After Alexis Martinez was killed by Keto, both SeaWorld/Loro Parque and the Canary Islands OSHA equivalent launched investigations into the incident. These reports are the most detailed and revealing accounts of exactly what happened between Keto and Alexis Martinez (and you can read my reporting and analysis of what they mean in my story about Alexis’ death).
Here is the SeaWorld/Loro Parque corporate incident report:
Here is the Canary Islands Dept. Of Labor Report (Spanish):
Continuing to archive documents and reports related to the tragic death of trainer Alexis Martinez at Loro Parque in December, 2009, this upload includes (in Spanish): Preliminary Pathology; Police Interviews; Hospital Summaries; Autopsy Report; Excerpts From Alexis’ Diary Of Work At Loro Parque; Timeline Summary of Loro Parque video of incident; Labor Dept. Investigation.
In December 2009, killer whale trainer Alexis Martinez was killed at Loro Parque in the Canary Islands by Keto, an orca that had been transferred there by SeaWorld. At the time, Martinez’s tragic death got little attention. But when SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau was killed just over two months later at Sea World in Orlando, Martinez’s death became the warning that no one listened to.
I wrote a story investigating how and why Martinez was killed, how it was handled, and why it was relevant to Brancheau’s subsequent death. In the course of my reporting, I collected a lot of documentation. As part of my ongoing effort to post documents and materials collected during my reporting on killer whale captivity to a publicly accessible Blackfish Archives, I am posting Keto’s SeaWorld profile as the initial document which helps tell the story of Keto and Alexis Martinez (at the time my story was published I also posted a detailed and troubling review of the many problems at Loro Parque written by Suzanne Allee, who worked at Loro Parque). .
Maybe the world–forced into social-distancing lockdown and economic pain–is finally waking up to the many dangers of zoonotic viruses that can pass back and forth between humans and animals, and how close contact between humans and animals in factory farming, the bushmeat economy, and the wildlife trade and its “wet markets,” sharply elevates the risks.
And we have also seen how zoo animals, like a tiger at the Bronx zoo, can “catch” a virus from a human. Now the Voice Of San Diego notes that Sea World’s Shamu, and two other killer whales, were also likely infected by a flu virus passed from a trainer:
SeaWorld’s founding veterinarian was named Dr. David Kenney, a young man in the 1960s “who took credit for naming Shamu … and then figured out how to fly her to Sea World from Seattle,” according to his 2012 obituary in the Wall Street Journal.
In January 1969, Kenney noticed that Shamu and two other killer whales named Ramu and Kilroy seemed out of sorts. According to The San Diego Union, they had “bad cases of the sniffles, poor appetite, weakness and that all-over aching feeling.” Shamu, the paper reported, had been “moaning all day” and was “lethargic and irritable.”
The killer whales got a lighter schedule (although they apparently didn’t get to sit around and do nothing), and Kenney wondered whether they’d come down with the human flu. “We can’t be certain that they have human influenza,” he told the paper, “but the symptomology correlates, and blood tests indicate their infection is viral in nature.”
That killer whales in captivity can be victim to viruses they likely would not pick up in the wild, has already been established. And now Ingrid Visser and 20 scientists have published a detailed review of novel viruses in captive marine mammals and issued a call for killer whales and other marine mammals to be added to a permanent ban on the import of wildlife into China. They note that dozens of captive orcas have died from respiratory infections over the years, but that we don’t really know the extent of the problem because so many necropsies are kept confidential. It’s an eye-opening review, and you can read it here (and below):
Factory farms and wildlife markets are no doubt the most worrisome vectors for zoonotic viruses. But the fact that captive marine mammals and other zoo animals have also been infected by viruses that likely were passed from humans, and could themselves be the source of viruses that pass to humans, is just one more urgent reminder that humanity needs to dramatically change its relationship with animals–especially the degree to which they are commoditized and industrialized, and brought into the human economy.
It’s not good to be SeaWorld (or its CEO) these days.
SeaWorld Entertainment’s chief executive has resigned only five months into his job, becoming the third leader of the theme park company to depart in just over two years, according to a company filing released Monday.
Sergio Rivera cited his disagreement with the board of directors’ involvement in decision-making at the company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
His predecessor, Gustavo “Gus” Antorcha, cited a similar reason for his leaving last September [snip]…
…The spread of the novel coronavirus has paralyzed the theme park industry. Like most other theme park companies operating in the U.S., SeaWorld’s 12 theme parks have been closed since mid-March.
