Tales from the Whale Side – Seven

Questions Unsettling, Unshakeable and Disturbing

Page Seven of remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.

Bottlenose dolphins. Credit: Carl Safina

Me, I am most skeptical of those things I’d most like to believe, precisely because I’d like to believe them. Wanting to believe something can bias one’s view of facts and events.

But the whales leave us with questions so puzzling they are unsettling, unshakeable, at times even disturbing. Why would these beings declare unilateral peace with humans and not with dolphins and seals, whom they hunt and eat? Why would they single us out to give assistance? And why no grudge? Why, after the chronic harassment, capture, and disruption we’ve visited upon them, no learned and handed-down fears of humans such as wolves and ravens and even some dolphins seem to teach their young? The dolphins of the vast Pacific tuna grounds have such fears. Tuna nets used to kill them by the thousands; they still flee in panic from a ship several miles away if it pivots toward them, or if its engine merely changes pitch. I have seen that myself, in person. The dolphins’ hard-learned fear of ships makes sense.

The whales leave us with questions so puzzling they are unsettling, unshakeable, at times even disturbing.

What doesn’t make sense is: gigantic mega-brained predators color-patterned like pirate flags who eat everything from sea otters to whales and spend hours batting thousand-pound sea lions into the air specifically to beat them up before drowning and shredding them; who wash seals off ice and crush porpoises and slurp swimming deer and moose – indeed, seemingly any mammal they come across in the water; yet who have never so much as upended a single kayak and who appear – maybe – to bring lost dogs home.

On Argentina’s coast killer whales sometimes burst through the surf to drag sea lions right off the beaches. You see the video and you think it would be insanity to stroll near the shoreline. Yet when park ranger Roberto Bubas stepped into the water and played his harmonica, the same individual killer whales would ring around him like puppies. They’d rally playfully around his kayak, and come as, by names he gave them, he called to them.

Through the squishy anecdotes runs a hard fact: free-living killer whales treat humans with a strange lack of violence. It’s especially strange when compared with the rate at which humans continue hurting and killing other humans. How to explain either fact? What can explain the whales’ striking forbearance? For the sea’s present-day T. rex to stick their heads up alongside a tiny boat uncountable times, and never hurt a human even in play; that begs an explanation. More crucially, it demands that we find a way to understand. What, in the world, is going on? Is it simply outside our cognition; are their reasons beyond our ability to comprehend? Perhaps one day.

When breakthroughs happen, they don’t come as confirmation of what we already know. They come as something unexpected, hard to fathom, puzzling, demanding new explanations. They come as things that many people dismiss, or scorn. Until they turn out true. So, while I am wary of believing – I’m also wary of dismissing. These stories have pushed me into the “I just don’t know” category. And it’s pretty hard to get me there.

I feel shaken out of certainty. I’ve suspended disbelief. It’s an unexpected feeling for me. Uncomfortable. The stories have forced open doors I had shut, doors to that greatest of all mental feats: a simple sense of wonder.

Science fiction used to imagine wise visitors from outer space wielding huge heads housing vastly superior brainpower. The whales certainly have, at least, very big heads.

All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.