You're Wrong About
Sarah is a journalist obsessed with the past. Every week she reconsiders a person or event that's been miscast in the public imagination.
You're Wrong About
Keiko Part 1 with Brianna Bowman
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Can a killer whale really jump that high? For kids of the 90s, the adventure movie Free Willy introduced us to magic of the orca through its charismatic megafauna star, Keiko. In part one of our series, deep sea correspondent Brianna Bowman tells Sarah about his journey from free marine mammal to imprisoned entertainer to Hollywood royalty. Together they discuss what Keiko meant to them as kids, 1990s whale-related activism, and the follies of anthropomorphic projection. Digressions include the power of horse memoirs, the importance of cartoon eyebrows, and the uncommon honesty of the flea circus.
Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler
More Brianna Bowman:
Support Brianna's new podcast Rewilding Keiko on Patreon
Submit a voicemail with your memories of Keiko at rewildingpodcast@outlook.com (Brianna's Note: yes, Outlook! I’m a weirdo)
Linkedin (Brianna's Note: yes I am a double weirdo)
More You're Wrong About:
YWA - Keiko pt1
Sarah: We are a tuna magnet, and we are going to be here till 11 o'clock when our dads are picking us up.
Welcome to You’re Wrong About. It's a new year, and we are talking about everyone's special little guy, Keiko the killer whale. If you don't know the story, don't worry, you will. And you're going to learn it from our guest this week, science communicator and journalist, Brianna Bowman.
We also have a bonus episode coming at the end of the month about the famous flop, Ishtar. A movie that failed despite starring both Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. And I get to talk about it with Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of the Unspooled podcast, and you can find it as always on Patreon and on Apple+. We had a really good time making it. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Now let's go talk about Keiko.
Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we just talk about everyone's favorite orca. And apologies if your favorite orca is a different orca. We're talking today about Keiko, and we're talking about him with my friend Brianna Bowman. Brianna, hello.
Brianna: Hi.
Sarah: Oh my gosh.
Brianna: I can't believe I'm here.
Sarah: Come sit down in Sarah's Playhouse.
Brianna: I've dreamed of this day of telling you about my true love of Keiko for so many years.
Sarah: So have I. Especially because for the past many months you've been like, I'm not ready yet. There's still things that science is figuring out about Keiko.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: And I respect that so deeply. Because much as that guy in Jurassic Park said about Sam Neill, you're a digger.
Brianna: That was not the Jurassic Park line I thought you're going to use.
Sarah: Ooh, which one did you think it was going to be?
Brianna: I don’t know what. I guess I was just going for the low hanging fruit of life finds a way.
Sarah: You stood on the shoulders of giants.
Brianna: Oh, there we go. Oh yeah. I've kind of agonized over this story for many months. many years.
Sarah: Well, it's called journalism babe. You know, let's also, to get out this out of the way, you and I have known each other since 2003.
Brianna: Yes. That was going to be the other way I was going to introduce myself and say, “I'm Brianna Bowman, and I am a journalist slash former fishery biologist. And most importantly, I was your lab partner in senior year of high school.”
Sarah: Yes.
Brianna: And here we are.
Sarah: And here we are. And so we're going to talk about Keiko. And I want to imagine for a second somebody who has no idea who we're talking about. Someone who said, as my dad famously once said as I left the house very early in the morning in 1995 to go see Keiko at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, as my dad famously observed, “You're going to see something called Kiko?” And I said, “No, dad. His name's Keiko, not Kiko.”
But Brianna, who is Keiko? And also, why was I, a small child in Oregon, going off very excitedly to see Keiko on a very important field trip?
Brianna: Well, I guess to start from the very beginning of how a child would encounter Keiko. Keiko was in the lead role of the movie, Free Willy. He was the killer whale that played Willy in the movie, Free Willy.
Sarah: And do you prefer, because I use ‘orca’ and ‘killer whale’ interchangeably, and tell me what you prefer.
Brianna: Scientists aren't that concerned about whether it's killer whale or orca. It is used pretty interchangeably. I haven't come across anyone saying, “Oh, you should use ‘orca’ because ‘killer whale’ is…
Sarah: Prejudicial.
Brianna: Yes. Yeah. Like giving them a bad rap.
Sarah: And as we learned in Jaws, where Quint’s little boat is called The Orca. Or at least as I think I know, orcas are kind of like, I don't know, fairly unique for the fact that they are on the same level as big old sharks. And they can kill a big shark if they feel like it.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: That was a very scientifically accurate statement, I bet.
Brianna: Very.
Sarah: You know, if they feel like it. I mean, they don't have to, but they could.
Brianna: They could. They have the power to, but they choose not to use it.
Sarah: And what does an orca or a killer whale look like?
Brianna: Well, a description that I love. So in researching this story about Keiko, there are two main published books about him. I will get to one of them later on in the story. But the one that kind of sums up the story as a whole that's out there that you can read is a book called, Freeing Keiko by Kenneth Brower. And he used a description in that book where he said something along the lines of, “Orcas are the original art deco animal” because they have these striking black and white markings. They're a beautiful, large citation. They are related to dolphins. They're more closely related to dolphins than other whales.
They are a tooth whale, so they are then more closely related to sperm whales and pilot whales and that sort of thing. But they get to around 30 feet long. I think females maybe tend to be a little shorter than that. And they have these just beautiful black and white markings across their body. They have this big white eye patch above their eye and white belly, and they have what's called a gray saddle patch, which is like this little wisp of gray behind their dorsal fin. And actually, scientists can use the pattern of their saddle patch to identify them to an individual. So the saddle patch can kind of vary from orca to orca.
And I think in explaining what orcas look like, I think something that is kind of special about Keiko, the whale we're going to talk about today, is that it seemed almost serendipitous that the most famous killer whale in the world who became this huge movie star and then the symbol of this conservation project, he was easily identifiable to the lay person, to the average member of the public, by his three chin spots. He had these three black spots on his chin, and that made him just immediately identifiable to an individual so you could pick him out from other whales. I mean, besides the fact that he also had a curved dorsal fin.
Sarah: Yes. He had a lucky fin, as is depicted on the Keiko plush that both of us own.
Brianna: Yes. Yeah. Mine's sitting behind me right now and it has the three dots on his chin. But I think that the markings, I just have thought about that. And so much of this story is about people coming together for this astronomically huge project that is really on the scale of the lunar landing when it comes to the amount of money, and planning, and time, and orchestration…
Sarah: And I guess moving of a really large, not object in this case, but you know, a big trip.
Brianna: Yeah. What was your TLDR of the Keiko story?
Sarah: What did I tell you? I forget. You tell me.
Brianna: It was something like, “The Keiko story, where they moved a whale around a lot.” And you know what? You're not wrong, Sarah. That is kind of the gist of it, in one sense.
Sarah: They're like, this whale should go here. No, we're moving this whale here. No, this whale needs to go to a third place. And America's children looked on.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: I also should point out that this is just, I don't know, to put this in a timeline of recent orca events, that this is in a pre-black fish world. Because something I remember us kind of learning, I remember this being about when we were in college, so the late 2000s, that orcas actually seemed to really, really not like doing shows for people generally at Sea World. And of course we had at least one famous orca incident where an orca killed his trainer. Tilikum, I'm thinking of.
And then there was this amazing article, and I want to say outside, that was kind of an incredible piece of almost true crime journalism that's like, Tilikum has done this unspeakable thing. But what happened to Tilikum? What is Tilikum's story? And then you're reading it and you're like, oh no, no wonder Tilikum did that.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: You know, part of the concept here that I know, or I imagine we're going to get into, is that orcas, from what I recall, and this is going to be me telling you what I remember, and you can gimme the more nuanced version from your expertise, but that they're extremely social animals who live in matriarchal pods, I guess.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And that for them to live in isolation the way they do in places like Sea World, is basically psychological torture for them.
Brianna: Yeah. What we know about orcas, and we've studied, especially the orcas in the Pacific Northwest a lot. And especially a group called the Southern Resident Killer Whales.
