When Paul Spong first met Skana, a 1,300-kilogram, 4½-metre-long killer whale, he viewed her as he would any other test animal.
“When I started, I was really treating the whale as if it was a creature as complex as a laboratory rat,” recalled the physiological psychologist, 28 at the time and the first researcher to work with whales at the Vancouver Aquarium.
The year was 1967 and little was known about orcas.
Skana was the aquarium’s first captive whale, and while Spong knew she was intelligent, neither he nor anyone else yet understood the psychological complexity of cetaceans — an order of marine mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises.
“I was very well aware right from the beginning that this was an animal with a very complex brain,” said Spong. “I deliberately put that aside at the time.”
But it was not long before Spong saw something in Skana that made him come to the conclusion he was dealing with the type of animal that simply cannot live an acceptable life outside of its natural environment.
Spong is among a rising tide of animal experts and ethicists who argue keeping cetaceans in captivity is akin to torturing them. It’s a position that comes at bitter odds with aquarium staff who say everything is being done to create the best environment possible to facilitate crucial research on the animals that can help their wild counterparts.
The debate is not new, but it has reached a tipping point this week, with the Vancouver park board ordering a review of the aquarium’s operations with an eye to consider phasing out its cetacean program. The debate is set to reach council today, with a motion pushing for a referendum on whether to end a legacy of captive whales at the aquarium that has drawn controversy from the start.
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Making a splash
The aquarium drew big crowds from its earliest days, attracting more than 10,000 guests in 48 hours when it opened its doors in June 1956.
Over the next 10 years, 300,000 visitors would pass through the gates annually, according to Sun archives. But it was not until 1966 when a captive dolphin was netted off the coast of California, flown to Seattle and trucked to Stanley Park that the aquarium’s era of captive cetaceans began. The Pacific striped dolphin was Canada’s first captive cetacean and it was joined in the aquarium less than a year later by the country’s first captive whale.
Skana came to Vancouver in 1967 as a spectacle at the Boat, Trailer and Sport show on the Pacific National Exhibition grounds. Initially named “Walter” due to her captors thinking she was a male, Skana was viewed by more than 100,000 people. Among them was aquarium curator Murray Newman, who bought the whale for a reported $27,000 and trucked her to Stanley Park.
The B.C. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals immediately condemned the practice of keeping whales in aquarium tanks. It is a position that the SPCA maintains, recommending that programs for “the capture, confinement and breeding” of marine mammals for research, entertainment or educational display should be phased out.
That statement is consistent with the conclusions of Spong, who began his research work with Skana soon after she arrived at the aquarium. He said the whale quickly tired of the simple tasks being asked of her and began to do the exact opposite. Spong attributed her resistant behaviour to her rejection of an environment that he said deprived her of the joy of life.
The black box
Opponents of keeping cetaceans in captivity argue that aquarium tanks deprive cetaceans of natural acoustic stimulation and experience.
Those that are captured from the wild are torn from their family groups, and those born in captivity are raised outside of their natural social context. Many argue that physical constraints on cetaceans contribute to poor physical and psychological health, and the things they need to thrive cannot be met in captivity.
Spong said keeping a whale in an aquarium is akin to holding a human in a room and depriving them of light — something he said was akin to torture.
“Sound to them is like sight to us, and when you deprive them of sound — of normal sound experience — you’re subjecting them to a form of sensory deprivation,” he said.
“I’m not saying that there’s a deliberate attempt to torture whales and dolphins in captivity. Absolutely not,” he said. “They try to be generous and kind to them, but what they’re actually doing is depriving them of the essence of what they need to live.”
Spong concluded it was neither fair nor appropriate to keep whales in a “tiny concrete space,” and he spoke out publicly against keeping whales captive, forming a rift with his employer.
He left the aquarium in 1969 and went on to form OrcaLab, a field research station on Hanson Island, off the north end of Vancouver Island, where he continues to research whales in the wild.
“There are certain things that can be learned only in a captive setting,” he said. “Is that information important enough to justify keeping these whales in captivity? My opinion is it isn’t important enough.”
Clint Wright is the senior vice-president and general manager of the Vancouver Aquarium. On a recent weekday he toured the facility with The Sun to present some of the ongoing research staff are conducting on cetaceans.
Wright has worked there for more than two decades. During that time, the aquarium concluded its orca program, when killer whale Bjossa was shipped to SeaWorld in 2000.
Now accompanying the aquarium’s roster of dolphins and porpoises are a pair of beluga whales: Aurora, a female captured in Churchill, Man., in 1990, and her daughter Qila, born at the aquarium in 1995, according to aquarium information.
Wright said research at the aquarium has directly helped his own field work with belugas and narwhals.
“The experience I’ve had here has enabled me to go off into the wild and assist ... with various rehabilitation attempts,” he said, including the successful rescue of an orphaned killer whale in 2002. “That just simply couldn’t have happened without experience and expertise I’ve learned in aquariums like this.”
