Blackfish is the story of Tilikum, a whale in captivity that has taken the lives of several people, and that was a sentence that shocked me, it also highlights just how much we don’t know about these intelligent mammals and how man, and corporations exploit nature for money, Tilikum was snatched from his family at two years old and has faced a life of isolation, confined to what is the equivalent of a bath tub and had no real intellectual or emotional stimulation.
Imagine that if you will, you are taken from you family and then held captive and every so often people would come and gawk at you as you were coerced into performing tricks for them.
Dawn Brancheau lost her life in 2010, what was tragic is that it should never have happened, we should not be taking an animal like this and removing it from the wild, placing it in a battery cage of a pool and then make it do tricks for fish, that’s not the way this animal was intended to live.
Because when an animal as dangerous as this lashes out through boredom or frustration then people get seriously hurt or killed and how can that be justified?
I also watched the excellent Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man,
If you haven’t watched it I implore you to make it the next thing you watch, it relates the story of Timothy Treadwell, a well-meaning if slightly unstable conservationist who tried to live among a tribe of wild grizzly bears. The documentary was released in 2006 and all through it I had this awful sense of something terrible coming, okay, yeah, I know we know that before going in, but here was a guy who made the mistake of trying to anthropomorphise wild animals. Ultimately Timothy paid the ultimate price and it was not an easy way to go. My heart goes out to the man and his family, but he didn’t take any sensible precautions and throughout the documentary can be heard giving these wild animals cute nicknames.
I watched It knowing that Timothy was trying to do the right thing, but going about it in a wholly wrong way, no thought for his safety or that of his girlfriend and that was a the tragedy here, Timothy was on camera stating he didn’t care if he died in the defence of the magnificent creatures, but his naïve enthusiasm and magical thinking also got his girlfriend killed as well.
Two lives lost for the pursuit and Disneyfication of what is a wild animal driven by its instincts to survive and feed.
The next Documentary I watched was part of the BBCs excellent Storyville series and was about Tyke a circus elephant who went on what people were describing as some sort of rampage in Honolulu.
This was yet another documentary that you could see what was to come, an animal forced into a situation that wasn’t normal or natural, Brian McMillan, Tyke’s original trainer was quoted as saying,
“She would resist the training," he said. "She would run away when you tried to do anything with her. She just didn't have a good attitude.”
However Tyke was “owned” by the Hawthorn Corporation based in Illinois. One person dies and Tyke was eventually shot down by police, it was harrowing and graphic and in my opinion avoidable. So, any talk of the animal’s suitability as a performer was brushed away, there seemed to be some drive towards “it okayism”, as in nothing will happen, as long as we make money then it’s all okay.
It seems to me that all of these situations could have been avoided, from the smaller end of the scale like Timothy Treadwell who didn’t exhibit any real sense of caution and appreciation for the danger he was putting himself and his girlfriend in, to the larger end of the scale where corporations get involved and exploit a living breathing animal as if it was some sort of capital good that needs to make a decent return on the investment made in it. SeaWorld has seen a drop in numbers over the years, I’m not sure if that’s to do with the work PETA (People for ethical treatment of animals) have done in highlighting why we should keep killer whales, or any whale or dolphin, in captivity performing tricks.
Animals aren’t capital goods, we have a responsibility to preserve and protect, but not exploit them.