Sarah: Well, hi! It's a southern resident killer whale.
Brianna: That has never occurred to me. Now I'm going to think of it. Southern Belles.
Sarah: It's like Dixie Carter. “And that, so you may know, and so your children may know, was the night the lights went out in Georgia.”
Brianna: And now I'm also picturing like Real Housewives of Atlanta or something.
Sarah: It's whatever you want it to be. That's what's great about it.
Brianna: Yeah. Like, who knows? Maybe the southern resident killer whales are having their own little, you know, personal dramas with each other.
Sarah: I feel like killer whales are like real housewives, where you're like, wow, so beautiful, so majestic, so charismatic. Don't fuck with them though. Do not fuck with them.
Brianna: Yes. That's in a nutshell.
Sarah: And of course humans spent a lot of the 20th century being like, what if we fuck around with these whales?
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. So the southern residents, they are made up of different families. There's the J-pod, K-pod and L-pod, their family structures. And each pod has a matriarch who's basically the person, the whale, making the decisions of where they are going to go to hunt and where they're going to travel, or whether they're going to just chill out and rest.
Sarah: Don Whale.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. And they stay in these family units their entire lives. Young male orcas may kind of leave and form their own little kind of bachelor pods for a little while. But otherwise they'll kind of disband and the males will, as far as I know, also spend basically their whole lives in their mother's pod.
Sarah: What's the thing about them putting fish on their heads? That's a thing, right?
Brianna: That's a thing I don't think anyone really knows, and the conclusion is just like, it's a behavior.
Sarah: How do you get the fish to stay on your head? And how do they put it on their heads?
Brianna: Very talented orcas. It's like a kid spinning a basketball on their finger. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, orcas and other dolphins and other whales, too. But I think especially orcas and dolphins have been observed, they'll take objects in the water and play around with them like that. So like another thing that orcas love to do and dolphins is find a piece of kelp and like swim under it so that it gets caught on their dorsal fin or on their pectoral fin, and then kind of pass it around to each other in a little game.
So I think the quote unquote “wearing the salmon on their head” is maybe an extension of that. It is just fun to balance something on their head, and salmon happened to be around.
Sarah: It's not about fashion, it's maybe just sort of about play.
Brianna: Yeah. Well, and that kind of gets into a topic that I think comes up very strongly throughout the story of Keiko is the risk of anthropomorphs... Oh my gosh, anthropomorphs, I can't say it. Anthropomorphizing.
Sarah: Anthropomorphestablishmentism.
Brianna: Yeah. There you go. Yeah, anthropomorphizing animals.
Sarah: Which is?
Brianna: Anthropomorphizing is projecting human behaviors, our feelings and our emotions, and I think also just it's really hard for humans to disentangle ourselves from these structures and systems that we're immersed in all the time. And we just think of it as a normal way to exist in the world. And it's hard to imagine ourselves in a place like an animal would be where they don't have art and culture.
And I think that's why I am saying that story with the killer whale and the salmon on their head. Like people are saying, oh, it's wearing it like a hat. And it's like, well, that's one idea, but that's also, to put it diplomatically…
Sarah: Parentheses, you fucking idiot.
Brianna: But jumping the gun a little bit and assuming that orcas have such a thing as like wearing an item like we would wear an item
Sarah: Right. When like why would they, why would orcas have a concept of clothes?
Brianna: Right. Like it would be hard for us to imagine, or it's hard for us to imagine that from the get-go of existing in the world in that way. And so with the risk with anthropomorphizing in science especially is, and especially animal-based science, where you're trying to describe animal behavior or even animal psychology, is you have to be very, very careful about distancing yourself from the subject that you're studying and only taking observations that you can make objectively and not trying to assign intent behind a behavior.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: And it's to the point that anthropomorphizing in science, it's almost like a, I've heard it referred to as like a cardinal sin. Like if there's even a hint of any kind of anthropomorphizing going on in your study, your data, then it can be the end of your work of your career. And that's understandable because that is a very real risk. I'm not saying that it's not a very, a real risk. Like we don't want to assume we know what animals are thinking and feeling.
That being said, I do think that in reading about this story about Keiko, and in talking and reading to people that are involved in this kind of work, there is also the risk of taking that idea of avoiding anthropomorphizing at all costs. There is also the risk of taking that a little too far as well, and ignoring information that is in front of you.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: For example, I have a book here from Carl Safina. He was working as an ecologist, he's a writer now. And he did a lot of work with reducing seabird bycatch in fisheries in the Atlantic.
Sarah: I hate to leave you on a cul-de-sac, but what is bycatch? We have to know. See, because you're like, everyone knows what bycatch is. And would that were true, what's bycatch, Brianna?
Brianna: No, that's fair. Bycatch is in commercial fishing. And also, I guess, in sport fishing, too. Let's say you're going out and you're trying to catch tuna because you know that's what you have quota for as a fisherman, and it is the most valuable thing that you want to catch and sell. Basically, anything that you catch that isn't tuna is bycatch. So there'll be other species of fish that you'll catch instead because you can't just, you know, catch tuna that precisely
Sarah: With a tuna magnet.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: No, that's a band name
Brianna: That's our ska band, Tuna Magnet.
Sarah: We are Tuna Magnet and we are going to be here till 11 o'clock when our dads are picking us up.
Brianna: But yeah. Carl Safina wrote this book called, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. And it's basically addressing this topic of, yeah, we as scientists shouldn't anthropomorphize, we shouldn't assign any thoughts or feelings that are primarily human to an animal's experience. But at the same time, humans are animals. So we can't also say that we don't know what they're thinking or feeling all the time. Like there is some sort of middle ground.
Sarah: Right. Or at least we can't act as if we can't make an educated guess occasionally. Especially if we've… because there's also, I feel like the distinction, to use dogs as an example. That people will be like, oh, the dog loves the baby. She's wagging her tail. And I know enough to know that you could also correctly say, well, tail wagging is really more of a sign of excitement. Which could be good excitement or it could be bad excitement. Like, what the fuck is this thing?
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: You know, so there's a thing where like, I think probably dog owners are a great case study because we do a lot of projecting of our emotions onto our pets.
Brianna: Oh yeah, I do it every day.
Sarah: As pet owners in America, generally. But then also there's the fact that it is possible to learn to an extent what your dog's actual sort of baseline consistent species translated body language is telling you. And you can learn to a degree their kind of physical dialect, I would say.
And also, they know what we're feeling. Like they understand when we're nervous or scared most of the time. But they also don't understand our taxes, probably.
Brianna: Yeah. Probably, who knows. Murphy's pretty smart. I would give Murphy full allowance to go and do my chores for me. I don’t know if she'd want to though.
Sarah: I mean, she certainly wants the best for you. I think she wants the best for you in a general way, but maybe only some of the, you know, it depends.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: But I feel like this is kind of the bedrock of what we're talking about today, that there's this sort of story with Keiko. And I would love to get next into kind of the Free Willy part of this, if this is the right time.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Of like people coming together to try and do what's best for an animal. And also, inevitably and frustratingly projecting our emotions onto an animal in mass. The same way that we do, arguably… I mean, what's interesting too, as a comparison is that I'm obsessed with Tonya Harding historically, and you're obsessed with Keiko. And these are both majestic creatures of the Pacific Northwest who the media fixated on and ultimately meaningfully, you know, misunderstood in the nineties.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And we should really take your course on that.
Brianna: We should, yeah. I would love to teach a course on Keiko. I think at this point I probably could.
Sarah: It's time. Yeah. Okay. So that's the orca of it all. So who's Keiko?
Brianna: Keiko was a whale when we all as children first encountered Keiko. It was in, as I mentioned, in the movie Free Willy.
Sarah: Yep.
Brianna: So actually Sarah, would you like to explain Free Willy in a nutshell?
