Jonah is the Whale (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2001

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Jonah is the Whale (Cont.)


	the star plays with his food

"ONCE A TRAINER, always a trainer. All the wrong people are involved in this. They're still doing obedience training, using that whistle," rails Richard O'Barry, founder of the Dolphin Project, a Florida-based group dedicated to freeing captive marine mammals, as well as a consultant for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, an animal-rights network with 380 member organizations in 80 countries. "At least Keiko is back in home waters, experiencing the natural sounds of the sea and the rhythms of the tide. But he's still being exploited. The whole plan to 'train' Keiko to be wild is ridiculous, a captive idea, and the main problem. They're putting on a whale rehabilitation show, not letting the whale go wild."

Captivity mavens consider O'Barry an extremist. On Earth Day 1970, he was arrested for stealing a dolphin and and trying to free it. On other occasions, however, he's been more successful. Sure, a few of the dolphins he's freed have had to be recaptured because they swam into shallow inlets to beg humans for food, but others joined up with wild dolphins, never to be seen again. O'Barry is also a former dolphin tamer who makes no bones about his résumé. He trained the dolphins who performed in the 1960s TV show Flipper and became a marine freedom-fighter after one of his trainees died in his arms at the Miami Seaquarium.

Some say the whole plan is "ridiculous"; others, like Iceland's top chef, Siggi Hall, joke that "we could boil his blubber down" and make "Keiko candles out of him."

O'Barry has an alternative model for freeing Keiko. "First of all, you get rid of all the trainers, anyone connected to the captivity industry whose history with animals involves obedience. Then you back off and let nature take its course. You try to become invisible. To diminish human contact, first you wear sunglasses, so they can't see your eyes. Then you wean them off anything connected to captivity--buildings, boats, buckets, man-made objects, training behaviors. You stop asking them to do anything. You feed them live fish at random intervals for doing nothing, not for doing something. And you build a blind, and you throw food from behind it to sever the dolphins' connection of food with humans.

"You stop feeding them bits of dead fish. First you feed them dead fish halves, then whole dead fish, then partially alive fish that have been stunned, then live fish," he continues. "Then, if you want to make them wild, you stop feeding them, period. When they can hunt fish for themselves, you can set them free."

Ocean Futures PR material touts the fact that Keiko is "continuing to increase and approximate natural feeding patterns" and now gets "up to 50 percent of his food in the water column." I assumed this means he now forages for half of his food. I am wrong.

"Actually, it's now closer to 100 percent from the water column, which means that we don't feed him by hand directly into his mouth anymore. We throw fish into the water for him to retrieve," says Charles Vinick. Translation: Humans supply Keiko with 100 percent of his diet, between 90 and 140 pounds per day of dead herring. Vinick contends that 25 percent of the food the team feed him is live fish, but on the day I visit Keiko in Heimaey, all the food he gets is formerly frozen.

"We don't feed him live fish every day. Maybe every week," Foster says. As for Keiko chasing down the live pelagic creatures that swim continually in front of his nose, Foster is doubtful. "We've never seen him eat live fish, so we can't speculate. We have seen him chase cod and pin it down with his nose, but that might just be cat-and-mouse play behavior. My gut feeling is that he's probably never been food-motivated enough to forage. But we're not concentrated on getting him to hunt. Our main goal is conditioning," he says.

But if Keiko is to be self-sufficient and to not haunt fishing boats begging for scraps, won't he have to hunt for himself?

Because orcas hunt in packs, Ocean Futures argues that Keiko won't go for his own food until he's fully free and accepted into a group of wild whales. "We can't teach him navigational skills, where food sources are, or how to catch them. The best thing for him to do would be to integrate into a group of wild animals and let them teach him all that," Foster avers, reminding me that tame animals, such as stray house cats, revert to hunting instinctively when they're hungry.

Unconvinced, I call Kenneth Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Washington, a 60-year-old research biologist who has studied the population dynamics of wild orca pods in the North Pacific for the last 25 years. He thinks Keiko could learn to feed himself before he's free.

"Hundreds of whales come to the waters off Heimaey every year because of the herring spawning grounds there. All you'd have to do is take Keiko over to where wild whales are traumatizing fish schools and eating them," Balcomb suggests. "If Keiko were hungry at that point and not magnetized by a metal fish bucket, he'd see all his buddies out there eating live fish and he might join them. It would be a good opportunity for him to learn how to hunt."

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