Orca kills SeaWorld trainer

jayem · #1 24th February 2010, 06:11 PM

"ORLANDO - A SeaWorld trainer died Wednesday when she slipped into a pool and was fatally injured by an orca, theme park officials said. A witness, however, said it appeared the orca had actually pulled the trainer into the pool.

The same orca, or killer whale, has been tied to two earlier deaths in 1991 and 1999, according to the Humane Society of the United States, which has campaigned to keep marine mammals out of theme parks...

WKMG-TV reported that a witness, Victoria Biniak, said she saw the incident from a viewing area where the orca is housed.

"The trainer was explaining different things about the whale ... and then the trainer that was down there walked away from the window ... and then Telly (the whale) took off really fast in the tank and he came back, shot up in the air, grabbed the trainer by the waist and started thrashing (her) around," Biniak said..."

No matter how tame they might seem, they're still wild animals. I'm sure this orca's show career is over. I hope they don't take any more drastic action.

Orca kills SeaWorld trainer - Environment- msnbc.com

PreachersWife2004 · #2 24th February 2010, 06:45 PM

I just finished reading this story and headed over here to see if anyone had posted it. Goodness. Can you imagine being at that show and watching it happen?? The thought makes me ill.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. As tame as they act, they're still wild animals, prone to wild animal actions. It's sad, really. I don't know what they can do with the orca. They can't release it. The article I read mentions another orca who had attacked the same trainer (not the trainer from the current article though) three different times, yet apparently they kept it around.

Saving Hawaii · #3 24th February 2010, 08:15 PM

The weird thing about orcas is that "aggression towards humans" isn't actually a wild trait on their part. It's something you'll only see in the captive population. For whatever reasons captivity ends up being very hard on orcas and you see that come out in their behavior (which frequently borders on the insane for how an orca normally behaves) and their greatly reduced life expectancies.

Even so, most of the cases where captive orcas killed humans weren't acts of aggression either. Tilikum wasn't an aggressive orca, even though this is the third human death he's been involved with. The problem is that they're a very playful creature; the first trainer he killed was a "play" incident. The orcas apparently didn't realize that a human couldn't hold his breath as long as they could and it didn't go well for the trainer. There's an additional problem with this orca (and quite a few other captive orcas) in that they're not used to having humans in the water with them so they're not exactly clued in on how to safely "play" with humans.

So it's kind of a weird limbo for a place like SeaWorld. Usually they're worried about wild animals that have an instinctive fear of humans that they've trained to be non-aggressive towards humans. When you have a lion rip apart a human, you know that it has training problems and that it's probably lost a lot of that instinctive fear. Orcas really don't fit into that category so it's hard to know what to do with them.

And yeah... orcas are probably the most ridiculously fascinating animal in nature. They truly are a puzzle. Just look at the differences between residents, transients, and offshore orcas. All apparently the same species, apparently swimming in the same waters and hunting in the same areas as one another. Yet they hunt completely different prey, don't interact with one another, don't interbreed, have completely different vocalizations and social structure. Yet they're apparently the same species. Bizarre.

blessedmomof5 · #4 24th February 2010, 08:23 PM

kinda like someone is trying to say they were not put here for our entertainment? we have never nor will never visit an animal that has been kept for our entertainment purposes, and i Doubt thats what God had in MInd when he created them