Sarah: God, I would love to, yes. Yes. I mean, you know it much better than I do, so mine will be more general. And what's funny too, is that even as an adult rewatching this, I was like, wow, they really moved that whale around. But it's all just special effects and footage that's cut together. The whale was only ever in one place.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: So, okay. Free Willy is one of those nineties movies that's filmed in the Pacific Northwest. This one was edited in such a way where a character catches the Max in Pioneer Square in downtown Portland and then gets off at Astoria.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: A few stops later, which like, can you imagine? I would love that.
Brianna: This fictional town that they've created is like this pastiche of Portland and Astoria and Canon Beach. And I'm like, yes, I want to live there.
Sarah: So what's it about? That's the, I had to get the geography issue out of the way, just so you knew. Okay. But so Free Willy is about a troubled kid.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Which is like a staple, I feel like, of nineties movies. Like an approximately 11-year-old boy who's an orphan in some way and who's like, adults have given up on me. If only I could have an angel on a baseball team or a bond with an unusual animal to teach me to love and trust again.
Brianna: Yep. It is a really standard nineties family film.
Sarah: Yep. And I feel like he gets busted for shoplifting or stealing or something. And so he gets sent to live… or what is it?
Brianna: He gets busted. I just re-watched Free Willy yesterday so I'm fresh. He gets busted. So he and his friends, famously this movie opens… I mean for me, famously, after the beautiful documentary footage of Pacific Northwest whales and they show Willy getting captured. Then they go to immediately Pioneer Square in downtown Portland.
Sarah: Yep.
Brianna: He has some other kids that I guess they're all runaways or something, and they're begging for food.
Sarah: The Baker Street irregulars.
Brianna: Yeah. And later on that day, they're at the Burnside skate park hanging out, and the police get after him for stealing a cake or something, I don't know.
Sarah: That's right. He steals a cake. It's very Jean Valjean.
Brianna: I know. He runs away from the police, and he and his friend kind of open a random door. And this is the part in the movie that I find really funny. They just kind of wander into a random door, no clue that it's actually the door into Keiko's underwater ceiling area. Like they just steal the door to whales. They just accidentally are like, here in this door, dive in here. And they're like, “Oh, cool, what's this place?”
Sarah: And as a kid were you like, why does this never happen to me? No matter how many random doors I open, there's never a whale, it's always mops.
Brianna: Like there's not an outer perimeter wall of security on this place. Maybe they hopped it and I forget.
Sarah: Well, I mean, that's why everyone's so scared of Portland, because the media taught us to believe that any door downtown you could open and there'd be a killer whale. It’s actually just the cashier of a gentleman's hotel.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: But it's like a classic meet cute, I guess.
Brianna: Yeah. And so they go and they're like, oh, weird. It's like this underwater pool. They're like, we'll just hang out here until the cops leave. And so they start graffiti-ing.
Sarah: Oh no, they're graffiti-ing the whale’s tank?
Brianna: Yeah. And then Jessie is like, wait, what's that in the tank? And then Willy comes up to the tank and he opens his mouth and he is like, rah. And there's like flashes of light, like there's lightning or something. And it's like a monster. Even though he is like the least scary monster possible
Sarah: *singing*
Brianna: Yeah, that's the mashup. We need Phantom of the Opera and Free Willy.
Sarah: I can't believe it hasn't been done, honestly.
Brianna: I know, right? So anyway, the cops catch Jesse, they bring him to his caseworker
Sarah: Cake stealing, breaking and entering, and harassing a whale.
Brianna: Yeah. And so Jesse's been on the run. But you know, the cops catch him and he gets to his caseworker, and his caseworker's like, “What have you been doing? Oh my God. Well, we got this nice couple that's going to take you in.”
And Jesse's like, I just want to be with my mom. And the guy's like, “We haven't seen or heard from your mom in six years, and we don't know where she's at, and she doesn't want to be found.” And so then they take Jesse to the foster family, which is Michael Madsen.
Sarah: You live on the Astoria side of Portland Oria.
Brianna: Yeah. We've quickly gone to the upper hills of Astoria, and they have this beautiful house that overlooks the Columbia River
Sarah: Kids in the eighties and nineties got really Astoria-pilled because we have The Goonies, Short Circuit, and Free Willy.
Brianna: Yeah. You know what a fun fact about Free Willy?
Sarah: What?
Brianna: The guy who played the father in The Goonies co-wrote the script of Free Willy.
Sarah: What?!
Brianna: Yeah. Keith Walker, I .
Sarah: He was like, I was in this wonderful town and I thought, what if there was a whale?
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if like… I think maybe he was approached around the same time that The Goonies was being filmed.
Sarah: Oh, and Kindergarten Cop.
Brianna: Yeah, Kindergarten Cop. Gosh, I feel like there's others that I'm forgetting, but those are like the big four.
Sarah: Yeah. Which makes sense. Because it's just a town that photographs well, it has these big steep hills leading down to water. It's just very photogenic, I think.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: And also very fun. And if you go there, you can go to Frite & Scoop.
Brianna: Yep.
Sarah: Anyway.
Brianna: Also the Oregon Film Museum, where you can learn all about all these film sites from all these movies.
Sarah: All these movies that we are remembering and also not quite remembering.
Brianna: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, he is told that he has to clean up his mess at the aquarium. He has to clean up the graffiti, and then he bonds with Willy, who is also a grumpy, misanthropic whale who doesn't want to perform.
Sarah: Oh my God. That's true.
Brianna: And that's how they connect with each other. He's like, I get Willy, I understand where he is coming from. And there's the evil aquarium owner, played by Michael Ironside.
Sarah: Oh my God, I forgot it. Yeah. Isn't there a line where Michael Ironside is like, “I hate that whale”?
Brianna: He says it at least twice in the movie, it's like his final line. He's like, “God, I hate that whale.”
Sarah: Michael Ironside has had the most incredible career.
Brianna: He really has, but he's just a caricature of a capitalistic tycoon. Like he just opened this aquarium purely to make money. He doesn't care about the joy of children. He wants to get rid of Willy, and they're like, no, we'll teach him new tricks and we'll get more people to come to his show.
So they put on a big show for the aquarium owner and he's like, cool, can you do that again and we can sell tickets. And they're like, yeah, he can do it. And then it's the big day and Willy gets stage fright. But it's mostly because little kids are banging on his window in the underwater viewing area and he's getting freaked out and scared. And they're like, “Willy, what's going on? Why don't you want to perform?”
Sarah: He's a highly sensitive whale. Yeah.
Brianna: And then Jesse's all upset because he feels like Willy let him down. And then as he is kind of having a talking to with Willy, he hears out in the water beyond this fictional aquarium that doesn't exist, that is on a hillside It looks like near a coal estate park somewhere, there's a pot of whales that swim by. And they call out and Willy calls back to them, and Jesse's like, “Oh my God, it's your family.”
Sarah: They're like, we looked you up on find my phone.
Brianna: But I forgot that when Willy freaks out because all the kids are banging on the glass underneath, Willy rushes the window and he causes damage to it. So it starts leaking.
And then so the evil aquarium owner, Michael Ironside, is like, wow, I could collect insurance money on Keiko. And so they're just going to let him die. They're just going to let it leak and be like, oh, whoops.
Sarah: God.
Brianna: I guess the tank leaks and yep, we can collect our insurance money now.
Sarah: Nineties kids movies are amazing. They're like, you know how you have some issues with adults? Well, you're correct. Some of them are so needlessly evil that they're like Roman emperors. That's how extravagantly evil they are. They're killing whales for fun.
Brianna: I know. I feel like you go through a period in like, I don't know, young adulthood where you're like, people aren't that bad. That's just something in movies. And then I feel like, no, I feel like I've met people like this in my life.
Sarah: And politically, we are being shown a lot of evidence, like daily. Which, you know, certainly tips the scale a little bit.
Brianna: I mean, if a certain president owned an aquarium, you can be sure he would be trying to collect insurance money on a whale.
Sarah: Oh my God. There would be so many clam assassinations and so forth.
Brianna: Yeah. So anyway, they're just going to let him die. So Jesse is like, we have to save Willy.
Sarah: The clock is literally ticking, you guys.
