Keiko’s Legacy

How the “Free Willy” whale inspires North America’s first whale sanctuary

Register for the webinar here.

What is Keiko the orca’s legacy?

Keiko, you will recall, had been captured in 1979 and taken from his family in the Icelandic ocean to Marineland Canada and was then sold to an amusement park in Mexico City where he was housed in a small, shallow tank, insufficient for an adult male orca to thrive.

In 1992, Warner Brothers began filming Keiko for his part in a movie that would tell the story of Jesse, a foster boy who befriends a captive orca named Willy and helps him escape back to the ocean.

The film became a major box office success, spawning three sequels, a television series and a video game.

Unlike the character he was playing, however, Keiko himself didn’t get to leave the tank in which he was being housed at the amusement park. (His “stunt double” in the action sequences was an animatronic model.)

However, that was not the end of the story. After seeing the movies, tens of thousands of children wrote letters pleading for the return of the real-life whale to the ocean.

As a result of this passionate outcry, Keiko was indeed rescued, and in 1996 he was brought to a specially built large pool in Oregon, where he was treated for multiple health conditions. Two years later, he was flown to a bay on an island off the coast of Iceland, where he spent four years going on ocean “walks”, learning to catch his own fish, and introducing himself to wild orcas, all with full-time care while preparing for a life in the open ocean.

Several of us on the Whale Sanctuary team today worked together 20 years ago as part of that amazing project. Indeed, it was led by Charles Vinick, who is today Executive Director of the Whale Sanctuary Project. It was an invaluable and rewarding experience, and one that informs much of our work today.

So, what is Keiko’s legacy? Join Charles in an inspiring discussion about Keiko’s reintroduction to the wild and how our sanctuary in Nova Scotia will give other captive whales a chance to get “back to nature.”

Register for the webinar here.
Bring your questions or send them in advance by email.
And then join us on Thursday, December 17th at 3:30 pm ET, 6:30 pm PT.