Wright said the best research comes from a collaboration between experts who work in aquariums and field researchers, adding that “you simply can’t have really good science one without the other.”
Wright characterized the non-profit aquarium as a conservation organization that he said has inspired generations of B.C. residents to be more environmentally conscious.
Among the ongoing research at the aquarium are tests to measure the ability of dolphins to detect fishing nets using echolocation. But it is the work with belugas that Wright noted could be of crucial importance, pointing to a rapidly changing Arctic.
“Within a generation the sea ice may disappear in the summers and that’s going to be a huge problem for belugas. Having these animals here, being able to engage with people, seeing these animals, getting them interested in doing something to help to try to protect those animals is something that I truly believe in and the aquarium stands behind,” he said.
“There are some people that would rather not see them here and that’s fine. That’s a personal opinion. But you’ve really got to weigh the science, the benefits to the wild population, how well these animals are being cared for to really understand what’s going on here.”
Care in captivity
Staff veterinarian Martin Haulena said threats to animals from toxins, plastics, noise, debris and new diseases mean cetacean research at the aquarium must continue.
“Now is not the time to stop learning about these animals,” he said. “We’ve got so many people invested in these animals and so much potential good stuff we can learn.”
Haulena has been working with aquarium mammals for nearly 15 years and is an adjunct professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University and at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre. He has authored dozens of scientific journal articles and book chapters.
He said he did not agree with the idea that cetaceans could not live an acceptable life in captivity.
“I don’t accept it on many levels,” he said, standing alongside a dolphin tank. “They’re happy being here. These animals love their trainers. They’re bonded to their trainers, they’re bonded to each other.”
Haulena added that he has not seen in the dolphins that he cares for some of the warning signs that cetacean experts like U.S.-based neuroscientist Lori Marino point to that she says indicate when animals are unhealthy in captivity.
Those, according to a 2011 paper Marino wrote with beluga and dolphin researcher Toni Frohoff, include things like unresponsiveness, excessive submissiveness, hyper-sexual behaviour, self-inflicted physical trauma, stress induced vomiting, or excessive aggressiveness.
“There’s nothing wrong with the animals,” said Haulena. “They’re here for a reason, and while they’re here we’re going to do a great job with them. They’re going to be happy, they’re going to be healthy. They’re going to teach us a whole lot, they’re going to engage people ... they’re going to get people involved.”
But Marino, a well-published research associate with The Smithsonian Institution and an adjunct professor at Emory University’s Center for Ethics who has studied whales and dolphins for more than two decades, says research on captive cetaceans is no longer a must.
A new era
Some things about cetaceans simply cannot be studied in the wild, but that doesn’t mean we need to know them. That is the premise that backs Marino’s concept for a new era of research that would see scientists take their work to whales in their natural setting — an approach akin to that now taken by Spong.
“There are some things that require an enormous amount of control and a captive environment affords that,” she said.
But she added that some things will never be known about cetaceans — captive or otherwise — because learning about them would demand unethical research practices.
“I think we have to ask ourselves what’s worth knowing. What do we want to know just for curiosity sake, and what do we want to know because it’s somehow going to translate into a conservation measure?”
Into the future
Peter Payne, a six-year-old boy from North Vancouver, was among thousands of people who entered a contest in 1967 to name the Vancouver Aquarium’s first captive Orca.
The name he suggested was Skana, a Haida word that adorned his father’s sailboat.
Payne’s entry was deemed the winner and the boy was awarded a lifetime membership to the aquarium for his suggestion.
Payne, now 53, told The Sun he went to the aquarium regularly as a child, and once he had children of his own, found himself returning.
“I think it has a huge value educationally,” he said. “This is something that most people don’t get the opportunity to see.”
But Payne said he has experienced his own moments of unease surrounding keeping whales in captivity.
“That came up when Skana was dying,” he said. “My thoughts on it are that it’s OK to have them in there if they were in such a sorry state that they would not have survived in the wild.”
When asked what he would like to see the aquarium become in the future, he said: “Perhaps it can become like a rehabilitation centre for when they’re injured — kind of like an aquatic mammal hospital.”
That is just one option for consideration as the city wades into the entrenched debate.
With the aquarium undergoing an expansion of as much as $100 million, including expanded animal habitats that will enable the facility to take back as many as three belugas that are on loan at other aquariums, the organization’s vested interest in maintaining its cetacean program may never have been stronger.
“We plan to have belugas and rescued animals here for a long time,” said Wright. “It’s absolutely essential to our engagement of the public and we don’t see a future without these animals here. They’re absolutely integral to who we are and what we need to do to conserve the oceans.”
Spong disagrees that whales are necessary to the aquarium’s mission.
“The Vancouver Aquarium actually does a lot of really good things,” he said, but he added that “people’s attitudes are changing about keeping cetaceans in captivity and they should see where things are heading.
“It was the first institution in, and it was the first institution out, of displaying orcas in captivity. I just think they should try to lead the way again.”
With assistance from Sun librarian Kate Bird.
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