Brianna: It's literally ticking. And so he and his friends, the trainer and Lori Petty, I think is her name.
Sarah: Yep. Tank Girl herself. Which, when I think of this movie, I think mainly of Lori Petty going, “Salmon is like his chocolate.”
Brianna: Yes. That is one of, that's a great line. They bring it back in Free Willy 2, also. They're like, “Oh, the salmon's his chocolate.” And it's true, the Pacific Northwest whales do love their salmon. But he and Lori Petty and August Schoenberg, who's the handyman at the aquarium. Also like the, I don't know, stereotypical mystical Native American kind of character.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Who lives and breathes to help annoying, white children.
Brianna: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, they band together. They're like, okay, we got to get Willy out of here. So they steal Jesse's foster dad's truck, and they somehow managed between the three of them to get him on the back of the trailer of this truck.
One of my favorite details about this part of the movie where they're like, they were going to take a forest road to a beach to release him, but then it's blocked because a tree fell down. That road apparently is a section of the road up to the Astoria column. They just filled it in with dirt to make it look like a forest road. But anyway, so that's where they filmed that scene.
Sarah: Yeah. I love movie magic, especially when it involves people moving around large quantities of dirt and snow and stuff in the olden times.
Brianna: Yeah. When we actually used to do that sort of thing. Make it look real.
Sarah: And you know what, some people still are.
Brianna: Yeah. And you can tell when they do.
Sarah: Fun to create an illusion.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Yes. They have to drop a whale off real quick at the ocean, which is hard to do.
Brianna: Yes. They're like, plan B, take him to… what is the…
Sarah: It's like the end of Notting Hill, they’re like…
Brianna: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah: Just gimme some loving everyone. Thank you.
Brianna: Yeah. But they take him to a marina, which is the Hammond Marina near Warrenton.
Sarah: Yep. Near the wreck of the Peter Iredale, my favorite Pacific Northwest shipwreck.
Brianna: Well, and also I love this scene because I hadn't watched Free Willy for years. I don't know, it must have been at least over a decade. And then when I re-watched it like three or four years ago and seeing this scene, I was like, what? I had a job as a port sampler for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and I was standing in this marina almost every day for a summer, and I had no idea this was the marina where Keiko famously jumps over the wall to freedom to his family. Anyway, I just, it just really felt like some sort of full circle moment.
Sarah: I think the weirdest thing about movie locations is that they don't even announce themselves as special unless you know what you're looking for a lot of the time, right? Or, you know, they're special, but you don't know that they were immortalized in some way.
Brianna: Yeah, I know. Yeah. I had no clue. There was nothing, there's no sign or plaque being like, hey, there is the fun scene.
Sarah: That's why I have a plaque in my home saying that Jamie Loftus wrote a chapter of Raw Dog here. It's made out of paper, and I taped it to the wall. But it's still a plaque.
Brianna: It still counts.
Sarah: Make plaques in your home. Commemorate events.
Brianna: Yeah. I'll have a plaque of this recording up in here somewhere.
Sarah: So, yeah. And I also just, okay, I feel silly asking this just to be clear, because there's so many questions I have in my life that are like…
Brianna: There’s no silly questions.
Sarah: Thank you. Because I feel like a lot of people, when you ask a question, do you ever feel like you ask a question and someone's like, you should never do that. Or like, you should always do that, and you just have no idea whether it's going to be one of the two.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And so my question is like, an orca couldn't really do that, right?
Brianna: You know, it's funny. When I was rewatching this, I had a thought, like, I wonder if Sarah's going to ask me if that's possible, and I'm going to say, no, it's not.
Sarah: Okay. Tell us what could an orca do? What would be a realistic version of that?
Brianna: I mean, I think an orca could jump over a net hanging in the water. I just don't, they can't get that much clearance.
Sarah: Okay. So when does Free Willy come out? Like 1993?
Brianna: Yes. July 16, 1993. A month after another wonderful movie came out, Jurassic Park.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Brianna: So what a summer for movies, honestly.
Sarah: What a summer for giant creature features. And then first Willy goes out to sea and finds his pod, and then we hear, “Hold Me, like the river Jordan…”
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: I remember watching the Planet Earth episode about the whales that ends with, what is it, David Attenborough? I can never remember. With Attenborough, speaking of Jurassic Park, saying something like, “Soon these whales will be extinct if we don't take our thumbs out of all butts.” And you were like, let's not listen to that. Let's listen to the song from the end of Free Willy and stuff.
Brianna: Yeah. We just turned off the narration and listened to the Free Willy soundtrack.
Sarah: And you know, we learned a lot. Okay, so my question to you, because we were both like five when this was all going on. Great time to be a five-year-old.
Brianna: Mm.
Sarah: Incredible toddler clothes.
Brianna: Absolutely.
Sarah: And so I remember vaguely just seeing this movie and liking it, and then hearing about Keiko more as an actual whale and the story that unfolded from there. But what was the response to this movie and did it, as I kind of imagined from my adult perspective, involve people being like, wow, we'd love to know more about this wonderful whale who is in the movie about his needs and rights and him being freed. Like, what's his living situation like? Is it good?
Brianna: Yeah, that's basically it in a nutshell. So I don't know if you remember at the end of Free Willy.
Sarah: Oh my gosh,
Brianna: There was a phone number.
Sarah: I do, now that you're saying this.
Brianna: Yeah. There was a phone number, 1-800-4whales.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: And it says something to the effect of like, if you would like to learn how you can help the plight of whales around the world, call this number. And do you want to try calling it?
Sarah: I would love to.
Brianna: Okay. It said call failed, so I'm gonna…
Sarah: Oh, man.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: What are we, how are, but then who do we call about the whales?
Brianna: Well, hold on.
Sarah: Who are we going to call?
Brianna: Who are we going to call? I'm just going to try it one more time and then I'll give up. Because I really think that was just because I have terrible phone service at my place.
Sarah: We can also do this, like kind of in post.
Brianna: Okay.
Sarah: And you can try it later and we can kind of patch that in at the end or something.
Brianna: Yeah. Okay. Shoot. Well, that's lame.
*recording*
You have reached the 1-800-4whales line, maintained by the Free Willy Keiko Foundation and the International Reman Project of Earth Island Institute. Our groups led the successful rescue, rehabilitation, and release of Keiko, star of the movie Free Willy. To learn more about Keiko, his remarkable journey, and our efforts to protect orcas around the globe, visit our website keiko.com. That's KEIKO.com. You can also order our all-new Free Willy Keiko discovery kit for yourself, or as a gift for budding orca enthusiasts. Check it out at keiko.com. Thanks for your interest. You're welcome to leave a message after the beep.
Brianna: Do you leave a message? You should leave.
Brianna: Hi, this is Brianna Bowman and Sarah Marshall, and we're recording a podcast about Keiko because I love the story of Keiko so much, and I admire all the work that you guys did to try to release him back to the wild. And I will be sure to check out keiko.com, though I'm fairly certain it's not an operating website anymore.
Sarah: I don't know. The phone number's still up. I dunno. We'll find out. We love Keiko. We'll never forget Keiko.
Brianna: Yeah, we'll never forget Keiko. Thank you so much. And send my love to all the whales around the world. Okay, bye.
Sarah: And all the ships at sea.
Brianna: That was so nice.
Sarah: That was nice.
Brianna: Wait, I'm just going to quickly look up keiko.com.
Sarah: Me too. Mm-hmm.
Brianna: Because I swear I looked this up and I thought it wasn't operating, but maybe that was a different website.
Sarah: Oh, oh,
Brianna: It's something. Yeah.
Sarah: Keiko.com. It's the International Marine Mammal Project.
Brianna: Okay.
Sarah: And now it redirects to savedolphins.eii.org.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Sending the failed experiment of, or captivity. That's a charitable way to put it.
Brianna: Yeah. All right. They're keeping the lines open.
Sarah: God bless.
Brianna: So, yeah, this is the organization that was in charge of this Keiko release project. So at the end of Free Willy there was that phone number. People called it. And the person that came up with the idea for the phone number, there's a little story behind that, and it really gets into why the movie Free Willy was made in the first place.
