have taken him out to swim, but he always comes home like a good little puppy. This isn't a killer whale, it's a pet mammal. We could get better use out of him on the dinner table! Do you know how many whale steaks I could get out of him? But Keiko's so old, he'd be hard to cook and tough to eat," Hall continues. "We could boil his blubber down. Imagine how many soap bars and Keiko candles we could make out of him!"

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