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Not first time SeaWorld killer whale has killed
Tillikum, the SeaWorld killer, was involved in two previous deaths
As horrified witnesses were still trying to get over the sight of a five-tonne killer whale shaking a female trainer to death at the SeaWorld theme park in Orlando, Florida, it became clear last night that the 30-year-old whale had killed two people before.
In 1991, Tillikum, as the orca whale is called, was one of three whales who killed a young trainer, Keltie Byrne, at Sealand of the Pacific in Canada. Again, the incident took place in front of a helpless audience and the trainer 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. Because it was deemed to be the man's fault, SeaWorld took no action.
But after yesterday's incident it seems SeaWorld will have to act. A spokesman for the HSUS said: "I dread to think what their options are."
The SeaWorld trainer, Dawn Brancheau, was rubbing Tillikum's head, talking to the audience, when yesterday's incident occurred. According to one witness, Victoria Biniak, the whale "took off really fast in the tank and then he came back around to the glass, shot up in the air, grabbed the trainer by the waist and started shaking her violently, and one of her shoes flew off." Paramedics were unable to revive her.
Whatever persuaded Tillikum to react as he did, it apparently runs in the family. In 2004 one of Tillikum's sons, Ky, attacked his trainer at another Sea World, in San Antonio, Texas.
Video showed Ky repeatedly trying to submerge his trainer, who survived the ordeal and described the 10-year-old whale's behaviour afterwards as the "the actions of a teenage whale nearing breeding age".
To which Naomi Rose, a marine mammal expert at HSUS responded: "To say that Ky's actions were motivated by his teenage hormones is a bit like saying a lion's hunting instincts are motivated by his appetite.
"Well, yeah, maybe that's right. But that's not the point. The point is humans cannot predict, let alone control, these natural behaviours. The danger in thinking we can control these animals is injury, maybe even death." ·
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This is a first, but I completely agree with you Mr Simmons.
If it was a dog it would be dead by now. Wild animals have no place in a circus, entertaining epsilons who think animals performing tricks is entertainment. These appalling places should be shut, not because a hominid has died, but because it is a crime to cage a large wild predator, a small pool is a cage.
At first signs of the animal showing aggression they should relase that animal back into the wild and in the case of sea animals that means back into the territory it came from.
I hope they don't think of putting this beautiful animal to death........