So it all kind of started with what people, and especially the author Kenneth Brower, brings up in his book. It started with potentially the movie Lethal Weapon too. You'll be surprised to know, logically.
Sarah: You know, I've never seen a Lethal Weapon, which is very out of character. There is a certain kind of sense to it where you do feel like the backstory of a lot of Hollywood stuff is like, well, this guy had the same dry cleaner as this other guy, and that's why we have Tootsie or something.
Brianna: Honestly, that is kind of the feel behind this.
Sarah: But it's like buddy cops, right?
Brianna: It’s Mel Gibson and…
Sarah: Mel Gib Gibson and Danny Glover.
Brianna: And Danny Glover. Yeah.
Sarah: Mel Robbins and Danny Glover. Mel Robbins is like, when someone's trying to arrest you, let them.
Brianna: Yeah. The buddy cop movie we never knew we needed.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: But in that movie, there's a scene where Murtaugh, Danny Glover's daughter is wearing a Save the Dolphins t-shirt.
Sarah: Okay.
Brianna: And he's about to eat a tuna sandwich, and his daughter's like, “Don't eat the tuna because there's dolphin bycatch.”
Sarah: Oh, hey, we learned all about bycatch.
Brianna: That was handy.
Sarah: I remember this being such a major issue in the early nineties. And the idea of dolphin safe tuna, like, you know, there's no such thing as dolphin safe tuna.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: But I think we didn't figure that out until later. And it was like, yeah, I feel like it was a thing in rom-coms of like, ugh, I would never date a man who doesn't care about dolphin safe tuna. I feel like that was in The Truth About Cats and Dogs.
Brianna: Oh really? Was it? I don't think I've seen that before.
Sarah: Something like that, dolphin safe tuna comes up.
Brianna: That's so funny. So the moment in Lethal Weapon 2 was suggested by an actress or model, and also Dolphin activist and Moss, who was friends with Richard Donner, who was the producer of Lethal Weapon 2. Richard Donner and his wife Lauren Schuler Donner, they wanted to use Hollywood as a tool for activism, and I think specifically like environmental activism.
And like I said, they were friends with Ann Moss and her husband Jerry Moss. And Anne was the one who was like, hey, you should put this little scene in your movie. And that did well. And the Save The Dolphins t-shirt that the daughter was wearing was made by an organization called the Earth Island Institute.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: So that movie was successful. And then after that, Richard Donner wanted to do another movie that kind of leaned into this environmental activism, and specifically like save the whales kind of story even more. So he started toying around with the idea of a story about an orca being released from captivity. And he started putting together a script. And that's when he brought in Keith Walker who was the, like I said, the dad in The Goonies, and also Cory Blackman.
And when they were getting close to this movie being finished, Richard Donner thought to reach out to the Earth Island Institute, the people that made that Save the Dolphins t-shirt. He thought to reach out to them and ask, what kind of particular message can we put in this movie? Like what kind of call to action can we do? Like something similar to that tuna sandwich scene.
And so Richard Donner calls a very important character, very important person in the Keiko story, David Phillips, he was the leader of the Earth Island Institute. It was led by David Brower, who was a really famous environmentalist. He was the executive director of the Sierra Club. And just like a side note, I mentioned that one of the main texts that's available out there to read about the Free Willy Keiko story is written by a man named Kenneth Brower. His father was David Brower. So that's how Kenneth Brower was kind of connected to all these people and had those contacts when he was writing the book.
So Richard Donner calls David Phillips, who's the executive director of the Earth Island Institute at the time, and David Phillips he's had a career in campaigns for whale conservation, dolphin conservation. He was instrumental in leading the campaign on dolphin safe tuna. So that was a lot of his work. I mean, of course the work of many people, but he was the leader of those campaigns and he was also the director of this International Marine Mammal project, which was kind of housed within the Earth Island Institute. Which if you're looking, if you happen to still be looking at keiko.com, that's exactly what you see. It's the International Marine Mammal Project and it says a project of the Earth Island Institute.
Sarah: Well, I really want to know at this point, like when they made this movie, how did they cast the whale? How did they find Keiko? And maybe this is a good point to get into, like what was his story and why was this call to action necessary?
Brianna: Yeah, so this is something that I'm a little. Still a little unclear of whether the producers on this movie. So Richard Donner's wife, Lauren Shuler Donner, and Jenny Lu Tuin, I think is how you say her last name. I found some interview where they kind of, it seemed like they had Keiko on their radar even before they cast him.
Sarah: Okay. So it's like Air Bud, where they're like, aware of this dog that can
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Play basketball. And they're like, we could write a movie around this dog.
Brianna: Yeah, possibly. But then I also read it in, I think Brower's book, that Warner Brothers, it was the responsibility of the Warner Brothers props department to find a whale to star in this movie.
And they initially, of course, reached out to places like SeaWorld in the U.S., which would've just logistically made a lot more sense. But as you can imagine, when they were like, “Hey SeaWorld, we want to do a movie about a whale that's in captivity, and then we release it because it's unhappy and it wants to be free.” And SeaWorld was sort of like, “Um, what if instead of him going free in the end, we build him a nicer, better tank.”
Sarah: Learn to love doing shows for tourists.
Brianna: Yeah. So as you can imagine, SeaWorld was just not interested, so they had to look elsewhere.
Sarah: Prophetic.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: When did we start putting orcas in tanks for our own amusement anyway?
Brianna: The first orca was caught and put in a sea pen in the early 1960s. It was a whale named Moby Doll. This is a little upsetting, but he was harpooned because he was going to be, the skeleton was going to be on display at the aquarium, that's why they were harpooning this whale. And then he didn't die.
Sarah: That's quite evil.
Brianna: Yeah. And they were like, hey, he didn't die. Let's see how long we can keep him for.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: And he lived for 87 days in a temporary sea pen made by the aquarium. And then there was another one caught the following year off of a location called, Namu, British Columbia. And that whale survived for about 11 months.
And so then it just kind of planted the seed of like, huh, maybe we could catch these whales, and people think they're cool and want to come see them. So it really was just purely a moneymaking venture.
Sarah: Right. And it's like having a dancing bear in the Middle Ages or something, right? Where you're like, “Everybody come see the bear. Don't worry about it.”
Brianna: Right. Yeah. And so in the seventies, the business of capturing and selling whales for tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even more than that. Like tens of thousands of dollars in 1970s money. So it was a very lucrative venture.
Sarah: Why, your evil, deadbeat dad could be set for life with one lucrative whale sale.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: For even a seal deal.
Brianna: Yeah. It was just a little too tempting for a lot of people
Sarah: And kind of like the waters outside British Columbia were a big center of this, right?
Brianna: Yeah. And this is the thing with the Southern resident Killer Whales was that this time period is acknowledged as like a really traumatic event to their population. And that in some ways, you could say they're still recovering from that.
Sarah: God, I never thought about that.
Brianna: There was a story like six months ago or so… So there was a particular, I think there was a few different events where whales were captured in Puget Sound. But there was a cove where one of these capture events took place, and I forget which pod it was that was targeted. But anyway, that pod, whether it was J, K, or L pod, hadn't returned to that particular cove since the seventies. And they had only returned to it for the first time last summer.
So again, not to anthropomorphize, but I think we could say that this is some almost like generational trauma.
Sarah: They learned something from it. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think it's too anthropomorphizing to call something trauma, but you could also just say, well, they figured out that they can't go there anymore. And it seems like that's become generational knowledge, which is interesting.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: You know, to speculate.
Brianna: Yeah. And it wasn't just a handful of whales, there was maybe 50. And just to get perspective for the southern resident killer whales, now there are 74 individuals.
Their population has struggled over the years. And part of that was in these initial capture events in the seventies, and then recently in the last like 20, 30 years, it has more to do with prey, availability with fish, the availability of salmon.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: But yeah, so that took place in the seventies in the U.S. But then there's the Save the Whales movement.
