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Tales from the Whale Side – Seven

Posted September 11, 2017 in Learn More by Carl Safina

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.

 

2 Comments

  • Anonymous says:
    February 6, 2019 at 3:53 PM

    When my daughter was very young and absolutely fascinated with orcas, we visited then Sealand on the tip of Vancouver Island. While waiting for the “show” to start we suddenly noticed she was no longer standing with us at the edge of the pool. We also noticed that the three orcas, one of which was Tilikum, had begun to swim in an obvious circle around the pool but momentarily stopping at the end of the pool where there was a “whale” sound was coming from…my husband and I looked at each other and headed for the sound ourselves…there was our daughter talking to the orcas. She doesn’t know to this day over 30 years later what she was telling them but they were listening….

    Reply
  • Robert Jolley says:
    January 24, 2018 at 12:19 PM

    I’ve had whales and dolphins under my boat many times in the San Juan Islands These stories are truly magical. The kyou

    Reply

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Photo of Carl Safina
Carl Safina

Tales from the Whale Side

Conservation biologist Carl Safina came upon some remarkable, unexplainable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild while writing his book Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel. Carl is President of the Safina Center and is on the board of the Whale Sanctuary Project. These stories are excerpted from his book. Tales from the Whale Side – Seven

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? Read more

Tales from the Whale Side – Six

One of the dolphins came briefly nearer the boat, and then suddenly fled. At that point, someone discovered that one of the people aboard had just died during a nap in his bunk.Read more

Tales from the Whale Side – Five

She allowed herself to wonder: were the whales trying to communicate something after she’d defended their family? Reading her thoughts while she watched them would mean true telepathy. That, she knew, “flew in the face of reason.”Read more

Tales from the Whale Side – Four

The dog’s owner was sitting on a log, crying, when he heard the blows of killer whales. He could see them coming closer. Just after the whales passed, he heard splashing. Suddenly, there stood his sodden dog, weakened and vomiting saltwater.Read more

Tales from the Whale Side – Three

“It was like a portal opened, or an introduction to another possibility of communication. I felt lighter, more integrated, very hopeful, light-hearted and full of joy.”Read more

Tales from the Whale Side – Two

Killer whales seem capable of random acts of kindness that defy explanation and make scientists consider some pretty far-out possibilities. Killer whale behavior seems to fall into two categories: amazing behavior and inexplicable behavior.Read more

Tales from the Whale Side – One

“The whales understood that we weren’t going to be involved in high-speed chases. We weren’t going to be shooting any darts and tags. They saw that we were cool around them. Which implies, y’know, a consciousness of what’s going on.”Read more

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