"DISPATCHER ON PHONE:" "Orange County Fire Rescue." "WOMAN ON PHONE:" "Uh, 6600 Sea Harbor Drive." "SeaWorld Stadium?" "DISPATCHER:" "Okay." "WOMAN:" "We actually have a trainer in the water with one of our whales, the whale that they're not supposed to be in the water with." "DISPATCHER:" "Okay." "We'll get somebody en route." "WOMAN:" "Send them through gate number three to Shamu Stadium." "DISPATCHER:" "Gate three." "DISPATCHER ON PHONE:" "Orange County Sheriff's Office." "MAN ON PHONE:" "We need S.O. to respond for a dead person at SeaWorld." "A whale has eaten one of the trainers." "DISPATCHER:" "A whale ate one of the trainers?" "MAN:" "That is correct." "(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)" "(ENCHANTING MUSIC PLAYING)" "MALE NARRATOR:" "Do you believe?" "My parents first brought me to a SeaWorld park when I was very young." "From that point forward, I was hooked." "It meant everything to me because I'd never wanted anything more." "I remember being probably in first or second grade watching National Geographic specials or Mutual of Omaha specials and seeing whales and seeing dolphins and as a little kid just being really incredibly inspired by it." "I never went to SeaWorld." "I grew up in New York, so I went to the Bronx Zoo." "I grew up on a lake with horses." "We'd swim the horses." "I grew up around the ocean." "I came from the middle of the country in flatland Kansas." "I'm from Virginia." "Travelled down, did the theme park thing in Orlando when I was 17." "And saw the night show at Shamu Stadium." "Very emotional, you know, popular music." "And I was just very driven to wanna do that." "Then I saw what the trainers did, and I said, "That's what I wanna do."" "GOMERSALL:" "One of the trainers there, he goes, "What are you doing out there?" ""You should be a trainer."" "I go, "I don't know how to train animals." ""I've never trained animals in my life."" "How do you prepare yourself for an encounter with an 8,000-pound Orcinus orca?" "KIM ASHDOWN:" "I always thought you needed a master's degree in marine biology to be a trainer." "MALE NARRATOR:" "It takes years of study and experience to meet the strict requirements necessary to interact in the water with Shamu." "Come to find out, it really is more about your personality and how good you can swim." "I went and tried out, got the job right away, and I'm like, "Yeah!" So excited." "I was so, so excited." "I really wanted to be there, I really wanted to do the job," "I couldn't wait to get in the water with the animals," "I really was proud of being a SeaWorld trainer." "I thought this was the most amazing job." "I showed up there on my first day, not really knowing what to expect," "I was told to put on a wetsuit and get in the water." "Hi, Mom!" "(SIGHS) I was scared out of my wits." "First of all, I put my wetsuit on backwards, because I was raised in a farm in Virginia." "Hi, Dad!" "My first thought and memory of that time was that dolphins are a lot bigger" "(CHUCKLES) than they look when you get in the water next to 'em." "I watched this sea lion and otter show, and this guy, Mike Morocco, he comes out during the show with a dress on, as Dorky, the alter-ego of Dorothy, in a dress with a sea lion," "the coward sea lion, right?" "And he's walking along with his little basket, and I go," ""I will never, ever do that."" "Two months later, "Hi, I'm Dorky!"" "Walking out on stage with a sea lion." "ASHDOWN:" "I was overwhelmed and I was so excited." "I mean, just seeing a killer whale is breathtaking." "JOHN JETT:" "I was just in awe." "It's shocking to see how large they are and how beautiful they are." "BERG:" "Being in the presence of the killer whales was just inspiring and amazing." "And I remember, seeing them for the first time, just not being able to believe how huge they were." "You're there because you want to train killer whales and that's your goal." "(TRAINERS CHEERING)" "I didn't know it was gonna happen, so I wasn't expecting it." "And one day they say, "Okay, Sam, you're ready to go."" "WOMAN:" "Fine?" "You got it." ""You're gonna stand on the whale," ""you're gonna dive off the whale," ""the whale's gonna swim under you and pick you up again." ""And then you're gonna do a perimeter ride around the pool."" "MAN:" "Good." "Keep moving." "(CHEERING)" "They just told me to go do it, and I did it." "(LAUGHING) Wow, I just rode a killer Whale!" "WOMAN:" "Yay, girlie!" "JETT:" "When you look into their eyes, you know somebody is home." "Somebody's lookin' back." "You form a very personal relationship with your animal." "There's something absolutely amazing about working with an animal." "You are a team." "And you build a relationship together." "And you both understand the goal." "And you help each other." "I been with this whale since I was 18 years old and I've seen her have all four of her babies." "We've grown up together." "That's the joy I got out of it, is just it's a relationship like I've never had." "WOMAN:" "Bro, I have to know, are you nervous?" "I'm scared." "VENTRE:" "No." "GOMERSALL:" "Nice hair, Jeff." "Did you see anything?" "Jeff Ventre is going to go over there, he's gonna shine, you're gonna notice..." " Dawn." " That's Dawn." "He's gonna be my supervisor one day." "There you go." "VENTRE:" "I knew Dawn when she was new." "She was a great person to work with, and she obviously blossomed into one of SeaWorld's best trainers." "This is Dawn Brancheau." "Dawn is the senior trainer here at Shamu Stadium." "I guess you could say I kind of knew Dawn in a past life." "REPORTER:" "It's a tough job, isn't it?" "Yeah, we really do go through a lot of physical exertion." "You can see in the show, we do a lot of deep-water work, breath holds, very high-energy behaviours with animals." "Obviously they're giving out a lot of energy, too, but we're working together and having a lot of fun as well." "She's beautiful, she's blonde, she's athletic, she's friendly." "Everybody loves Dawn." "And I mean this so sincerely, of watching you perform yesterday, you're amazing." " Thank you!" " You really are!" "BERG:" "She captured what it means to be a Sea World trainer." "She had so much experience that it made me realise what happened to her really could've happened to anyone." "REVERE:" "This is Detective Revere with the Orange County Sheriff's Office." "Today's date is February 24, 2010." "The time is 4:16." "In the room with me right now is Thomas George Tobin." " Is that correct?" "TOBIN:" "Correct." "(REVERE SPEAKING)" "(TOBIN SPEAKING)" "(REVERE SPEAKING)" "(TOBIN SPEAKING)" "(REVERE SPEAKING)" "(TOBIN SPEAKING)" "(REVERE SPEAKING)" "REVERE:" "So the arm is nowhere..." "TOBIN:" "Right." "JETT:" "OSHA, on behalf of the federal government, is basically suggesting that swimming with orcas is inherently dangerous, and that you can't completely predict the outcome when you enter the water or enter their environment." "DAVE DUFFUS:" "That's the crux of the OSHA case." "Stay out of proximity with the animals and you won't get killed." "It will have a ripple effect through the whole industry." "This was national headline news." "SeaWorld's whale performances may never be the same." "Right now the theme park is arguing in court to keep whale trainers in the water." "Something OSHA says is extremely dangerous." "These are wild animals, and they are unpredictable, because we don't speak whale." "We don't speak whale, we don't speak tiger, we don't speak monkey." "FEMALE ANCHOR 1:" "And tempers flared between the two sides today when OSHA's attorney suggested that" "SeaWorld only made changes after trainer Dawn Brancheau's death outraged the public." "FEMALE