No the killer whale did not say "set me free"

Being a public broadcaster it would be hoped that the BBC would use a little bit more rigour when reporting issues particularly those that involve science. A case in point is an article in the Newsbeat strand written by reporter Talia Shadwell regarding research done on the mimicking behaviour of killer whales at an aquarium in France entitled: "Killer whale could be saying 'set me free'. 

The article is very disappointing due to the obvious lack of research and which appear to be based on views from the animal rights groups The Born Free Foundation and Whale and Dolphin Conversation - both known for their objection to animals maintained in captive care.  Further, there appears to be absolutely no effort to contact Marineland in France whose animals and facilities were used in the research cited or indeed any other zoos or aquarium that display whales or dolphins.

First, the breeding ban on whales and dolphins in France mentioned in the report has been lifted by the French courts after being successfully challenged as it was not based on science or in the best interest of animal welfare. This would have been made clear to the reporter if they had bothered to contact Marineland.

The picture of a killer whale in captivity in the Netherlands was also deceptive because it did not explain that this was Morgan a young killer whale that was rescued in a distressed state suffering from malnutrition on the Dutch coast in 2010. The picture is her in temporary accommodation while she underwent rehabilitation.  

Picture of a killer whale in the BBC article was, in fact, Morgan a rescued animals in temporary accommodation in the Netherlands while she was being rehabilitated.

She successfully returned to full health but unfortunately due to her young age and the inability to find her original social group, which was believed to be located possibly in Norwegian waters, she was relocated to a large facility for killer whales in the Canary Islands in November 2011. This was undertaken under the direction of the Dutch government. 

Morgan remains there today in the company of other captive bred killer whales. Since that time it has been discovered that she was either deaf or has a severe hearing impairment which is possibly one of the reasons she stranded and had to be rescued. This again would make any attempts to release her back the wild inappropriate. 

Second, the issue of the bent dorsal fin in some male killer whales in captivity is often cited by animal rights groups as a sign of compromised welfare. However, there is no scientific evidence to support this contention and in fact, bent dorsal fins can be seen in wild killer whales and this has been cited in published research.

"....The collapsing, collapsed and bent  dorsal fins found on the New Zealand killer whales do not appear to be uncommon in this population,  with 23%, of the adult males having some form of abnormal fin..." (Visser, 1993).

Further, as this seems to be a gender specific issue regarding some male killer whales (either in captive care or the wild) as a measurement of fitness and health it cannot be used as an accurate determination of such criteria as compared with more standardised physiological parameters such as blood analysis.

Third, the comments regarding releasing animals back to the wild cited the release of a former captive killer whale called Keiko. This project was claimed to be a success and this is incorrect. 

Keiko was released back to the wild but failed to integrate into wild groups of other whales.  He eventually found his way to Norway and ended his days being cared for by humans in a fjord before dying of suspected pneumonia some months later.

In the review of the release, published in the peer review journal Marine Mammal Science, the authors concluded.

The release of Keiko demonstrated that release of long-term captive animals is especially challenging and while we as humans might find it appealing to free along-term captive animal, the survival and well being of the animal may be severely impacted in doing so.  (Simon, Hanson, Murrey,Tougaard, and Ugarte. 2009)

As to the actual research which - demonstrated that mammals were capable of mimicking human speech - this is not actually that new.

Research of this nature was conducted back in the 1960s by the controversial dolphin researcher Dr John Lilly. Ironically, the BBC showed a documentary in 2014 entitled "The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins" which highlighted his research and had recorded footage of one of the dolphins mimic English words and phrases. 

Further, it's not just dolphins that have been known to imitate human speech as it has also been seen in belugas such as an animal called Noc that was studied by Dr Sam Ridgeway under the US Navy marine mammal program (Ridgway, Carder, Jeffries and Todd, 2012). There was even in one instance of a seal called Hoover who lived at the Boston Aquarium in Massachusetts imitating human speech. 

Nevertheless, various scientific projects in the past (predominately the 1960s) where efforts were made to teach animals (such as dolphins or chimpanzees) human language, were abandoned as researchers could not produce any tangible evidence that the animals could be effectively taught to communicate with human beings in anything approaching a discernible human language structure. The net result was that funding from such organisations as NASA, who funded some of John Lilly's work, was withdrawn.  

Further, chimpanzee research also faulted when the psychologist Herb Terence maintained that much of his research was the result of the Clever Hans effect and not the animals actually having the ability to communicate with humans. 

