Lori Marino joins The People’s Environmental News Hour to talk about the Whale Sanctuary Project
with an invited studio audience.
- How will a whale who’s lived in a concrete tank adapt to the wide-open space of a sanctuary?
- Why can’t captive whales be released into the open ocean?
- Might some of them be suffering from PTSD, given that they already show signs, in their tanks, of stress and other mental disorders?
These were just a few of the questions posed by the hosts and the audience when Lori Marino, President of the Whale Sanctuary Project, was the guest on the People’s Environmental News Hour, a weekly TV show that’s broadcast from San Rafael, California.
It was a full hour of all the kinds of questions you might have posed if you’d been part of the studio audience, including:
- How do marine entertainment parks teach whales to do tricks?
- What’s the incentive for them to give up their whales? Won’t it put them out of business?
- What will you do if some of the whales don’t get along with each other?
- Will you allow them to breed? If not, how do you stop them?
- What might be the effect of a sanctuary on local wildlife?
- What do you think of ecotourism – swimming with dolphins in the ocean, etc.?
And lots more. Check out the video. And if you have questions that didn’t come up during the show, go ahead and ask them on our Facebook page.
Special thanks to Barbara McVeigh and Charlie Siler of the People’s Environmental News Hour for inviting us.
3 Comments
It took more than four years for Keiko to get to the point where he could spend extended periods of time with wild whales off the coast of Iceland.
In the summer of 2002, in the company of orcas, he left Iceland and swam more than 1,000 miles to a fjord in Norway, where he befriended local fishermen and townspeople. His caregivers from the Keiko Project came to the fjord to watch over and care for him. He was free to come and go, and he lived another year and a half.
The one thing that didn’t happen is that he never reunited with his family. And the lesson from that is straightforward: While it is very easy to capture a whale, it is lot more difficult to put one back with his family.
The best solution is to build natural seaside sanctuaries where captive whales and dolphins can live out their lives in an environment as close to their natural habitat as possible.
Yes, there wasn’t enough known about Iceland orcas at that time to find Keiko’s family. But one of the things Icelandic fish eating orca research has discovered in recent years is that their family structures and culture are very different than the close knit matrilineal pods of the Resident Orcas of the Salish Sea, which was the only family and cultural structure anyone knew about in the early 1990’s. The orcas around Iceland, from which Keiko was stolen as a 2 year old, primarily eat herring, not salmon and travel in small (3 to 5) member changeable hunting groups, not matrilineal relationship pods. They herd herring into balls and take turns swimming through them to gulp down mouthfuls of the little fish. The idea of finding Keiko’s family was based on a cultural model that turns out not to apply to Icelandic orcas. So another great thing that came out of Keiko’s journey to freedom was to stimulate money and interest in serious research of Icelandic orcas. It’s not surprising that the unique Icelandic ocean and food-scape would produce a unique orca culture very different from that in the Salish Sea.
What do you tell people who are against them being released into the sanctuary or potentially introduced into the wild, when they call “Keiko” a failure? I personally don’t believe that it was a failure, he died where he belonged…FREE