ANCHOR 2:" "OSHA doesn't want the trainers going back in the water without a physical barrier between them and the whales." "Being in close proximity to these top predators is too dangerous." "They won't then be getting in the water riding on the whales, things like that." "If you were in a bathtub for 25 years, don't you think you'd get a little irritated, aggravated, maybe a little psychotic?" "DUFFUS:" "The situation with Dawn Brancheau, it didn't just happen, it's not a singular event." "You have to go back over 20 years to understand this." "It was a really exciting thing to do and so everybody wanted to do it." "INTERVIEWER:" "What were they telling you you were gonna do?" "Hmm." "Capture orcas." "(MAN WHOOPING)" "They had aircraft, they had spotters, they had speedboats." "They had bombs they were throwing in the water." "They were lighting their bombs with acetylene torches in their boats and throwing them as fast as they could to herd the whales into coves." "(WHOOPS)" "But the orcas had been caught before and they knew what was going on." "And they knew their young ones would be taken from them." "So the adults without young went east into a cul-de-sac, and the boats followed them thinking they were all going that way, while the mothers with babies went north." "But the capture teams had aircraft." "And they have to come up for air eventually, and when they did, the capture teams alerted the boats and said," ""Oh, no, they're going north, the ones with babies."" "The speedboats caught them there and herded them in." "And then they had fishing boats with seine nets that they would stretch across so none could leave, and then they could just pick out the young ones." "We were only after the little ones." "And a little one is a big animal still." "But I was told because of shipping costs that's why they only take the little ones." "They had the young ones that they wanted in the corrals, so they dropped the seine nets and all the others could've left." "But they stayed." "We're there trying to get the young orca into the stretcher, and the whole fam damley is out here," "25 yards away maybe, in a big line," "and they're communicating back and forth." "(WHALES SQUEALING)" "Well..." "You understand then what you're doing." "(SIGHS)" "I lost it." "I mean I just started crying." "I didn't stop working." "But I just couldn't handle it." "It's just like kidnapping a little kid away from their mother." "Everybody's watching, what can you do?" "But the worst thing I can think of, you know?" " I can't think of anything worse than that." "(SQUEALING)" "Now, and this really sounds bad, but when the whole hunt was over, there were three dead whales in the net." "So they had Peter and Brian and I cut the whales open, fill 'em with rocks, put anchors on their tail and sink 'em." "Well... (GRUNTS)" "Really, I didn't even think about it being illegal at that point." "I thought it was a PR thing." "They were finally ejected from the state of Washington by a court order in 1976." "It was SeaWorld by name that was told," ""Do not come back to Washington to capture whales."" "Without missing a beat, they went from Washington to Iceland and began capturing there." "CROWE:" "I've been pan' of a revolution, two change of presidents in Central and South America." "And seen some things that's hard to believe." "But this is the worst thing that I've ever done, is hunt that whale." "MALE NARRATOR:" "Sealand has been a pan' of Victoria for over 20 years." "We specialise in the care and display of killer whales." "By the time I started, when he was four, he was up to 16 feet long, and weighed 4,000 pounds." "(MAN CHATTERING OVER PA)" "I had actually seen Tilikum quite a number of times." "He was right across the street here in Victoria." "(MAN CHATTERING OVER PA)" "BALCOMB:" "All Sealand was a net hanging in a marina with a float around it." "Tilikum was the one we really loved to work with." "He was very well behaved and he was always eager to please." "When he was first introduced, everything just went fine and dandy." "But the previous head trainer used techniques that involved punishment." "He would team a trained orca up with Tilikum, who was untrained." "He would send them both off to do the same behaviour." "If Tilikum didn't do it, then both animals were punished." "Deprived of food to keep them hungry." "This caused a lot of frustration with the larger animal, the established animal, and would in turn get frustrated with Tilikum, and would rake him with his teeth." "There would be times during certain seasons that Tilikum would be covered head to toe with rakes." "Rakes are teeth on teeth, and raking the skin and, from head to toe, you could see blood and you could see scratches, and he would just be raked up." "WALTERS:" "Both females would gang up on him." "Tilikum was the one we trusted." "We never were concerned about Tilikum." "The issue was really that we stored these whales at night in what we call a module, which was 20 feet across and probably 30 feet deep, as a safety precaution, because we were worried about people cutting the net and letting them go." "And the lights were all turned out." "So there was really no stimulation, they're just in this dark, metal, 20-foot-by-30-foot pool for two-thirds of their life." "When we first started, they were quite small, and quite young." "So they fit in there quite nicely." "But they were immobile for the most part." "It didn't feel good." "It just didn't." "And it was just wrong." "We started having difficulty getting them all into this one small steel box, to be honest." "That's what it was." "It was a floating steel box." "WALTERS:" "That's where food deprivation would come in." "We would hold back food, and they would know if they went in the module, that they would get their food." "So if they're hungry enough, they're gonna go in there." "And during the winter, that would be from 5:00 at night till 7:00 in the morning." "When you let them out, you'd see these new tooth rakes, and sometimes you'd see blood." "PORTER:" "Closing that door on him and knowing that he's locked in there for the whole night is like..." "It's a stab." "It's, "Whoa!"" "If that is true, it's not only inhumane and I'll tell him so, but it probably led to what I think is a psychosis that..." "Um..." "He was on a hair trigger." "He'd kill." "(SIRENS WAILING)" "MALE ANCHOR 1:" "An employee is dead after an encounter..." "FEMALE ANCHOR:" "At a Canadian park called Sealand of the Pacific..." "MALE ANCHOR 2:." "The victim, Keltie Byrne, was a championship swimmer and a part-time worker at Sealand." "FEMALE ANCHOR 2:" "As seen in this home video, rescuers used a huge net to..." "FEMALE ANCHOR 3:" "Workers' efforts were hindered by the agitated whales." "I'd like to make the Pan-Pacific team this summer, but my more immediate goal is just to swim fast at nationals." "NADINE KALLEN:" "It was sort of a cloudy, grey day and we were looking for something to do." "So we thought, "Why not go to Sealand?"" "It was kind of like this dingy pool with these whales... lt just felt a little bit like an amusement park that was kind of on its last legs and everything was a bit grey." " Yeah, it was like a swimming pool." " Yeah, yeah." " Three whales in a swimming pool." " Yeah." "And they would come up and touch the ball and there was..." "I think there was some tail splashing and there was some..." " Some jumping." " The fish." "They hold the fish and the whales jump up." "And I remember saying, "Oh, what a fun job."" "She's so lucky." "And then, I saw her walking with her rubber boots, and she tripped and her foot just dipped into the