The company said more than a week ago that it was furloughing 90% of its workers.
It would be interesting to know just what, exactly, is causing so much turmoil between SeaWorld CEOs and the SeaWorld Board. Whatever it is, the underlying problem is that SeaWorld’s business model, and its reliance on captive animals and large crowds, is simply not a good fit for today’s world.
It has long seemed that one of the biggest challenges of keeping orcas healthy in captivity is dental care. Many captive orcas wear down and break their teeth by fighting, and chewing on concrete or the gates between pools. If the damage is bad enough SeaWorld and other facilities drill out the teeth and then flush them daily. Even so, the damaged teeth become prone to infection, infections which can lead to serious health problems.
To more fully gauge and understand the extent of this threat, John Jett and Jeff Ventre, two former SeaWorld trainers, along with other researchers, studied dental damage in captive orcas, using photography to catalogue and evaluate the problem. The result, “Tooth Damage In Captive Orcas, which appears in the Archives Of Oral Biology, is a comprehensive, scientific, assessment that reveals how common and extensive tooth damage in captivity really is.
Highlights of the paper include:
Keeping any animal captive–especially a highly evolved, free-ranging, top predator–presents unusual health issues, both mental and physical. It is unlikely many marine park visitors suspect that tooth damage is one of the leading health challenges for captive orcas. But this paper makes clear how common the problem is, and how severe the damage can be. That is important, because the more we understand the negative side-effects of keeping animals captive for entertainment, the better we can weigh the ethical question of whether it is justified.
This Washington Post story does an excellent job of running through the timeline of SeaWorld’s public and private actions in response to Blackfish. And, yes, they shamelessly (and maybe illegally, it turns out) tied themselves in knots to reject or downplay any Blackfish effect, even while insiders sold shares:
In reality, the company was waging a serious campaign — and leveraging considerable money — against the “’Blackfish’ effect.”
The complaint accused the company of feeding employees lines to use regarding the film and instructing them to “dissuade family and friends” from watching. SeaWorld executives also hired a public relations firm to handle the criticism, and one executive reached out to ultimately 50 major film reviewers to discredit “Blackfish.”
In 2014, the company provided the funding for a website that also aimed to discredit the movie, and SeaWorld would also eventually task employees with infiltrating PETA and other animal rights groups.
But following the IPO, the company maintained the film was no cause for alarm and had not sparked backlash against the brand. On Aug. 29, 2013, a company executive told the Los Angeles Times “’Blackfish’ has had no attendance impact.” The same executive told Bloomberg SeaWorld “can attribute no attendance impact at all to the movie.”
To me, this sort of baldfaced denial is a powerful reminder of just how arrogant SeaWorld was (both its corporate culture and its leadership) following decades of profits and unthinking adulation. The old guard running the place really didn’t believe anything could touch them. And now they may be called to account.
I was going through computer files the other day, and I came across an archive of stuff I have on Morgan at Loro Parque. I have always felt a sadness for Morgan, picked up off the Dutch coast in 2010 and now at Loro Parque in the Canary Islands. (I wrote about Loro Parque in 2011, because that is where trainer Alexis Martinez was killed by a SeaWorld killer whale just a few months before Dawn Brancheau was killed in Florida).
You can read all about Morgan, and how she came to be at Loro Parque, here. The story has a lot of twists and turns, but the bottom line is that Morgan is a recently wild killer while who now finds herself owned by SeaWorld, and with her valuable wild DNA likely to become part of SeaWorld’s captive breeding mill.
Anyhow, I started clicking on some of the videos of Morgan (they are from 2013) and for some reason this video perfectly captured for me the banality and tedium of a once wild life that is now experienced in a confined pool, and devoted to entertaining holiday crowds. Teaching Morgan how to wave her tail just seems so pathetic and lame. And her energy level and affect seems to indicate she feels the same way. Good times.
Theme Park Insider publishes an excellent breakdown and analysis of SeaWorld’s attendance numbers since 2009. Here are the numbers for SEAS four largest parks:
SeaWorld Orlando
2009: 5.8 million
2010: 5.1 million
2011: 5.2 million
2012: 5.3 million
2013: 5.0 million
SeaWorld San Diego
2009: 4.2 million
2010: 3.8 million
2011: 4.2 million
2012: 4.4 million
2013: 4.3 million
Busch Gardens Tampa
2009: 4.1 million
2010: 4.2 million
2011: 4.2 million
2012: 4.3 million
2013: 4.0 million
Busch Gardens Williamsburg
2009: 2.9 million
2010: 2.8 million
2011: 2.7 million
2012: 2.8 million
2013: 2.7 million
You can see that the SeaWorld parks suffered their biggest attendance declines 2009-2010, before Blackfish. My guess is that the numbers reflect a combination of families feeling the pinch of the Great Recession plus the negative publicity that followed Dawn Brancheau’s death in February 2010. And attendance never really recovered, and then declined again in 2013 when Blackfish starts to hit the public consciousness (and attendance was off another 4.7 percent for the first nine months of 2014).