Sarah: We had to go get our whales elsewhere.
Brianna: Basically. So we passed a piece of legislation in the U.S. called the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And I believe that was passed in something like 1973 or 76 or something like that.
Anyway, it stipulated that we can no longer do live captures of whales in U.S. waters. So basically what happens is that the demand for that…
Sarah: Nixon and Ford, those hippies.
Brianna: But the demand for that just essentially shifts elsewhere.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: And one of the places that it shifted to was Iceland. So there are really robust populations of killer whales around Iceland, even to this day. Like the southern resident killer whales.
I think for those of us living in the Pacific Northwest, we're aware that there maybe as a population not doing so well, and we're very concerned. and their population is listed as endangered.
But elsewhere in the world, orcas are actually doing okay. And one of those populations of orcas that are doing okay is are ones in the North Atlantic, around Iceland. So captures started happening there, and that's where our friend Keiko was captured in roughly around 1979-ish, maybe ‘78.
Sarah: Wow, he is a Gen Xer.
Brianna: Yeah, he is. He was about two to three years old, which was kind of the ideal age to capture a whale. You wanted to capture them when they were younger so that they would adapt to captivity better.
Sarah: What kind of lifespan do killer whales have in the wild, approximately?
Brianna: The average that I found was that females live a little longer, and the average is around like 50. The max for females can be up to like 80 years old. And then the average for males is around 30, and then their max can be around like 50 or 60 years old.
And then there's many accounts of whales in captivity not living nearly that long, though I will say Keiko did live to about 27 years old. And you know, part of that might have been all of this effort that was put in to get him back to health and to his wild home.
So he was caught off of Iceland, and he was caught by a vessel called the Guðrún. If anybody's Icelandic and listening to this, I apologize.
Sarah: Yep. Somebody is. Please let us know. We would love to hear the way you say it. But you know what, Brianna?
Brianna: I listened to a video over and over.
Sarah: Yeah. You did your best.
Brianna: I'm very aware of it now, like hosting on KLCC.
Sarah: We'll never be Icelandic. This is just the situation.
Brianna: Yeah. Right. There's going to be many more Icelandic words that I'm definitely not going to get right.
Sarah: Yeah. It's kind of a blanket disclaimer. We’re trying.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: We're trying, you know, it's the mark of a really quality language that foreigners sound like idiots when we try and speak it.
Brianna: Oh yeah. I've been listening, I've been streaming Icelandic radio recently just to get my head in the how is that, I just love the sound of, of Icelandic language. It's really, I don't know, it's just very pleasing to me. And then like of course Iceland has incredible, you know, musicians. And anyway, I've enjoyed listening to that.
But Keiko was caught by the Guðrún, which was a herring type of fishing boat.
Sarah: Was he caught on purpose?
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: Okay. They weren't just like, oh boy, that's a big herring.
Brianna: No. So at first when whales were caught in Iceland, like the first couple of times it was an accident. Orcas would end up in the nets. So this is a behavior known as depredation. It's when a wild predator is targeting a resource that humans are also trying to harvest or extract.
Sarah: Yes. Because we got the thing that they like all kind of in a big pile.
Brianna: Yeah. We make it easy for them. And this term is used when talking about orcas that are targeting fish that are being caught by a commercial fishing boat. Sperm whales do it too. This happens in Alaska and in other parts of the world.
Sarah: What does sperm whales eat?
Brianna: Well, sperm whales love to follow black cod long liners in Alaska. I've seen it myself.
Sarah: Good for them, I don't like cod.
Brianna: No, black cod, which is technically not cod, actually.
Sarah: Oh, okay. That's right. Well, why do we have to keep naming all these fish all this made-up stuff, like Chilean sea bass. That was a whole PR thing.
Brianna: It is an issue. It is actually something that some people are working on. Because there's kind of, it's actually like a consumer fraud issue of labeling something as halibut when it's not actually halibut, and charging someone like it's halibut.
Sarah: It's like when they have balsamic vinegar and the ingredients are like balsamic vinegar and three other things, and you're like, oh.
So okay. How did they get Keiko and who captures him?
Brianna: Yeah, so he's captured by this boat that was kind of retrofitted, I guess, to capture whales. So it was primarily a fishing boat, and then they were like, hey, we can actually make more money in one go capturing some whales.
Sarah: Right. I'm just imagining like a thousand dads and uncles simultaneously that it's like, every few years there's new stupid things for people to try and make money on as a side hustle. And it's this for a little while. Which just seems… I don't know.
I don't want to, in a way I don't want to make fun of it too much because I think it is genuinely horrific what we did to these animals. But it also is very dumb, you know? Just to think about these random guys apparently who had been in herring being like, you know what, let's just get a whale and flip it. Like the hubris of that is just so over the top. I guess it becomes absurd.
Brianna: Oh, absolutely. I mean, this whole time period of hey, you know, those beautiful, majestic animals that are top predators in the ocean? What if we caught them and put them in essentially a fishbowl?
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: And taught them tricks and charge people money.
Sarah: Tracy is not calling me back, but when I'm making a whale jump through a little hoop, I don't think about it so much. I don't think they can jump through hoops. It's just kind of a good image though.
Brianna: They need a pretty big hoop.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: And like I said, they'd have to be low to the surface of the water.
Sarah: It's not their best trick. This is why flea circuses are so great, because it's the only animals doing trick exhibit that I can think of where part of the appeal is that the animal doesn't exist and isn't there.
Brianna: Right. Or like Cirque de Soleil, it's a circus.
Sarah: Well, those are real French Canadians. And they fall.
Brianna: But there's no animals involved.
Sarah: That’s true. We only torture humans in Cirque de Soleil.
Brianna: There's only human animals involved. But it just reminds me of the last time that I went to SeaWorld, which was back in, I don't know, 2012 or something like that. Or 2010. And I remember at the time feeling like, okay, this could be my last time going, because I don't know how I feel about this.
And I'll just speak specifically about the killer whale show that we went to. I was so upset. I remember being tearful because I thought, well, okay, here's these incredible, beautiful, really fascinating, really interesting animals. And there was not a goddamn thing in that show about their life history, about their biology. Not a single fact about like what's it like to be a killer whale? What are they like in the wild? And nothing about their social structures. Nothing about like echolocation or something. You know, just anything.
Sarah: Nothing about who they are.
Brianna: You know what they had was a guy playing an electric guitar and a jumbotron, and it said words like, “Believe” and “Magic”. That was the gist of the killer whale show.
Sarah: Yeah. Where it's like, the point of this giant animal is the stupid things that we believe that we get to feel in his presence and that are all sort of about our most commercialized emotions. I guess the idea of a guy playing electric guitar, being like, “believe”, “magic”. It's just like, I cannot think of something more brain dead. It's like, believe what, you guys?
Brianna: Exactly. It's like they're commandeering the feeling of awe that you see when you're in the presence of a large animal like that. And especially such a charismatic animal.
Sarah: And also I feel like kids are fairly easy to please in terms of spectacle. I think it's more for adults, these things that can penetrate when your senses have been really dulled, you know? Because I feel like kids get pretty excited about marine animals if they simply swim sort of near them in a tank where nothing else is happening.
Brianna: Yeah. I think generally kids are just naturally really interested in the natural world. Like, I think they love animals, they love for the most part, being outside.
Sarah: Kids are naturally curious. And then we teach them to be incurious because it's inconvenient. And then we send them to school and ask them to be curious again, but only about boring things.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: It's my analysis.
Brianna: I think something I notice with kids, and I remember this as a kid, is the fascination with animals was also about connecting with animals on an individual level, too. Like bringing it back to that idea of this whale or this snake, whatever it is, could be my friend. And we will take on the world together. And I think it's just every kid's fantasy.
And this is like the entire fantasy of Free Willy, like the fairytale of Free Willy, is the feeling of being chosen by a wild animal. Like this wild animal chose to be your friend, which means you’re special.
Sarah: And troubled kid meets troubled whale. Which I do feel like there is a lot of us that like weird dogs, and we like weird dogs because we're weird people, you know? And there's something to that.