edge of the pool and she lost her balance and fell in." "And then she was pushing her way up to get out of the pool, and the whale zoomed over, grabbed her boot and pulled her back in." "At first I didn't think it was that serious, because you see the trainer in the pool with the whale and you think, "Well, the whales are used to that."" "And then all of a sudden, it started getting..." "There was more swimming, more activity, more thrashing, and then she was starting to get panicked, and then as it progressed, you started to realise," ""Whoa." "Something's not right here."" "She started to scream and she started looking around and her eyes were bigger and bigger and realising that," ""I really am in trouble here."" "And then, they would pull her under." "And then they would come up and then they came up she'd be, "Help me!" "Help me!"" "And then they'd take her down again." "And she would be submerged for several seconds up to, I don't know, maybe a minute." "You're not keeping track." "So, and it was harder and harder for her to get the air in, because she was screaming." "And my sister remembers her saying, "I don't wanna die."" "Well, condolences to Keltie's family." "COWELL:" "Yeah." "That we couldn't help her was pretty wretched." "DUFFUS:" "Sealand closed." "Well, it's probably a good thing." "I mean, it was a little pond." "And I think the owner made the right decision for whatever reasons." "I don't believe he's a bad guy, a bad man." "I think he was shocked by the whole affair, too." "The blush was gone from the business." "And he decided that that was it." "We should shut down." "And no one ever contacted us." "There was an inquest." "No one ever asked us to say what happened." "We just left." "And there was no big lawsuits afterwards, and there's no memorial and the only thing remaining of Keltie Byrne, uh, is what's left in the folks' minds who recall the case." "So, in the newspaper articles, the cause of death was that she drowned, accidentally, but she was pulled under by the whale." "There's a bit of smoke and mirrors going on." "I mean, one of the fundamental facts is, is that none of the witnesses were clear about which whale pulled Keltie in." "Yeah, see, it was the large whale, Tilikum, the male, is the one that went after her." "And the other two just kind of circled around." "But he was definitely the instigator." "And we knew it was that whale because he had the flopped over fin." "It was very easy to tell." "VENTRE:" "Sealand of the Pacific closed its doors and was looking, I guess, to make a buck on the way out, and these whales are worth millions of dollars." "When SeaWorld heard that Tilikum was available, after this accident at Sealand of the Pacific, they really wanted Tilikum, because they needed a breeder." "So I don't even think that anybody even was questioning, like, "Is this a good idea?"" "My understanding of the situation was that" "Tilikum and the others would not be used in shows." "They would not be performance animals." "Our understanding of their behaviour was that it was such a highly stimulating event for them, that they were likely to repeat it." "Sealand was, we were all young and bit of sea cowboys, and we weren't so technical and scientific as SeaWorld, so we all had this vision that they knew more than us, and they were better than us," "and Tilikum would have a bigger pool and he'd have a better life, and he would have better care and he'd have better food and it'd be a great life for him." "So it was like, "Okay, Tili!" "You're going to Disneyland!" "Lucky you!"" "MALE NARRATOR:" "The orcas'intelligence may be even superior to man's." "As parents, they're exemplary, better than many human beings." "And like human beings, they have a profound instinct for vengeance." "Dino De Laurentiis presents..." "If you go back only 35 years, we knew nothing, in fact, less than nothing." "What the public had was superstition and fear." "MALE NARRATOR:" "A fight to the death!" "Between the two most dangerous animals on Earth!" "What in hell are you?" "These were the vicious killer whales that had 48 sharp teeth that would rip you to shreds if they got a chance." "What we learned is that they're amazingly friendly, and understanding and intuitively want to be your companion." "WOMAN:" "Are you recording this?" "(WHALE SQUEAKING) -(LAUGHING)" "GARRETT:" "And to this day, there's no record of an orca doing any harm to any human in the wild." "(CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING)" "They live in these big families." "And they have life spans very similar to human life spans." "That females can live to about 100, maybe more." "Males to about 50 or 60." "But the adult offspring never leave their mother's side." "(WHALES SQUEAKING)" "Each community has a completely different set of behaviours." "Each has a complete repertoire of vocalisations, with no overlap." "(WHALES VOCALISING)" "You could call them languages." "The scientific community is reluctant to say any other animal but humans uses languages, but there's every indication that they use languages." "The orca brain just screams out intelligence, awareness." "We took this tremendous brain and we put it in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner." "What we found was just astounding." "They've got a part of the brain that humans don't have." "A part of their brain has extended out right adjacent to their limbic system." "The system processes emotions." "The safest inference would be these are animals that have highly elaborated emotional lives." "It's becoming clear that dolphins and whales have a sense of self, a sense of social bonding that they've taken to another level, much stronger, much more complex than in other mammals, including humans." "We look at mass strandings, the fact that they stand by each other." "Everything about them is social." "Everything." "It's been suggested that their whole sense of self is distributed among the individuals in their group." "MAN 1:" "Five of 'em." "These orca are going to attack this seal on..." "They've been breaking the ice off and swimming around him." "Here they come, two of 'em, look at..." "Underneath there, you can see them underneath." "They made a big wave, look at that." "Big wave." " Oh, yeah." " MAN 2:" "Oh, God." "WOMAN:" "Oh, God." "No, no, no." "I can't stand it." "MAN 1:" "If you can't watch the bullfight, you better leave." "Here they go." "Look at this." "Three of 'em." "WOMAN:" "Oh, God!" "Oh, no!" "MAN 1:" "It's all over." "WOMAN 2:" "Nope, not quite." "MAN 1:" "Nope." "Yeah, it's all over." "It's all over." "(CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING)" "DUFFUS:" "The First Nations people and the old fishermen on the coast, they call them Blackfish." "They're an animal that possesses great spiritual power." "And they're not to be meddled with." "I've spent a lot of time around killer whales, and they're always in charge." "I never get out of the boat, I never mess with them." "The speed and the power is quite amazing." "Rules are the same as a pool hall." "Keep one foot on the floor at all times." "Even after seeing 'em thousands of times, you see 'em and you still..." "(INHALES SHARPLY) Wake up." "(CHUCKLES)" "He arrived I think in 1992." "I was at Whale and Dolphin Stadium when he arrived." "And he's twice as large as the next animal in the facility." "MAN:" "Guy's right at about 12,000 pounds." "That's incredible." "He looks fantastic." "When Tilikum arrived at SeaWorld, he was attacked viciously, repeatedly, by Katina and others." "In the wild, it's a very matriarchal society." "Male whales are kept at the perimeter." "In captivity, the