Word: whaled
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...cats to the compulsive back-and-forth swimming of Gus, the famously neurotic polar bear in New York's Central Park Zoo - illustrate the psychologists' point. Trying to improve conditions is hard enough with small to midsize animals like cheetahs and lions; with a leviathan like a killer whale, whose enclosure can only get so big, it's nearly impossible. (See a 2006 story about a killer-whale attack in San Diego...
...course, plenty of killer whales live in captivity and never do anything like what Tilikum has done. What was it about this particular whale's experiences or environment at SeaWorld that led to the swish of a ponytail sparking such violence...
...everyone within the whale-studying community takes such a dim view of SeaWorld and other such places. Bernd Wursig, a professor of marine biology at Texas A&M University, acknowledges that the sheer size of whales makes them hard to accommodate well, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. "I don't buy the idea that confinement is what was responsible for Tilikum," he says. "I prefer to see animals in nature, but when they were born in captivity or have been in captivity so long, that socialization is the only one they know...
...white tiger that attacked Roy Horn of the Seigfried and Roy performing team in 2003, was spared when Roy himself insisted on it. Tilikum, too, benefited from merciful judges. Brancheau's relatives pleaded for mercy, and a little more than 24 hours after her death, SeaWorld announced that the whale's life would be spared...
...know what was going through the killer whale's head," says Chuck Tompkins, Brancheau's former supervisor. The fact, of course, is that we never can know such things - which is what will always make keeping such beasts in the first place the dangerous business...