SeaWorld trainer ‘dragged to death by her long hair’

The SeaWorld trainer killed in front of helpless spectators by the orca whale, Tillikum, died because her long hair became caught in the whale's mouth. According to a final death report issued yesterday by the local sheriff's office, Dawn Brancheau was lying on her stomach on a cement slab, nose-to-nose with Tillikum when her hair began floating on the water. When it drifted into the whale's mouth, he dragged her to her death.

Another trainer saw Brancheau struggling to free her hair, but within seconds she had disappeared underwater. She then escaped to the surface briefly, but the whale struck her and dragged her under again.

Fellow staff at SeaWorld Orlando used nets and threw food at Tillikum in a bid to distract him, but one of Brancheau's colleagues said it only made him more agitated. Lynn Shaber told the sheriff's office that Tillikum was "a possessive animal", adding: "He normally keeps things that he has and will not release them."

Following Tillikum and Brancheau from pool to pool, the staff eventually captured the whale and released the trainer's body. He still had her arm in its mouth.

As Alexander Cockburn wrote for The First Post in February, orca whales 'in the wild' do not normally attack humans. But in aquariums it is more common than we think. In fact Tillikum had been associated with two deaths before he killed 40-year-old Brancheau.

In 1991, he was one of three whales who killed a young trainer, Keltie Byrne, at Sealand of the Pacific in Canada. On that occasion, too, the incident took place in front of spectators and Byrne was dragged around the pool in the killer whale's jaws.

At the time, a spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), which lobbies against sea parks and urges holiday-makers not to visit them, said: "The whales weren't trying to kill Byrne, but Tillikum and his orca companions didn't know that humans can't hold their breath as long as whales."

Tillikum was later shipped to SeaWorld where in July 1999 he was implicated in another death. A naked man was found dead one morning, draped across Tillikum, having apparently stayed after the park closed and jumped into the whale's tank. ·