animals are squeezed into very close proximity." "Tilikum, the poor guy is so large, he couldn't get away, because he just is not as mobile relative to the smaller and more agile females." "And where was he gonna run?" "There's no place to run." "BERG:" "I think he spent a lot of time in isolation." "And Sea World claims that, "Oh, no, he's always in with the other females. "" "From what I saw, he was mostly put with the females for breeding purposes." "And he didn't spend a lot of time with the other whales." "It's for his own protection." "He gets beat up, and so by segregating him, it provides a physical barrier so the females can't kick his butt." "Tilikum is pretty much kept in the back, and then brought out at the very end as the big splash." "He was always happy to see ya in the morning." "ALL:" "Aww." "WOMAN:" "Boy." "MAN:" "Look at his chompers..." "VENTRE:" "Maybe because he was alone, maybe because he was hungry, maybe because he just liked you, who knows what was going on in his head?" " Wanna whistle?" "(WHISTLES)" " Come on, big boy." " Show those pecs." "BERG:" "He seemed to like to work, he seemed to be interested, he seemed to wanna learn new things." "He seemed to be enjoying working with the trainers." "JETT:" "He, for me, was a joy." "He really responded to me, and every day I went to work, I was happy to see Tili." "(WOMAN GIGGLING)" "WOMAN: (LAUGHING) That's cute." "(WOMAN LAUGHING)" "You're being too cute." "BERG:" "I never got the impression of him, while I was there that," ""Oh, my God, he's the scary whale." Not at all." "Maybe some of it's just our naivete or whatever." "Because we weren't given the full details of Keltie's situation." "WOMAN:" "Turn around, smile, buddy!" "I was under the impression that Tilikum had nothing to do with her death specifically, that it was the female whales responsible for her death." "What I found really odd, at first, was the way they were acting around this whale and what they had told us seemed to me to be two different things." "The first day he arrived, I remember, one of the senior trainers at SeaWorld," "Tilikum was in a pool, and she was walking over a gate, and she had her wetsuit unzipped and it was tied around her waist." "And she was making cooing noises and going," ""Hey, Tilikum, what a cute little whale!"" "And she was like, just kind of play-talking at him, and one of the supervisors said, "Get her outta there!"" "And just screamed at her, like, "Get her away from there."" "They were so worried that something was gonna happen." "And I remember thinking," ""Why are you guys making such a big deal out of this when he didn't actually kill her?"" "Well, clearly management thought there was some reason to exercise caution around him." "Clearly they knew more than they were telling us." "Ladies and gentlemen, the next two behaviours you're going to be seeing, you can only see right here at Sea World!" "BERG:" "Jeff was out in the audience filming one of the Shamu shows." "It was a perfect show." "All of the hot dog sequences, the water works sequences went off great." "I was really excited just to be capturing this, 'cause it was kind of turning out to be a great show." "A show that's kind of complete." "It probably only happens a few times a week." "At the very end of the show, Liz was working Tilikum, and apparently Tilikum lunged out of the water at her." "And I had captured Tilikum coming out of the water, kind of turning sideways, and, appeared to me, to try to grab Liz." "And at that moment, the tape became unusable." "I was just kind of basically instructed to get rid of the tape." "Wanting to kind of preserve the tape, I actually used the editing equipment and snipped out that little half-second or second when he did that and stitched it back together, so it just kind of looked like a glitch in the tape," "and I'm like, "Look at this."" "And it was like, "No." "This is no longer usable."" "And so, we had to destroy the tape." "VENTRE:" "It's pretty outrageous that SeaWorld would claim there was no expecting Tilikum to come out of the water, because they had witnessed him coming out of the water, and it's written into his profile." "He lunges at trainers." "When we visit Sea World, we tend to take advantage of the fact that Shamu has been provided with a safe and comfortable habitat." "And everything trained is an extension of the killer whale's natural behaviour." "I spewed out the party line during shows." "I'm totally mortified now." ""Look at Namu." "And Namu's not doing that because she has to."" "Namu is doing this because she really wants to." "Oh, my gosh." "Some of the things I'm embarrassed by, so embarrassed by." "At the time, I think I could've convinced myself that the relationships that we had were built on something stronger than the fact that I'm giving them fish." "I like to think that, but I don't know that that's the truth." "I had been there a while and I'd seen a few other things along the way that made me question why I was there and what we were doing with these animals." "FEMALE NARRATOR'." "On November 4th, 1988, a killer whale at Sea World gave the performance of a lifetime." "Don't miss this small miracle." "Come see our new baby Shamu." "I know it was naive of me, but I thought that" "(CLEARS THROAT) it was our responsibility to do as much as we could to keep their family units together, since we knew that in the wild that's what happens." "MAN: (SINGING) Yes, sir, that's our baby" "RAY:" "Kalina was the first baby Shamu." "MALE NARRATOR:" "Baby Shamu, Sea World's newest star!" "Don't miss her..." "She had become quite disruptive, and challenging her mom a little bit, and disrupting some shows and that kind of thing." "MAN: (SINGING) She's got the whole place jumping" "Shamu!" "She's our baby whale" "It was decided by the higher-ups that she would be moved to another park when she was just four, four-and-a-half years old." "And that was news to us as trainers that were working with her." "To me, it had never crossed my mind that they might be moving the baby from her mom." "The supervisors basically were kind of mocking me, like, "Oh, you're saying poor Kalina." ""What's she gonna do without her mommy?"" "And that, of course, just shut me up." "So the night of the move, we had to deploy the nets to separate them, and get Kalina, the baby, into the med pool." "And Katina was generally a quiet whale." "She was not an overly vocal whale." "After Kalina was removed from the scene, and put on the truck and taken to the airport, and Katina, her mom, was left in the pool, she stayed in the corner of the pool, um," "like literally just shaking and screaming, screeching, crying." " I'd never seen her do anything like that." "(SCREECHING)" "And the other females in the pool, maybe once or twice during the night, they'd come out and check on her." "And she'd screech and cry." "And they would just run back." "There was nothing that you could call that, watching it, besides grief." "HARGROVE:" "Those are not your whales." "You love them, and you think, "I'm the one that touches them, feeds them," ""keeps them alive, gives them the care that they need."" "They're not your whales." "They own 'em." "Kasatka and Takara were very close." "Kasatka was the mother." "Takara's the calf." "Takara was special to me." "They were inseparable." "When they separated Kasatka and Takara, it was to take Takara to Florida." "Once Takara had already been stretchered out of the pool, put on the truck, driven to the airport," "(HIGH-PITCHED VOCALISING)" "Kasatka continued to make vocals that had never been heard before." "(HIGH-PITCHED VOCALISING)" "They brought