Perhaps one of the fundamental problems is that animals are generally incapable of speaking a language in the same terms as human beings. As Dr Justin Gregg points out in his 2013 book "Are Dolphins Really Smart - The Myth Behind the Mammal" human beings (Homo sapiens) are the only animal species that have a native language; the reality is that humans have language and animals communication. The depth and sophistication of human language exceed anything that we know regarding animals in the wild and their ability to communicate with each other. 

In conclusion, the premise that the killer whales (if they could speak and communicate with humans) would be that they wanted to be set free could turn out to be the fact that they are quite happy where they are in the protective environment of a zoo and aquarium.

A section from the 1983 Nova documentary "Signs of Apes and Songs of the Whales" featuring cognition research featuring dolphins and sea lions. At the University of Hawaii, two dolphins are being taught to comprehend the rudiments of grammar. And in California, the controversial John Lilly is teaching dolphins to mimic--and perhaps one day reply to--the computerized human voice.

 

Captain Paul Watson's Moral Compass Loses Its Way

Paul Watson standing in front of the renamed Sea Shepherd Vessel the Steve Irwin. It is ironic that Steve Irwin was not only a conservationist but a zoo owner and his daughter, Bindi Irwin, is now an ambassador for SeaWorld.

"Actually oceanariums are in many ways are victims of their own success. They educated the public so well about dolphins, whales, and other marine life that a public that didn't care a fig about these animals [...] Unfortunately this compassion for whales and dolphins is not harnessed as a force against the killing industry, but is instead turned against the teacher. Paul Watson, 1995"

Many might be aware of the activities of the conservation organisation Sea Shepherd and its controversial founder Paul Watson. In recent years, Sea Shepherd seems to have lost its way and has drifted into the realms of animal-rights. Rather than just opposing the killing of whales and dolphins in whaling and drive fisheries, in such countries as Japan and the Faroe Isles, they have moved their sites to attacking the maintenance of whales and dolphins in captivity.

In a recent commentary on their website Paul Watson decries the death of a killer whale at the Marineland in Antibes, France. The whale called Valentin died some time after a serious flooding incident that seriously affected not only the marine park but also the surrounding area and involved the death of at least 19 people.

Watson berates the death and  - without any supporting evidence - makes the statement that it was the flooding that killed this animal due to the ingress of contaminated water into the killer whale exhibit. In actual fact, the post-mortem revealed that the animal died of a twisted gut (torsion) which veterinarians believe is unrelated to the flooding incident. The other whales in the same exhibit remain at the time of writing healthy and well.  He also blames Marineland for being built on a floodplain. Although, during its 45 years of existence this is the worst flooding experienced by this facility. Moreover, as stated, this didn't just affect the park but the large area surrounding it.

Watson finishes his polemic in a predictable way with the now familiar rhetoric and unrealistic aspiration that:

"Marineland must be shut down and the animals rehabilitated and released to the wild [...] These tanks must be emptied and these facilities shut down. Marineland, SeaWorld and other cetacean prisons around the world are a disgrace to humanity and an ongoing ordeal of suffering for hundreds of animals denied their rights to be free and to live a full and productive life..."

This is of course a totally unrealistic objective for many and various reasons. The first of which is that all the killer whales at Marineland (including the recently deceased Valentin) were all born in captivity and have never been in the wild – as is the case for the vast majority of the 50+ killer whales currently displayed around the world in zoological collections.

Further, as the well-known failed release of the wild caught killer whale Keiko demonstrated,  that even with wild caught animals such endeavours are highly risky and likely to not only be hugely costly but also inevitably not successful. It is interesting to note that this fact has also now been accepted by Jean-Michel Cousteau whose organisation Ocean Futures were directly involved in the Keiko experimental release. 

Interestingly, this hasn't always been Paul Watson's position regarding whales and dolphins is in captivity. In a commentary in the June edition of animal people magazine in 1995 entitled The Cult of Animal Celebrity his position was very different.

Watson makes the very good point that:

"Not all facilities holding marine animals are the enemy. And the huge sums raised to free a few individuals could be more positively directed toward ending the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of nameless whales, dolphins, and seals on the world's oceans"

He goes on to say something that many believe are truisms when it comes to the public's changed perception over the years regarding whales and dolphins.

"Actually oceanariums are in many ways are victims of their own success. They educated the public so well about dolphins, whales, and other marine life that a public that didn't care a fig about these animals before 20 years ago now cares a great deal. Unfortunately this compassion for whales and dolphins is not harnessed as a force against the killing industry, but is instead turned against the teacher."

His final statement here is indeed very ironic because Watson is now engaging in the very behaviour he rightly criticises in this cited article.

In the closing passage of this article he makes a judgement that many feel is not without truth.

