Ula Was Never Part of Their “Family”

On Monday of this week, Loro Parque Zoo in the Canary Islands announced that the young orca Ula had died. The zoo wrote about its “immense pain and sadness” and about how it is “impossible for us to explain what the loss of little Ula means for the Loro Parque family …”

But the zoo doesn’t even mention the one member of Ula’s family who is truly bereaved. Her name is Morgan, and she is Ula’s mother. And while Morgan cannot tell us in words what she is feeling and experiencing – her daughter would have been three years old next month – we do know that the bond between orca mothers and daughters is deep and powerful. (You may recall how Tahlequah, one of the Southern Resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest, carried the lifeless body of her baby up and down the Puget Sound coast for two weeks on what was described around the world as a “tour of grief.”)

And yet, no word from Loro Parque about the grief that Morgan must be experiencing – what it must have been like for her when her echolocations suddenly ceased to pick up a heartbeat from her daughter.

Morgan (left) and Ula. Photo by Diva Flora Nikolova via Inherently Wild

Morgan was a calf herself when, underweight and swimming alone, she was rescued off the coast of the Netherlands in 2010 under a “rescue, rehabilitation and release” permit. And yet, instead of being given the chance to return to her family, she was shipped 2,000 miles to this zoo and tourist attraction in the Canary Islands. (Read more about her here.)

Zoos and marine amusement parks routinely refer to the whales as being part of their “family.” But Morgan could never be part of Loro Parque’s family. For starters, five of the other six orcas there had been born at SeaWorld amusement parks in the United States. Three of them had been fathered by the famous orca Tilikum. Morgan’s lineage was completely different. She couldn’t fit in, and the other whales began ganging up on her. The zoo’s owner, meanwhile, announced his delight at having acquired her, saying that she would provide “a new bloodline” for breeding.

There is not a mention of the grief that her mother must be suffering.When Morgan gave birth to a daughter, Ula, the two immediately bonded. But just a few days later, the park separated mother from daughter, first on the pretext that Morgan had too little milk, and then saying it was for safety reasons. Soon after, reports began circulating of Ula having a deformation of the skull, photo-toxic lesions, and a diseased left pectoral fin.

This year, when Ula became sick and animal protection organizations expressed serious concern about her, Loro Parque brushed them aside, saying that “Ula is fine, playing with the rest of the orcas, and there is no longer a trace of the intestinal disease that she suffered in the past weeks.”

And now she is dead. And there is not a mention of the grief that her mother must be suffering.

Ula is the second orca to have died this year at Loro Parque Zoo. In March, when teenager Skyla died suddenly, the zoo’s management described the cause of death as being “intestinal torsion, which caused acute septicemia and immediate death.” They added: “This pathology can occur suddenly in completely healthy animals and is absolutely inoperable in cetaceans, so, despite all our precautions and efforts, it would not have been possible to do anything to save Skyla’s life.”

We asked Dr. Heather Rally, a wildlife veterinarian with specific training and experience in marine mammal medicine and a member of the Whale Sanctuary Advisory Group, for her view on the zoo’s statement. Dr. Rally called it “highly unlikely that Loro Parque didn’t have some indication of at least a pre-existing gastrointestinal illness, recent traumatic incident, and/or an indication of pain or distress prior to the day of her death.”

Morgan and Skyla. Photo by Ulrich Brodder via Inherently Wild.

The zoo’s management spoke of how Skyla was “part of the Loro Parque family,” just as they would in the wake of Ula’s death. But Skyla, like Morgan and Ula, was never part of the management’s family. Nor, indeed, of any whale family at the zoo. She had been born at SeaWorld Orlando, where her parents were Kalina and Tilikum, and had been shipped across the Atlantic to Loro Parque at age two.

With the deaths of Skyla and Ula, Loro Parque now has five remaining orcas. We have little doubt that the zoo will try to breed more for their “collection,” and doing so will be a travesty and a recipe for more grief and suffering.

Only last week, in the United States, the Mystic Aquarium announced that one of the beluga whales they had acquired just weeks before from Marineland Canada had died. Once again, we were told of the “devastating loss for our staff and for the community.”

These expressions of sadness ring increasingly hollow. It is beyond time for the shows and exhibitions to come to an end … all over the world … once and for all. It is time for the whales and dolphins to be released from their concrete tanks and retired to sanctuaries that can provide the kind of environment in which they evolved over millions of years. All the best veterinary care in the world cannot make up for an artificial environment.

The sanctuary we are creating in Nova Scotia is the first step in our global mission to promote sanctuary for all captive cetaceans and to bring about a time when there are no whales still confined to tanks and used as a form of entertainment.

Thank you for being part of the Whale Sanctuary Project. Together we can give them a life that makes up for as much as possible of what went before.

Photo credit: Title photo at top of this post by Diva Flora Nikolova.