in the senior research scientist to analyse the vocals." "They were long-range vocals." "She was trying something that no one had even heard before, looking for Takara." "That's heartbreaking." "How can anyone look at that and think that that is morally acceptable?" "It's not." "It is not okay." "WOMAN:" "Stand by, Dean." "MAN:" "Let's go live to SeaWorld where Dean Gomersall is joining us for a sneak peek." "Hi, Dean, tell us about the new show." "Good afternoon, Richard." "The new show is Whale and Dolphin Discovery." "What it does is it shows the relationship we have between all our animals here at the Whale and Dolphin..." "GOMERSALL:" "There's so many things that were told to us..." "They tell you so many times that you just start believing it." "GOMERSALL ON VIDEO:" "So, all the animals here get along very well." "It's just like training your dog, really." "GOMERSALL:" "I was blind." "I was a kid." "I didn't know what I was doing really." "MAN:" "Nice." "WOMAN:" "Good job." "(LAUGHING)" "Ladies and gentlemen, this is David from Maryland!" "Go ahead and wave at everyone, David!" "BERG:" "I just really bought into what they told us." "I learned to say what they told us to the audience." "Hello, out there!" "Children are some of Shamu's biggest fans." "We can do just about anything we want." "I thought I knew everything about killer whales when I worked there." "And everything about these animals." "I really know nothing about killer whales." "I know a lot about being an animal trainer or a killer whale trainer, but I don't know anything about these animals' natural history or their behaviour." "I really, in some ways, believed a lot of what I was learning from them, because why would they lie?" "Because the whales in their pools die young, they like to say that all orcas die at 25 or 30 years." "Twenty-five to 35 years." "Twenty-five to 35 years." "They're documented in the wild living to be about 35, mid-30s." "They tend to live a lot longer in this environment, because they have all the veterinary care." "GARRETT:" "And of course that's false." "We knew by 1980, after half a dozen years of the research, that they live equivalent to human life spans." "And every other potentially embarrassing fact is twisted and turned and denied one way or another." " WOMAN:" "So, in the wild, they live..." " Less." "Like the floppy dorsal fins... 25% of whales have a fin that turns over like that, as they get older." "Dorsal collapse happens in less than 1% of wild killer whales." "We know this." "All the captive males, 100% have collapsed dorsal fins." "And they say that they're a family, that the whales are in their family." "They have their pods." "But that's just an artificial assemblage of their collection, however management decides they should mix them and whichever ones happen to be born or bought and brought in." "That's not a family, come on." "VENTRE:" "You've got animals from different cultural subsets that have been brought in from various parks." "These are different nations, these aren't just two different killer whales." "These animals, they've got different genes, they use different languages." "MARINO:" "But what could happen as a result of them being thrown in with other whales that they haven't grown up with, that are not part of their culture, is there's hyper-aggression, a lot of violence, a lot of killing, in captivity, that you don't ever see in the wild." "MAN OVER PA:" "For the health and safety of the animals, please do not put your hands in the water." "JETT:" "There was always this backdrop, this underpinning of tension between animals." "Whale on whale aggression was just part of the daily existence." "MAN OVER PA:" "We ask that you use the stairs and aisle ways as you exit." "Please do not step on the seats." "These areas may become wet and therefore slippery to some footwear." "Thank you." "In the wild, when there's tension, they've got thousands of square miles to exit the scene and they can get away." "You don't have that in captivity." "Could you imagine being in a small concrete enclosure for your life when you're used to swimming 100 miles a day?" "Sometimes this aggression became very severe and, in fact, whales have died in captivity because of this aggression." "I think it was 1988," "Candu, trying to assert her dominance over Corky, rammed Corky." "It fractured her jaw, which cut an artery in her head and then she bled out." "Now, that's gotta be a hard way to go down." "I saw that there was just a lot of things that weren't right." "And there was a lot of misinformation and something was amiss." "I sort of compartmentalised that part of it, and did the best that I could with the knowledge that I had to take care of the animals that were there." "I think all the trainers there have the same thing in their heart." "They're trying to make a difference in the lives of the animals." "You think that, "if I leave, who's gonna take care of Tilikum?"" "I mean that's why I stayed, because I felt sorry for Tilikum." "I mean, if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of it," "I stayed because I felt sorry for Tilikum." "And I couldn't bring myself to stop coming and trying to take care of him." "(THRILLING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)" "DAWN BRANCHEAU:" "Gosh, do I love coming out here every day and having the audience just love what we're doing with the animals." "How do I make this animal as beautiful as they are, and have people walk away loving this animal?" "They're touched and they're moved and I feel like I made a difference to them." "I left in January of 2010, a month before Dawn passed away." "She was like a safety guru." "I mean, she was always double-checking, making sure that everyone was doing the right thing." "I remember she would record every show that she did and she would watch it and critique herself." "She was constantly trying to be better." "When I found out it was Dawn, I was shocked." "That could've been me, I could've been the spotter." "What if I was there, and I could've saved her?" "You know, all these things go through your mind." "BERG:" "John Sillick is the guy who, in 1987, was crushed between two whales at SeaWorld of San Diego." "Now, even though I'd been working at SeaWorld for six months," "I had no idea that that had even happened." "I never even heard that story." "And the SeaWorld party line was, "Well, it was a trainer error."" ""it was John's fault." "John's fault." "He was supposed to get off that whale."" "And, for years, I believed that, and I told people that." "I actually started at SeaWorld five days after that event occurred and we weren't told much about it, other than it was trainer error." "And, especially when you're new into the programme, you don't really question a whole lot." "Well, years later, when you actually look at the footage, you go, "You know what?" "He didn't do anything wrong." ""That whale just landed on him, that whale just went to the wrong spot."" "It could've been aggression, who knows?" "But it was not the trainer's fault at all, watching that video." "(AUDIENCE GASPS)" "When I saw the video of the killer whale landing on John, it just absolutely took my breath away." "I gasped." "I watched it two or three times, and every time I saw that, I just gasped." "I could not believe what I was seeing." "What kept his body together is his wetsuit basically held him together." "I know he's had multiple surgeries and he's got tons of hardware in his body." "And it's hard for me to believe that" "I didn't actually see that video while I was actually an animal trainer." "Because it seems to me that every person who