"There are hundreds of dolphins held in tanks around the world. There are millions whose numbers diminished daily in the world's largest human controlled killing tank of all: the ocean. If we don't hold the wanton killing in the wild, the only place dolphins will survive will be in captive facilities." 

So why has Watson apparently changed his mind completely regarding the captive care of whales and dolphins? Certainly, the situation for these animals in the wild has not really changed substantially. Animals are still being killed as is graphically shown in documentaries.  Watson's own efforts to highlight the drive fishery killings in Japan have failed to have little impact on the continuation of these hunts.

What seems to be happening is that Watson and others have decided that there might be a more lucrative return in targeting the small numbers of animals that are currently being caught in the Japanese drive fisheries for display in aquaria as this would generate better publicity and more public donations. The fact that these operations (which run in tandem within the drive hunt) have only been going on for decades compared with the hundreds of years history of the drive hunts seems unimportant.

This fact became very clear with the release of the 2009documentary The Cove. Whilst this film was very successful one criticism of its presentation was the overemphasis of the role of the live capture of dolphins in the drive hunt against the slaughter of the majority of the animals.  This of course comes as no surprise as the main protagonist featured in this documentary was the former dolphin trainer now animal-rights activist Ric O'Barry.

Whilst, there seems to be a considerable amount of common ground between the animal-rights lobby and the zoological communityregarding the use of drive fisheries for the acquisition of animals for captive display.  It should be noted that the USA and mainland European zoological collections now exclusively use self-sustaining captive breeding for the acquisition of display animals and not wild capture.  Unfortunately, opinions about the role that the captive display of whales and dolphins can positively provide in awareness to the protection and conservation of their wild counterparts seems to have been polarised. 

Sadly and ultimately the only ones that will suffer from this consequence will be wild dolphins, whales and the marine environment.  A situation recognised by Paul Watson in 1995 but seemingly now lost .

Further reading and links

Drive Hunts and Animals Acquired for Dolphinaria.

Cove Cultists?

Blackfish: Please Release Me Let Me Go

Killer whales, Politics and Animal-Rights.

I am sure that this animal-rights led pantomime will continue to roll on. Unfortunately, I am minded to think that the only people who will profit from this are lawyers and the least likely are going to be the killer whales and their care at SeaWorld. 

Perhaps it should be a given that politicians should be very wary of getting involved in areas of science where they have very little or no specialist knowledge. This is particularly true in the area of animal welfare – which actually can be considered a science that can be objectively studied. This situation has become even more complex since the inception of the philosophical concept of animal-rights which as many have pointed out bears little relationship to issues of animal welfare.

A recent case in point is the continuing controversy regarding the SeaWorld's zoological parks and their care and husbandry of killer whales. This has been exacerbated by the much promoted film Blackfish which those who have regularly read the comments and blogs on this site will be very familiar with. The problems with this particular film have been discussed elsewhere and therefore I will not revisit old ground in this particular article.

The latest developments in the saga of the animal-rights lobby groups particular the organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) is an ongoing campaign to stop the SeaWorld Park developing larger habitats for their killer whales. This recently culminated in this organisation and its supporters lobbying the California Coastal Commission who have jurisdiction on allowing planning permission for SeaWorld's to undertake the new killer whale exhibit in San Diego. The resultant current outcome of the Commission's ruling aptly demonstrates the concerns regarding politics and animal welfare alluded to at the beginning of this article.

First, the California Coastal Commission is there to undertake stewardship of coastal resources in California and is primarily involved in making sure that planning decisions do not negatively impact on the environment. However, they are not there to make moral or other judgements on how organisations or businesses operate beyond that point. For them to give permission for the extension of the killer whale habitat at SeaWorld's but then bind it to issues regarding the husbandry of their animals - the cessation of their killer whale breeding programme and a banning of movements of animals within zoological facilities - is clearly not within their legal remit. For those people who do not understand this position a way to think of it is this: would it be acceptable for this same Commission to grant permission to allow the building of a new carnivore exhibit at San Diego zoo or Wild Animal Park and then turned round to that institution and tell them that they cannot breed these animals or move them to other facilities. This would be particularly pertinent if the animals concerned were also part of an international breeding programme.

Clearly it was the actions of the lobbying of PeTA that seems to have forced the Commissions hand in introducing these Draconian amendments to the planning permission of SeaWorld's new killer whale habitat. Interestingly, the same set of criteria was forcibly imposed on the publicly owned Vancouver Aquarium last year. The board that oversees the aquariums operation tried to initially ban the display cetaceans at the aquarium and when this failed tried to force a ruling that banned animal breeding and movement between other zoological facilities. Again this was a group of local politicians who had been influenced or had sympathies with the animal-rights movement. Fortunately, the animal management team at the Vancouver Aquarium challenge this ruling and it was overturned.