Although, I also think that… I don't know. I would love to know what you think about this. Because where I land right now is this idea that there's some kind of experience of growing up maybe that is developmentally necessary, or at least I hope that everyone has the capacity to get there, where you begin by thinking of animals. Not everybody, but I think many human beings begin by thinking of animals as important or having an interest in them. Partly because of this idea of them as a proxy for our feelings or something that could choose us and befriend us and validate us in that way.
And for example, I was out for a walk in my neighborhood recently, and speaking of a recent Lulu Miller episode we did, there was a daylight coyote that I saw and then saw again just walking around in the neighborhood and pausing to look. And I was thinking about that thing where like there will always be a part of me that's the kid at heart that's like, what if this coyote and I become best friends and we're just a girl and a coyote, just living and loving, living in the sunlight. Wait, living in the sunlight, loving in the moonlight.
But then there's also the part of you, the like adult brain, that I think that you get to develop if you have the right teachers and stuff of like, this coyote needs to continue to fear people and not befriend the people in the neighborhood. And I have to continue and not try and get them to pause for longer than they are, basically.
It's almost like a tragic, gay, 1950s love story. Where it's like, “Rupert, you'll always know my heart better than anyone else. But for our own safety, we must live separate lives. And my love for you will always dwell in my heart” They're British.
Brianna: I got that. No, I think you're right. Because even though I have this fantasy of like, oh, I'll befriend a dolphin or a harbor seal or something, and they like me and nobody else. Or a coyote or a wolf or, especially I think sometimes we have that fantasy with predators.
Sarah: Yes.
Brianna: Having something that's so in our minds, like scary or powerful or mysterious.
Sarah: Because humans are predators and we seek solidarity, I guess, with the other ones.
Brianna: Yeah. Maybe. Or I think it's again just like, well, I think what is lurking under the surface of this fantasy of connecting with an animal like that is it is kind of wrapped up in our ego.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: Because it is really just about… or it's not the only thing, but a lot of it is about feeling special in some way.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's like asking nature to choose us. And then maybe there comes a moment or a time when the mature perspective becomes. And I think a lot of kids understand this from the jump, but I guess that there is the kind of like growing up partly involves learning to not project your emotions in the way that maybe we do more as children when it's safer for sentimentality to be kind of the logic of our lives.
And that emotional maturity involves being like, I need to value this animal more for what I am able to do in this world that my species is controlling in so many ways to help protect their ability to live an autonomous life, basically.
Brianna: Yeah. Because I think if we let go of our ego in this fantasy and we really make it about what is best for the animal, and realizing the best thing for a lot of animals is actually probably to not interact with humans all that much.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: And even though we like crave that attention, it is the thing that can actually be the most detrimental or harmful to a wild animal.
Sarah: Maybe this is me being sentimental right now, but it feels like humans have this homesickness or nostalgic for animals that live more fully in nature than we do.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Because I don't know. I kind of like to think that on some level we recognize that we are animals and that we are of them, and yet that we don't get to be with them.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: And also to be clear, it would suck to live in the wilderness in many ways, as an animal, because most of your life is about eating enough food and survival and potentially getting eaten by something. And as a human, I hardly have to worry at all about something eating me.
And I really love that as well, you know, so not to romanticize it too much, but it does feel like there's this lost Eden feeling that's driving some of that longing that we have.
Brianna: I think so. I think there's a lot of push and pull in these themes of like, well, yeah, the best thing for a wild animal is for them to probably not interact with humans as much as possible.
That being said, being a wild animal is really difficult. And they are exposed to a lot of things that we aren't.
Sarah: That's why we shouldn't stress them out because they're already under so much pressure.
Brianna: Yeah. How can I do it all? How can I have it all as a coyote?
Sarah: I'm just trying to collect all my nuts before the winter and also find a suitable mate. How can I have it all? That's what a squirrel's saying when she's stocking nuts in her cheek.
Brianna: She's going, “I can have it all. I can have it all.” But that's what I find so compelling about this Keiko story is that it brings up all these themes, and it's going too far in one direction. It's never going to be the answer.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: And everyone kind of rallies around a really particular, pointed perspective on how to address this issue of like, how do you put an animal back in the wild? And the answer is that, well, a no one knows what the clear answer was.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: And also I believe that everyone involved in this story, truly in their heart of hearts, had the best of intentions for Keiko along the way. Like everyone just had a very different idea of what was the best thing for him.
For some people, it was, well, he shouldn't go back to the wild. He should just stay in Oregon. Or, come hell or high water, we're going to release him. And it doesn't matter whether he's ready or not. But just him being in the wild is better than him being in captivity, even if it's in a sea pen in Iceland.
And part of that is everyone, again, they wanted the best for Keiko. They were acting with the best of intentions. But it is also clear to me, or it seems apparent that there is ego wrapped in it. And I don't necessarily mean arrogance, I just mean that…
Sarah: Yeah. The human inability to sort of see things totally clearly, maybe, where there's just like, we're always seeing somebody else and their needs, especially if they can't articulate them through this kind of screen of our own subjectiveness.
Brianna: Yes. Yeah, exactly. A really great quote from a book that I love, that is not about Keiko, it's about wolves. Wolfish by Erika Berry. She has this wonderful quote where she says, “To understand an animal exists neither to kill you nor to cuddle you, is to untangle your ego from its life. To see it as complex and wild, worthy of existence, independent of your feelings about it.”
And I don't know, I just feel like that encapsulates some of the push and pull of, we wanted the best for Keiko, and we were doing our best, really. Acting, I think, in a really commendable way as human beings. Like we really came together and tried to do something extraordinary, and like real life happens. It didn't necessarily go to plan, and it wasn't executed perfectly.
But yeah, I just think if we had sort of struck a middle ground in there somewhere, then that could have been quote unquote, “the correct way to go about it.” But hindsight's always 20/20, so yeah, it's hard to say.
Sarah: Well, and speaking about, I mean, this kind of gets to also my question of what's his life like between being captured in Iceland and then ending up in a movie somehow about 15 years later.
But also, I mean, that brings us to something I realize we haven't actually… you saying that is making me realize we haven't talked about this yet, which is like, what is Keiko like? Like what kind of a whale is he?
Brianna: Yeah, I know. That's actually a very important aspect of this story. Because like, people, like dogs, like any animal, I think whales, orcas have personalities and they can be very different from each other. And what is the strongest consensus about Keiko is that he was a really friendly whale. He was really easy to work with. He got along with people really well.
And it's like at some point in the book, Kenneth Brower makes the point of this character trait of his, of working really well with people and getting along with people really well. While it would've never been relevant in the wild and would've never come up, it actually served him really well in his life.
Sarah: He's like the Dick Van Dyke of whales.
Brianna: Yeah. And he has been compared, I think in one place he was compared to a golden retriever. In another place he was compared to a Labrador. In another book he was compared to a Saint Bernard. Like he is just described as a very sweet and very passive whale.
And some descriptions are kind of funny because they kind of make him sound, I don't know, like maybe he wasn't the sharpest whale, but also it was like maybe he just wasn't very motivated.
Sarah: As my mom says, of her dog. “Not the sharpest poodle in the drawer.”
Brianna: Yeah, that's what I say about my other dog, Precious. I'm like, eh, you know…
Sarah: This is my daughter, Murphy. This is my other daughter, Murphy's sister.
Brianna: Yeah, I know. I haven't brought her up, even though Precious takes up a lot of my brain space these days, with her many needs.
Sarah: She was a retired endurance athlete, Brianna.
Brianna: I know, exactly. She doesn't have to answer to anybody.
Sarah: It's like you're taking care of Kipchoge in there.
Brianna: Wait, it's like taking care of what?
Sarah: Isn't that like the marathoner, Kipchoge, who's beating everybody's records?
Brianna: Oh.
Sarah: He runs these crazy fast marathons.