works with killer whales should have to watch that video." "HARGROVE:" "Tamarie..." "Tamarie made mistakes." "The most important one was interacting with whales without a spotter." "So she's putting her foot on Orkid, she's taking her foot off." "She's putting her foot on Orkid, her rostrum, she's taking it off." "Watching the video, knowing Orkid, your stomach drops because you know what's probably gonna happen." "She grabbed her foot." "Tamarie whips around and she grabs the gate." "You see her just ripped from the gate." "At this point, Tamarie knows that she's in trouble." "She's under the water, Splash and Orkid both have her." "She's totally out of view." "No other trainer knows that this is happening." "People start to scream." "It was a park guest that was filming it." "You don't see her, but you hear Tamarie surface." "You hear her just scream out, "Somebody, help me!"" "And the way she screamed it, it was just blood-curdling, like she knew she was gonna die." "Robin, when he ran over, he made a brilliant decision, he told a trainer to run and take the chain off Kasatka's gate." "By taking that chain off, it would give the precursor to Orkid that Kasatka was coming in." "Kasatka is more dominant than Orkid." "So, Orkid let her go." "Her arm, it was U-shaped." "It was compound fractured." "She's very lucky to be alive." "That's for sure." "BERG:" "I believe it's 70 plus, maybe even more, just killer whale trainer accidents." "Maybe 30 of them happened prior to me being actually hired at Sea World and I knew about none of them." "VENTRE:" "I've seen animals come out at trainers." "MAN ON VIDEO:" "Something's wrong." "I've seen people get slammed." "The whales, either they're just playing, or they're upset for a second." "It was just something that happened, you know?" "This culture of you get back on the horse, and you dive back in the water." "And if you're hurt, "Well, then we've got other people that will replace you," ""you came a long way, you sure you want that?"" "A SeaWorld trainer is recovering today after a terrifying ordeal in front of a horrified audience." "(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)" "DUFFUS:" "For some reason, the whale just took a different approach to what it was gonna do with a very senior, very experienced trainer, Ken Peters, and dragged him to the bottom of the pool." "And held him at the bottom." "Let him go, picked him up, took him down again." "And these periods he was taken down were pretty close to the mark." "A minute." "A minute, 20." "When he was at the surface, he didn't panic, he didn't thrash, he didn't scream." "Maybe he's just built that way." "He stroked the whale." "And the whale let go of one foot and grabbed the other." "That's a pretty deep pool." "And he took him right down." "I think that's two atmospheres of pressure." "Apparently, Mr Peters is an experienced scuba diver and I think that knowledge probably contributed to how he was able to be hauled down there that quickly and stay calm, and know what to do." "He knew what he was doing, you can see him actually in the film, the def is so good, you can see him ventilating." "You can see him ventilating really hard." "So he knows about swimming and diving and being underwater." "He may have been assuming he was going under again." "I did not walk away unimpressed by his calm demeanour during that whole affair." "I would be scared shitless." "He was near to the end." "Presumably, Ken Peters had a relationship with this whale." "Maybe he did, maybe that's what saved him, but Peters got the whale to let him go." "And they strung a net across." "And Ken Peters pulled himself over the float line and swam like a demon to a slide out, because the whale was coming right behind him." "The whale jumped over and came right after him." "He tried to stand up and run at first, his feet were damaged and he just fell and he scrambled." "And they take this as a prime example of their training working." "They say, "Well, they stand back and stay calm," and that did work." "They claim this as a victory of how they do business." "Maybe so, but it can also be interpreted as a hair's breadth away from another fatality." "Hi, Shamu!" "Hi, everybody!" "We're the Johnsons from Detroit, Michigan!" "We sure had a great time when we visited SeaWorld, it's one of our favourite places!" "Yeah, I like the part when Shamu gets everybody wet!" "When the whales get close to the glass and start kicking up the water?" "Wham-o, you're a goner!" "(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)" "(PEOPLE SHRIEKING)" "Orange County Sheriff deputies have identified the 27-year-old man found dead in a killer whale's tank at SeaWorld." "The victim is Daniel P. Dukes from South Carolina." "Dukes was found yesterday draped over the back of Tilikum, the largest orca held in captivity." "Well, all I know is the public relations version of it, he was a young man that had been arrested not long before he snuck into SeaWorld." "Maybe he climbed the barbed wire fence around the perimeter and stayed after hours." "Perfect story line, a mentally disturbed guy hides in the park after hours and strips his clothes off and decides he wants to have a magical experience with an orca and drowns because he became hypothermia." "Right." "So, that's the storyline, and none of us were there to know the difference." "He was not detected by the night watch trainers who were presumably at that station." "There are cameras all over SeaWorld." "There are cameras all over the back of Shamu Stadium pointing every which way." "There're underwater cameras." "I find it hard to believe that nobody knew until the morning that there was a body in there." "They have a night watch trainer every night." "That person didn't hear any splashing or screaming?" "I mean, I just find that really suspicious." "One of the employees, I don't know if it was a physical therapist, somebody was coming in in the morning and there was Tilikum with a dead, naked guy on his back, kind of parading him around the back pool." "The public relations spin on this was that he was a drifter and died of hypothermia." "But the medical examiner reports were more graphic than that." "For example, Tilikum stripped him, bit off his genitals." "There was bite marks all over his body." "Now whether that was post-death or pre-death, I don't know." "But all I can comment on is that the guy definitely jumped in the wrong pool." "So why keep Tilikum there?" "This guy has a proven track record of killing people, he's clearly a liability to the institution, why keep him around?" "Well, it's quite simple, the answer is that his semen is worth a lot of money." "BERG:" "Over the years, Tilikum has been one of the main breeding whales at SeaWorld." "It's brilliant, because they can inseminate way more female whales, because they can just get his sperm and freeze it, and he's basically operating as a sperm bank." "In a reputable breeding programme, rule number one is you certainly would not breed an animal that has shown a history of aggression towards humans." "Imagine if you had a pit bull who had killed, that animal would've likely been put down." "In the entire SeaWorld collection, 54% of the whales in SeaWorld's collection now have Tilikum's genes." "(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)" "The fall is to assume that all killer whales are like Tilikum, you have to look at their learning history from birth." "You have to understand why Tilikum was a hazard to anybody in the water." "And you have to understand that none of the other killer whales at SeaWorld that are in that system are that way." "INTERVIEWER:" "What