A second point to ponder is that PeTA and their associated protesters – who lobbied at the Commission meeting – have all publicly made declarations they wish to acquire the killer whales at SeaWorld's to be takento a sanctuary (zoo) run by themselves or their associates. Therefore, it would seem that here we may well have a legal conflict of interest insomuch that these animal-rights lobby groups and their supporters are actually taking action against a "business competitor" e.g. SeaWorld's which may well be at the very least legally dubious. This seems to have been something that the Commission has not fully realised.

I am sure that this animal-rights led pantomime will continue to roll on. Unfortunately, I am minded to think that the only people who will profit from this are lawyers and the least likely are going to be the killer whales and their care at SeaWorld. 

As a final thought, because we are now seeing a considerable amount of blurring of lines between a political ideology of animal-rights and the realities of animal welfare – not helped by the involvement of naive politicians – we are going to depressingly see considerably more examples of this nonsense in years to come.


Update: 15 October 2015. SeaWorld announced that it will challenge  ruling that banned the company from breeding captive killer whales at its San Diego park.

John Michel Cousteau Wants To Save SeaWorld. Really?

 "...Marine-animal expert Jean-Michel Cou­steau — who worked on the successful release of Keiko, the star of “Free Willy,” into a seaside pen (before he died in the wild) — said SeaWorld Entertainment can move its orcas to seaside sanctuaries without costing it money.This brief news article is the musings of John Michel Cousteau (the son of Jacques Cousteau) whose organisation Ocean Futures was involved in the release project of "Keiko" the killer whale..."

  
The comments in the above-linked article in the New York Post by Claire Atkinson are of course misleading. Let us make it clear the "Keiko" project was not a success. In making this statement, I mean that the plan to reintegrate this animal back into a population of wild killer whales off the shores of Iceland did not succeed despite huge amounts of time, money and planning. This is not just my opinion this is the conclusion of the peer review paper published in 2009 in the journal Marine Mammal Science HERE.

John Michel Cousteau himself has also made it clear that he does not now consider it viable to release long-term captive killer whales back to the wild.  

My blog goes into more detail regarding returning captive cetaceans back to the wild HERE.

The releasing of former captive cetaceans has been given some extra impetus in 2012 with the Born Free Foundation's project to release two former captive Turkish dolphins after extensive rehabilitation. Although, details of this project have never been published in any scientific journals. Moreover, as with all these projects, there needs to be a considerable amount of context to understand what they actually mean. These two animals released had in fact not been in captivity for any particularly long period of time; they had been caught within the area they returned to and they were young male bottlenosed dolphins. These three criteria are the actual reason that this release project was likely to have a high degree of success. In addition, it should be noted that it followed a protocol that was used in a successful experimental capture and release project by the late Dr Ken Norris and cetacean biologist Dr Randall Wells published in 1998 HERE.

As to Cousteau's involvements with the eight bottlenose dolphins currently displayed at the Baltimore Aquarium (of which only one was caught in the wild) I have blogged this in some detail linked HERE.

As an opinion, I would say that removing these animals from an urban aquarium to Hawaii goes completely against any value that displaying these animals could have had as there are a number of both captive and wild dolphin viewing opportunities in this particular part of the world. The fact that somebody like Cousteau does not understand the value of urban zoological collections (particularly displaying animals that people are unlikely to experience) speaks volumes and sadly smacks of rather distasteful celebrity elitism.

Jane Goodall: GMO & Echolocating Dolphins

Her allegation that the sounds the animals produce when using their echolocation bounce back from the walls of their tanks in their exhibits is correct but that is exactly how echolocation works.

Dr Jane Goodallis a scientist who became famous for her research in primatology particularly her work with wild chimpanzees in Africa specifically Gombe in Tanzania when she began her studies in the early 1960s. In 1986,  she published her first major work which was an accumulation of 25 years of original research in The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behaviour. She went on to found the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 who amongst their mission statements state:

"Improve global understanding and treatment of great apes through research, public education and advocacy"

In later years, she became something of a wildlife celebrity and broadened her interests into other areas of environmentalism and animal-rights. 

From 1998 to 2008, she was a director of the animal-rights group Advocates for Animals: a group that was originally founded as the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Vivisection and was later rebranded as OneKind. She resigned this post in 2008 for reasons that some have suggested was due to her support of a new chimpanzee exhibit at Edinburgh zoo which went against OneKind's ethos of: "keeping animals in captivity for entertainment".   

