Movie: Blackfish

Another Netflix documentary, this one about Orcas (killer whales) and their unfortunate history of injuring or killing their trainers in whale parks. You put a 5-ton self-aware mammal in a small concrete holding pool and, yes, they can get a little aggressive. As the show notes, there is not a single documented case -- not a single one -- of an Orca attacking a human in the wild.

But at SeaWorld, where negative as well as positive reinforcement has been used, there have been several incidents of whales turning on their captors.

During the show Ken Balcomb, the Orca expert / champion who lives two houses down from my parents' house, is interviewed. At the end of the show several ex-trainers are shown on a whale-watching boat in the harbor of Friday Harbor, where my parents lived.

The stories told, and the video evidence shown, make it clear these animals are at least our equals, intellectually, and quite possibly more. That we imprison them for our own entertainment is shameful.

Saw an interview a few days ago with a guy named Jon Ronson. He's an ex-trainer of killer whales and the conditions he described were deplorable.
All those animals should be released.

Many of them are captive bred or so unhealthy, physically or mentally, that they couldn't survive in the wild.

I thought of that when I made that post, but I wonder if we do not know enough about them to know whether or not they can survive. There probably are some that are too physically wrecked to survive, but I don't know that just being bred in captivity would make it impossible for them to acclimate to an ocean life. House cats, for example, will very quickly revert to a normal and successful feral life if released in the wild.

House cats have a lot of instincts.

Killer whale survival techniques, like the skills required of a human to survive in the wilderness, require years of training.