about the incident at Loro Parque?" "(STAMMERING) First of all, I can't speak with specificity about Loro Parque." "I wasn't there." "In fact, I know very little about it." "Probably about as much as the general public knows." "He told me he had something important to say." "He knelt down and proposed to me." "(GIGGLING)" "Very romantic." "Of course I said "yes."" "He said, "Really?" I said, "Of course."" "He never expected to train whales." "He thought he'd be a sound technician." "He always loved animals and decided to try it out." "He loved it." "He tried it, and just fell in love with it." "SUZANNE ALLEE:" "Loro Parque, it's in the Canary Islands, which is an autonomous region of Spain." "It's the largest tourist attraction in all of Spain." "(GREETING IN SPANISH)" "And when SeaWorld sent the orcas to Loro Parque, everybody was always questioning like, how did they make that leap to send four young orcas to a park off the west coast of Africa with trainers, a lot of whom had never been around orcas before?" "Nothing was ready." "The venue wasn't ready." "It wasn't ready for the orcas, it wasn't ready for a show." "The owner of the park didn't wanna lose revenue by shutting down the pools and repairing them." "So for three years, the animals ate the pools, and for three years, the animals had problems, with their teeth, with their stomachs." "So that's the reason why these animals are enduring the endoscope procedures." "Those are still SeaWorld's animals and they are responsible for those animals." "(WHALE SQUEALING)" "Loro Parque doesn't have a good reputation." "People that work in the business know the reputation of places, and Loro Parque does not have a good reputation." "They didn't spend the same amount of time as the SeaWorld trainers, did not go through the same regimen that the SeaWorld trainers went through, and Alexis really was the best trainer." "And I did say, I said, "You're the only trainer there" ""that can hold his own with a SeaWorld trainer."" "I said, "But you need to be careful."" "He complained to me that he was tired." "But I didn't take it seriously." "I said everyone gets tired from their job." "That's normal." "He said, "But my job is physical." ""I have to be fit, because I'm in danger every single day." ""If I am not fit, who knows?" "Maybe tomorrow something might happen to me."" "He said this the night before the attack." "Anywhere along the line it could've been stopped." "Because everyone knew it was a tragedy waiting to happen." "But no one ever did anything about it." "And in the end, it was the best trainer who lost his life." "My cell phone rang." "It was Miguel Diaz, Alex's boss." "He said, "There was an incident with one of the whales." ""Alex is fine."" "We noticed a few ambulances and the company owners." "The owner was there with the director and their lawyers." "He told us, "There was nothing we could do."" ""There was nothing we could do."" ""What?"" "They asked me if I wanted to see him." "It was horrible." "They took us to... the room where his body was." "Only his head was showing." "He was completely covered up." "I leaned over his chest." "I noticed something was wrong." "It seemed as though his chest had burst." "I asked what had happened." "I couldn't understand why they told me he was fine." "And all of a sudden, I see him like this..." "I just gave him a big hug and said, "I love you, I love you."" "Then they escorted us out." "And I don't remember anything else." ""It was an accident, it was an accident."" "But I wasn't content with that answer." "Finally, the autopsy gave us the reason." "It was no accident. it was an attack." "A brutal attack." "This was not just an accident." "That was a lie." "DUFFUS:" "Those were SeaWorld's whales, they were trained using SeaWorld's techniques, and their training was being supervised at the time of the fatal accident by one of their senior trainers from San Diego." "For somebody to get up and say in a court of law they have no knowledge of the linkages between SeaWorld and this park in Tenerife," "well, either she doesn't know and is telling the truth or it's just a bold-faced lie." "As trainers, we never forget Shamu's true potential." "We see it each and every day." "That's why all of our interactions are very carefully thought out, especially our water work interaction..." "Whoa!" "(LAUGHS)" "You big dork." "Especially our water work interactions, because they're potentially the most dangerous." "I'd been expecting it since the second person was killed." "I'd been expecting somebody to be killed by Tilikum," "I'm surprised it took as long as it did." "FEMALE ANCHOR:" "First tonight, a six-ton killer whale has lived up to his name, killing an experienced trainer at SeaWorld, Orlando today." "A tourist at an earlier show, said the animal seemed agitated." "Trainers complained the whales weren't cooperating." "The whole show, the main show was a disaster that day." "There was whales chasing each other and eventually the trainers decided that they had to stop the show because they couldn't get the whales under control." "Tilikum was in the back pool set up to do a "Dine with Shamu" performance with Dawn." "It's likely she saw what had gone on during the main show and so she had probably felt more pressure to do a good show." "(CHEERING)" "BERG:" "When you watch the whole video, you can see that" "Tilikum is actually really with Dawn in the beginning of the video." "(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)" "There's a couple of behaviours that she asks him to do, where Tilikum just jumps right in and he does exactly what she asks him to do." "VENTRE:" "There seemed to be a point in the session where things went south, so to speak, and in my humble opinion, it was at that missed whistle bridge, on the perimeter pec wave." "She asked him to do a perimeter pec wave, where she asked him to basically go all the way around the pool and wave his pectoral flipper." " And she blows her whistle, which is a bridge, -(WHISTLE BLOWING) which tells the animal that "Okay, you've done a good job," ""come back and get food." But he missed that cue." "And he went all the way around the pool on this perimeter pec wave." "My interpretation is that he didn't hear the whistle." "BERG:" "So not only did he not hear the bridge, then he went and did a perfect behaviour and came back." "And what he got was what we call a three-second neutral response, which is just a way to let the animal know, "No, you didn't do the correct thing," ""you're not gonna get rewarded." "And then we're gonna move on."" "And you can also see through the video that Dawn is running out of food." "VENTRE:" "The animals can sense when you're getting to the bottom of your bucket of fish, because they can hear the ice clanging around in the fishy, soupy water at the bottom." "And the handfuls of fish that they're getting delivered by the trainer, are all getting smaller." "So they know that they're coming down to the end of session." "BERG:" "When you see the difference between the beginning of the video and the end of the video, you can see that he's just not quite on his game any more." "There's no food left, she kept asking him for more and more behaviours, he wasn't getting reinforced for the behaviours that he was doing correctly." "He probably was frustrated towards the end." "Then she walked around the perimeter of G pool, he followed her." "And then continued over to the rocky ledge area, where she laid down with him to do a relationship session." "It's quiet time, basically." "JETT:" "Tilikum at some point grabbed a hold of her left forearm and started to drag her