Introduction

As a boy, I saw my dad cry on only three occasions. One was his father’s funeral. The other two involved dead orcas. In the 1970s, he worked as curator of Sealand of the Pacific, a small oceanarium near Victoria, British Columbia, and then for the Seattle Marine Aquarium and Sea World. On both sides of the US-Canadian border, across the Salish Sea, he helped capture killer whales for sale and display—or, as he darkly joked, “for fun and profit.” Tell someone today that your father caught orcas for a living and you might as well declare him a slave trader. Killer whales are arguably the most recognized and beloved wild species on the planet. They are certainly the most profitable display animals in history, and with the 2013 release of Blackfish, their fate became an international cause célèbre. Broadcast and distributed by CNN, the film became one of the most influential documentaries of all time. Already years into my research for this book when the movie came out, I found little in it surprising. But Blackfish turned my father, long conflicted about his past, sharply against orca captivity. He wasn’t alone. Almost over­night, viewers, politicians, and activists turned their sights on Sea World—a multibillion-dollar corporation famous for its killer whale shows. In this debate, it seemed there was no room for nuance or history. Millions around the world simply knew in their hearts that orcas had to be saved from captiv­ity. What they didn’t realize was that, decades earlier, captivity may have saved the world’s orcas. Orcinus orca is the apex predator of the ocean, but that ocean has changed rapidly in recent decades. Following World War II, rising populations and new technology drove humans to plunder the sea as never before, and many regarded killer whales as dangerous pests. By the 1950s, whalers, scientists, and fishermen around the world were killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, per year. In a single expedition, celebrated by Time magazine, US soldiers slaughtered more than one hundred off Iceland. But then a curious thing happened.

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