The film premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in January and was released that October.
Tilikum, nicknamed ‘Tilly’, is the film’s star; a 32 year old killer whale who resides at SeaWorld in Orlando, after being captured off the east coast of Iceland in 1983 when he was just two years old.
The orca hit headlines in 2011 after his trainer Dawn Brancheau drowned during a show that a number of guests were watching as part of a special ‘Dine with Shamu’ event. Later autopsy results indicated that she had died from drowning and blunt force trauma.
This was the third incident involving Tilikum and the death of a human.
It is of course amusement parks like SeaWorld who are to blame. In the name of entertainment, they encage orcas in pens little bigger than swimming pools. Distressed and frustrated, whales in captivity often show unusual aggression towards both humans and each other, aggression that is not present in killer whales studied in the wild.
Although a court ruling decreed that trainers are no longer permitted to enter the water with orcas following Dawn’s death, Tilikum continues to perform for audiences today.
My one criticism of the film would be that it focuses too heavily on the aggressive character of Tilikum himself, an aggression which has clearly been brought on by the conditions of his confinement. He is certainly not the ‘baddy’ of this film and I worry at times that this might be seen as the case.
Tilly is just one of 45 orcas kept in captivity worldwide.
Campaigners have called for all killer whales in captivity to be released into the wild, but as long as amusement parks continue to profit from having whales on display, this is unlikely to happen.
I believe keeping dolphins and whales in captivity is wrong. The old age argument that they are there for educational purposes no longer stands, especially now that technology has advanced to the level where we can watch programmes on television about the world’s wildlife. BBC documentaries such as Planet Earth can be viewed from the comfort of your own home in high definition, so why do we still feel the need to see a whale perform tricks in a zoo? What exactly do we learn about killer whales from this?
The law now forbids killer whales from being taken from the wild, but in order to keep up their supply and keep the cash flowing, sealife parks carry out breeding programmes that involve the artificial insemination of female orcas. Whales born into captivity rarely survive. Tilikum is the father of 11 calfs and his sperm is regularly sent out to parks across the globe.
Whilst the captivity of killer whales in the UK is illegal, we have in the past kept whales in zoos. Bubbles was the main attraction at Windsor Safari Park in the 1960s, now known as Legoland. As the rules on pool size weren’t monitored then, he was quite literally kept in a penguin pond and became ill from swallowing the coins that visitors threw into his pool.
There are several activist groups that you can join online and petitions you can sign to help support the fight against orca captivity.
To find out more go to: http://blackfishmovie.com/
To read about Lolita, the oldest killer whale in captivity and in the smallest pool of all of them, go to:
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