and eventually did a barrel roll and pulled her in." "May have started as play or frustration, and clearly escalated to be very violent behaviour that I think was anything but play." "In the end, he basicallyjust completely mutilated that poor girl." "HARGROVE:" "They were gathering all the trainers at the Texas park." "He said, "There's been an accident at the Florida park and a trainer was killed."" "Hearing that it was Dawn, I couldn't believe it." "I just remember saying to myself, "Not Dawn, it can't be Dawn."" "He said, "And he still has her."" "And I just was so disturbed by that and the reality of how powerless we are." "DUFFUS:" "Avulsion, laceration, abrasion, fractures." "Fractures and associated haemorrhages." "Blunt force traumas to the main body, to the extremities." "To see this meted out against a trainer." "And I cannot fathom the reason." "It's shocking." "The lawyer for OSHA asked me what I thought we'd learned, and I'm sitting in the courtroom and I've got the Keltie Byrne case file in one hand and I've got Dawn Brancheau in the other." "And they're almost, to the day, 20 years apart." "And I'm looking at these two things." "My only answer is, "Nothing."" "In fact, it's not a damn thing." "We have not learned a damn thing for something like that to happen 20 years apart." "FEMALE REPORTER:" "Could you tell if it was an accident or..." "MALE REPORTER:" "Did this female trainer work with this whale on a regular basis?" "I don't know." "What apparently happened is, we had a female trainer, back in the whale holding area, she apparently slipped or fell into the tank and was fatally injured by one of the whales." "At first, SeaWorld reported that a trainer slipped and fell in the water, and was drowned, so that was the first report." "It wasn't until eyewitness accounts disputed that, that they had to go back in their huddle and say, "Wait a minute." ""We gotta come up with a new plan."" "FEMALE ANCHOR:" "New tonight, SeaWorld has confirmed the killer whale pulled a woman into the water." "She didn't fall into the tank as the sheriff's department initially reported." "The new plan is that he grabbed her ponytail." "This is a subtle way of placing the blame on Dawn's shoulders." "She shouldn't have had a long ponytail, or if she did have that ponytail, it should've been up in a bun." "Dawn, if she was standing here with me right now, would tell you that it was her mistake, allowing that to happen." "HARGROVE:" "They blamed her." "How dare you?" "How disrespectful for you to blame her, when she's not even alive to defend herself?" "He grabbed her ponytail and pulled her into the water, that's as simple as it gets." "There are photographs of plenty of other trainers doing exactly the same thing that she was doing." "So I knew that SeaWorld was lying about the fact that this was her fault." "The ponytail, in all likelihood, is just a tale." "The safety spotter, who apparently didn't actually see the takedown, came up with that." " Are you excited?" " AUDIENCE:" "Yeah." "DAVE MCDANIEL:" "That during the spotter's testimony," "OSHA pushed him to say that he wasn't really sure that it was her ponytail that was in the whale's mouth." "That he just saw her underwater and he assumed it was the ponytail." "OSHA contends that the whale came up and grabbed Dawn Brancheau's arm, saying that that was another level of aggressiveness." "And again, SeaWorld is saying it was not an aggressive move." "One of SeaWorld's top curators, Chuck Tompkins, said when Dawn Brancheau was pulled off that ledge, it wasn't necessarily aggressive behaviour by the whale." "The initial grab was not an act of aggression." "This is not a crazed animal." "The industry has a vested interest in spinning these so that the animals continue to appear like cuddly teddy bears that are completely safe." "That sells a lot of Shamu dolls, it sells a lot of tickets at the gate, and that's the story line that they're gonna continue to stick with for as long as they can." "Recognise that those that say this is a crazed animal that acted out and grabbed Dawn maliciously, they want to prove the theorem that captivity makes animals crazy." "And that is just false." "All whales in captivity have a bad life." "They're all emotionally destroyed." "They're all psychologically traumatised." "So they are ticking time bombs." "It's not just Tilikum." "We have to separate what happened to Dawn, and as tragic as it is, no one wants to ever see it happen again." "Can SeaWorld create an environment where it never happens again?" "Yes, I absolutely believe they can." "What if there were no SeaWorlds?" "I can't imagine a society, with the value we put in marine mammals, if those parks didn't exist." "I'm not at all interested in having my daughter, who is three and a half, grow up thinking that it's normalised to have these intelligent, highly evolved animals in concrete pools." "I don't want her to think that's how we treat the kin that we find ourselves around on this planet." "I think it's atrocious." "This hearing's expected to last all week with OSHA continuing to work toward this theory, that SeaWorld knew there was a calculated risk of injury or death, but put trainers in the water with the whales anyway," "while SeaWorld will say that Dawn Brancheau's death was an isolated incident." "Reporting live in Seminole County, Dave McDaniel, WESH 2 News." "There's something wrong." "You know with Tilikum that there's something wrong, and when you have a relationship with that animal, and you understand that he's killing not to be a savage." "He's not killing because he's just crazy." "He's not killing because he doesn't know what he's doing." "He's killing because he's frustrated and he's got aggravations, and he has no outlet for it." "JETT:" "Now, Tilikum is spending a great deal of time by himself and basically floating lifeless in a pool." "WOMAN:" "Three hours now and he hasn't moved." "They try to sugarcoat it by saying," ""He comes out in the front pool every once in a while." ""Now, he's doing shows." Really?" "You know what he does in a show?" "He does a few bows, then he goes back into his little jail cell." "That's his life." "(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)" "DUFFUS:" "And I feel sad for Tilikum." "A regal thing like him swimming around the tank with his fin flopped over like that compared to a wild bull killer whale that size, which is one of the most kinetic and dynamic things you can imagine." "I feel sad when I see him." "BERG:" "It's time to stop the shows." "It's time to stop forcing these animals to perform in basically a circus environment." "And they should release the animals that are young enough and healthy enough to be released, and the animals like Tilikum who are old and sick and have put in 25 years in the industry, should be released to an open ocean pen," "so they can live out their lives and just experience the natural rhythms of the ocean." "This is a multi-billion dollar corporation that makes its money through the exploitation of orcas." "They're not suitable to have in captivity." "The whales are really bored." "You deprive them of all this environmental stimulation." "I think that in 50 years, we'll look back and go, "My God, what a barbaric time."" "Dawn Brancheau, DB, dream big." "Dawn was the most loving, giving person you ever met." "Her smile just radiated." "She fulfilled her life." "VENTRE:" "We saw whales swimming in straight lines with straight dorsal fins." "I was so honoured to be there." "And I was so thankful that I had sunglasses on," "(VOICE SHAKING) because the tears were kind of coming out." "And it was moving."