So why did SeaWorld’s numbers never make a recovery from 2010? Bad management, and a failure to come up with attractions that could compete with what other parks were rolling out, according to Theme Park Insider:
While other theme park companies have moved aggressively to develop new attractions and intellectual property in the wake of the Great Recession, the SeaWorld/Busch Gardens parks have stumbled through one challenge after another. The debuts of the two Manta roller coasters, in Orlando in 2009 and San Diego in 2012, provide the few bright spots during this period. Otherwise, the parks have suffered through construction delays on multiple new attractions, including missed projected open dates for major new drop towers in Williamsburg and Tampa.
Looking back through our Theme Park Insider reader ratings, I can’t find a single example of a new show debuting during this time period at any of these four parks that scored a higher reader rating than the show it replaced. In 2013, SeaWorld Orlando made what it called the largest capital investment in its history in opening Antarctica: Empire of the Penguin. An effort to compete with the engaging and immersive environment of Universal Orlando’s Harry Potter land, SeaWorld chose to go with depicting what might be the most inhospitable environment on Earth: Antarctica. Sure, people love penguins, but SeaWorld’s technically innovative Antarctica ride left visitors spending too much time spinning around in low-light caverns with there were no penguins in sight, rather than spending time with cute new penguin character SeaWorld had created for the attraction. At the end of the ride, SeaWorld crafted a new, open display environment for its penguins, but doing show required keeping the guest areas in the exhibit so cold that few visitors could stand spending more than a moment or two looking at the pavilion’s most compelling attraction — the live penguins themselves.
Not good.
That said, I think the #BlackfishEffect has become a bigger part of the story in 2013-2014. Throw in the investor lawsuits, and ongoing grassroots opposition to killer whale entertainment, and it becomes clear that whoever comes in to replace Jim Atchison as CEO has a very complex puzzle to solve.
Sure, sure. Correlation is not causation. But it’s still worth looking at and considering the correlation, so thanks Wonkblog.
Here’s Wonkblog’s setup:
Jim Atchison, the chief executive of SeaWorld Entertainment, which operates SeaWorld theme parks, resigned Friday morning. Atchison’s departure comes on the heels of what has been a terrible year for the company. In the first nine months of 2014, SeaWorld’s revenue fell by more than seven percent, and its attendance dropped by nearly five percent.
The changing of the guard is likely the result of something that occurred in July 2013: namely, the release of the documentary “Blackfish.”
“Blackfish” was met with both critical praise and public uproar. The documentary depicted cruel treatment of the orca (or killer) whales that SeaWorld holds in captivity and features among its biggest attractions. It was seen widely. And the response has been paralyzing (even despite an effort to discredit the documentary).
Personally, I think that there is more going on with SeaWorld’s drop in attendance and share price crash than Blackfish (though I do think Blackfish and the investor lawsuits at least partly account for it). Consider, also, that SeaWorld has basically been offering the same show for 50 years, and today it is even less thrilling since trainers are no longer leaping off orcas. Throw in a general public sensibility that increasingly questions the exploitation of animals for entertainment (at circuses and zoos, as well as at marine parks), and you can see why Shamu might not have the same drawing power as Harry Potter World.
So, does Atchison’s departure signal that SeaWorld might be ready to make big changes? I did an interview with NPR’s All Things Considered today, to discuss Atchison’s ouster. I said I suspected the most likely change is that SeaWorld will over time start to move its killer whale entertainment business abroad to more willing audiences in Russia, Asia and the Middle East. But one thing I should have mentioned to Greg Allen, the reporter, is that the only certain signal that SeaWorld plans to reinvent itself and evolve away from killer whale entertainment as the core of its business and brand would be a cessation of killer whale breeding. No breeding means that eventually there will be no captive killer whales. Anything else is just spin aimed at somehow perpetuating the Shamu Show, whether here in the US or abroad.
The Earthist Chronicles 