She was later involved in more controversy with accusations of plagiarism in her 2012 book "Seeds of Hope".   

More recently she has been criticised for her support of "Altered Genes, Twisted Truth" an anti-GMO polemic written by the American lawyer Steve Druker. To this end, her position was also criticised in the sceptical pod cast Skeptic's Guide to the Universe under the section "The Dumbest Thing I Heard This Week"
 

However, Dr Goodall's most recent foray into areas of controversy is her attack on the SeaWorld marine parks and its keeping of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) reported in the Huffington Post and picked up by a number of other media outlets.   

This is not the first time that she has attacked the practice of keeping cetaceans in captive care as over a year ago she also attacked the non-profit Vancouver Public Aquarium for their public display of cetaceans. Unfortunately, there seems to be no evidence that she has visited either Vancouver Aquarium (or indeed the SeaWorld parks) or directly spoken to their staff and scientists regarding her concerns despite an open invitation to do so.

Of course, the major problem with Dr Goodall's vociferous opinions is that she does not actually have any direct research knowledge of whales and dolphins either in aquaria or the wild as she remains above all an expert on African fauna and specifically primates.

This is clearly obvious in her comments regarding dolphin echolocation(sonar). Further, she confuses the echolocation of dolphins with their communication skills - the two are unrelated.

Her statement that the sounds the animals produce when using their echolocation bounce back from the walls of their exhibits is correct - that is exactly how echolocation works - but at this point her understanding sadly falters.

Dolphin echolocation is very sophisticated and it is this very sophistication that make them exquisite tools the dolphins exploit when hunting or exploring their environment; the sophistication of the dolphins echolocation is believed by some to be the reason these animals have complex brains.

In using their echolocation, dolphins are fully capable of controlling their echolocation beam in both direction and strength (volume); it is not a blunt instrument and animals have total control of this function in a similar way we humans can vary the volume and pitch when we are talking. As stated, echolocation is used is for hunting or investigating objects.

Further, it should be realised that dolphins also have extremely good eyesight both above and below the surface (echolocation only works within the aquatic environment) and will sometime rely on their eye-sight and not their echolocation skills.

Moreover, there is no evidence to support Goodall's claim that dolphins in captivity live in an "acoustic hell" and such erroneous beliefs appear to have been lifted directly from animal-rights websites and are not accurate.  Dolphins actively control their sonar it is nether autonomous or an unconscious sense.

It is somewhat ironic that if Dr Goodall had taken the opportunity to research dolphin echolocation she may well have been surprised to learn that much of the pioneering research into this ability was undertaken in captivity in laboratories and aquariums; originally by scientists such as Arthur McBride at the Marine Studios (Marineland of Florida) in the 1940s and later Dr Winthrop Kellogg in the 1950s (Au, 1993). It is a further irony that prior to this Dr Kellogg had also undertaken chimpanzee language research and Dr Goodall may well have been familiar with his early endeavours.

In fact, if Dr Goodall and her followers are so concerned about the welfare of dolphins such as killer whales they need to be looking to the wild and groups living on the eastern Pacific as these appear to be having serious problems far more pressing than animals cosseted in a well run aquarium.

Finally, her comments that dolphins "have a emotion like ours" perhaps reveals how far she as a scientist has drifted from viewing things with true objectivity. 

To this end, Dr Goodall would be advised to review Dr Justin Gregg's recent book regarding dolphin cognition "Are Dolphins Really Smart: the Mammal behind the Myth" published in 2013.

In this book, Dr Greg puts into perspective the fallacy of the much vaulted intelligence of dolphins which is greatly exaggerated. He primarily lays the fault of this erroneous perception at the doors of neuroscientist DrJohn Lilly and his work with dolphins in the 1960s. Lilly was a man who became over time an incredibly controversial figure who (after the funding dried up for his dolphin language work from groups such as NASA) went on and experimented with floatation chambers and drugs. He even injected LSD into dolphins to see what effect it would have on them.

Unfortunately, Lilly later became a guru for the counter-culture movement in which he perpetuated and extolled many views which by this point had strayed considerably from rational science into the world of metaphysics and sadly pseudo-science.

Finally, it would be more accurate to maintain that chimpanzees are probably cognitively more sophisticated than dolphins. Which makes Dr Goodall's position on dolphins in captive care even more disappointing and contradictory in that she seems to be willing to accept and support chimpanzees in zoological establishments such as Edinburgh zoo; support elephants being transferred to a zoo rather an animal-rights run sanctuary but illogically attacks the keeping of dolphins in all well-run aquariums or zoos.

More of dolphin echolocation HERE