Blackfish: The Documentary That Exposes SeaWorld

 

Abstract

When the documentary, Blackfish was released in 2013, SeaWorld officials initially responded by blaming falling attendance on negative media attention, but the falloff in attendance on the part of the general public confirmed that there was widespread outrage over the conditions in which orca whales were maintained. The documentary focused on Tilikim, a wild-caught orca whale that was subjected to medieval conditions that caused him to turn on his human trainers and kill several. This essayprovides an analysis concerning the decline in attendance at SeaWorld following the Blackfish documentary release and a discussion concerning SeaWorlds announced plans to discontinue their orca whale captive breeding program, followed by a personal reaction to this important but disturbing documentary.
Captive marine mammals frolicking and doing tricks for crowds of humans--it's a make-believe vision of what the ocean might look if it were designed by Walt Disney. Mark J. Palmer, Earth Island Journal, 2015

How sales at SeaWorld went down

As the epigraph above suggests, SeaWorld attracts millions of people to its facilities each year, but as Palmer adds, Underneath the water's surface, however, is a much darker reality, one characterized by routine suffering and occasional bursts of lethal violence (2015, p. 53). Unfortunately, the facts related the documentary, Blackfish, were not all that uncommon in the past when wild orca whales were routinely collected from their natural habitats. The documentary concerns Tilikim, a male orca killer whale that was captured in the North Atlantic in 1983 when he was about 2 years old (Schindler, 2014).

The documentary contains a number of gruesome empirical accounts from Tilikims trainers at Victoria, Canadas SeaWorld facility that would have an enormous impact on SeaWorld attendance and revenues. Among the more graphic details related by the trainers was the fact that 2 years after he was collected, Tilikum...
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According to a report by Schindler, There was no stimulation, they were mostly immobile for 14 hours a day, and the trainers punished and deprived them of food in order to make them perform tricks (p. 3). The combination of psychological and physical trauma resulted in Tilikum killing several human trainers beginning in 1991 with Keltie Byrne and then again in February 24, 2010 when the killer whale lived up to its name by killing Dawn Brancheau, a SeaWorld whale trainer at Orlando (Schindler, 2014).
The documentary also places the blame for these deaths on the executive leadership team at SeaWorld who made the decisions that resulted in this tragic outcome. Not only do orcas confined in capacity have shorter life spans than their counterparts living in the wild, they also suffer from more diseases including deformed dorsal fins and emotional trauma as a result of being forced to perform tricks for park attendees (Schindler, 2014). Animal rights groups have also criticized SeaWorld for the manner in which it harvested these whales (Schindler, 2014) even though the company claims it has not done so for more than 40 years now (The last generation of whales at Sea World, 2016). Not surprisingly, the revelations contained in the documentary caused SeaWorld to become the target of global criticisms for these inhumane practices following its release. Despite aggressive efforts to improve the orcas habitat, SeaWorlds Standard & Poors credit rating has plummeted and attendance has decreased by more than 20% (Schindler, 2014).

How Sea World agreed to end the Orca Program

Although SeaWorld initially attempted to deflect blame for the deaths caused by Tilikum and its treatment of orcas by citing media attention as causing its decline in attendance and credit rating, the companys CEO Jim Atchison reported that the company was building a new 10-million gallon whale tank in 2018 which is twice the size of…