Brianna: Oh, maybe. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, she is, I mean, for those listening that don't know, Precious is a retired sled dog. Both my dogs are retired sled dogs, and Precious at least once ran the Iditarod. So she is a professional athlete, now retired. She spends her days wandering the beaches of Oregon and eating dead bird carcasses when I'm not looking. uh.
Sarah: He is the sled dog of whales.
Brianna: Yeah. He's like the Precious of whales. He's very friendly and very sweet, and he loves people.
Sarah: And does he get exhibited in Iceland after they catch him, or is he immediately sold on Temo or whatever the equivalent?
Brianna: He was held in Iceland. From what I can tell, he wasn't on display, necessarily. There were a few whaless being held, essentially waiting to be sold to the next place.
Sarah: Just like that guy in that weird Jurassic Park movie with the dinosaur auctions.
Brianna: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly. I love that there actually are a lot of parallels to Jurassic Park in this movie right there in the story.
So Keiko was held in Iceland for a few years. His early years are really murky because there just wasn't much documentation.
Sarah: He has lost years like Shakespeare did.
Brianna: Yeah, yeah. It's possible that the confirmation of him sort of arriving into the human world was in an Icelandic newspaper on November 6, 1979. And the first place he goes actually after Iceland is Canada. And he wasn't first named Keiko at first. Supposedly, he was named Siggy, which was the name of the son of the captain, while he was kind of like in this holding pe
Sarah: That's such an absent dad thing to do. Like, not to profile this guy unfairly, but he’s like, “I named a whale after you. I'm sorry I missed your play.”
Brianna: Right. I am gone at sea fishing for herring and capturing whales for months at a time, but I named a whale after you.
Sarah: They're going to change it.
Brianna: They're going to change it. So pretty much immediately when he gets to Canada. So he first goes to Marine Land.
Sarah: They're like, he doesn't look like a Siggy. Don't be silly.
Brianna: That's silly. I guess so. I don't know why they changed it. But he goes to Marine Land of Ontario near Niagara Falls, and they changed his name to Kago, K-A-G-O. And that means ‘little boy’ in Icelandic, supposedly.
Sarah: God, he's like the Black Beauty of whales. Remember Black Beauty? Life was so hard for Black Beauty.
Brianna: Oh, Black Beauty. Oh my gosh. I need to reread that.
Sarah: I think Black Beauty was an important book in the history of the animal welfare movement. Like, don't quote me on that, but I think I might have something there.
Brianna: Yeah. I mean in a way it's kind of similar-ish to The Call of the Wild, from what I remember, of just following a animal's life.
Sarah: I mean, for people who did not get to be sensitive little girls, Black Beauty is a memoir as told by a horse about his various owners, some of which were very abusive.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Horse memoirs.
Brianna: We need more horse memoirs. Just, I can see how it would be maybe illuminating for a lot of people to really think about the whole of an animal's life, and where that animal was before they arrived in your life and where they went after. And how an animal is just like, a horse or a pet especially, is just at the whim of humans for their entire life.
And Keiko certainly was. That's the short story of his life is he was just a whale that was moved around a lot. Because humans made decisions for him for his entire life.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: And he spent about five years there. And these years are also kind of murky. There's not tons of information, but he shared a tank with about five other whales, and he was reportedly bullied by the other whales.
This speaks to his personality, that he was just a kind of submissive, passive whale. And even though the other whales, there were other Icelandic whales, and actually one of the other whales during this time in his tank was Tillicum. So he was another Icelandic whale. Though he wasn't a part of the same pod that Keiko was from. But Keiko was what one of the other authors of Keiko’s story said he was at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Sarah: Like when you have chickens.
Brianna: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. There was a pecking order of sorts. And also, think about how these animals are highly social and then you remove them from their family unit, from their pod, and then you stick them in a tank with essentially strangers.
Sarah: Yeah, it's like whale jail.
Brianna: Yeah. So it makes sense that the whales might pick on each other. Again, not to anthropomorphize, but I feel like humans do this too. It's similar behavior we observe in jails or prisons. You take a bunch of people and kind of force them to inhabit a space together.
Sarah: Yeah. Or British boarding school
Brianna: Or that, yeah. Any situation where some of the choice of who you interact with on a daily basis has been taken away from you.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. It's like Boy by Roald Dahl.
Brianna: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sarah: I love how I'm passionately against anthropomorphizing. Unless I do it, then it's fine. Then it's cool.
Brianna: Well, you know what actually sums up the issue of an anthropomorphizing for me, is it's a Sarah Anderson comic. Do you know Sarah Anderson? I think that's her name.
Sarah: No.
Brianna: She has this one, it’s like four panels, and the first panel is a scientist at a conference. And she says something like, “And therefore we cannot definitively say what an animal is thinking or feeling.”
And then the next panel is her about to open the door to go home, and her cat's waiting for her, and she opens the door and the cat leaps into her arms. And the scientist says, “Ah, I missed you too.”
To me, that's just, that's it in a nutshell. It's like, yeah, we can't say it, but also we do know on some level.
Sarah: But if you know in the conscious part of your brain that when you're thinking hard, you're trying to maybe… I don't know. Because then it's like, there's a question of what is empathy and when does it become something else? Or what are the varieties of it?
Because I feel like for some people, empathy is like, well, I value your perspective by considering it to be similar to my own, or that like me, valuing your life is assuming there to be similarities. And I feel like perhaps a deeper level or a more capacious level of empathy is thinking really hard about what might motivate someone different from you, including if they're a killer whale.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And also accepting the mystery of just the things that you can't know, you know?
Brianna: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sarah: Like I think accepting lack of understanding is actually an underrated part of relationships.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: I guess being like, I don't know why this is important to you, but it's important to you and that's all that matters. And I don't need you to explain it to me in a way that makes it make sense to me.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: I care about you and I'll do it.
Brianna: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking of. Like the most important or significant gift I guess you can give in a relationship is just being like, I believe what you're telling me. I'm not going to tell you I think I know better than you that what's best for you.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: And I think I've struggled with that at times in my life of realizing like, oh, I am not the arbiter of what is best for this person in my life even though my God, sometimes you really feel that way about someone that you care about. You're like, man, if you just did this one thing differently.
But it's just fully recognizing that this other being in your life, be it an animal or a person, they're the arbiters of their own life. They are the final say of what is best for them and what they need.
Sarah: Yeah. Like how I make a nice bed for my cat, and he prefers to curl up on an empty pizza box.
Brianna: Yeah. That's his prerogative. Like he can do that. And I think that is the issue with, I don't know if we're trying to dial in on where the line is of the issue of anthropomorphizing.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: I do think it's somewhere in there of letting go of the idea that I know what's best for you and not fully listening.
Sarah: Right. So it's kind of, I mean, it's like parenting, I guess, in a way. This attempting to live in a way where you can be a good steward of nature where humility is part of that toolkit and being able to listen to the extent that you're able to. Which is harder if someone communicates differently because they're of a different species.
Brianna: Right. I know. So that's the whole issue, right? Like, I mean, we have a hard time with this as humans, and we can talk to each other.
Sarah: Right. Yeah. We have a hard enough time understanding each other.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Even if we share a language and a dialect and everything.
Brianna: Yeah. And then if we try to do the same for an animal that has no language, at least as far as we understand language, and it communicates in really different ways and doesn't even have like the same concepts that we do, then it's a harder thing to figure out. Like how your dog might be expressing what they need in a given moment.
Sarah: Right. Looking for clues and being observant is different from looking for confirmation of the emotion you assume they would have or you would like them to have or something.
Brianna: Right. I think with whales especially, what happens with projection is that whales don't have an expressive face. And so I think it's easy for us to project a lot of emotions on them.
Sarah: What a good point.
Brianna: What's that film device where it's like you have…
Sarah: The montage effect.
Brianna: Yeah, where you have someone with a blank expression in one frame, and then in the next frame you have something sad. So then you are like, oh, that person's sad, even though their face is pretty neutral.
But then if the next frame was something happy, you might interpret their emotion as something different just by the juxtaposition of those images. And I think that happens with animals, especially animals.
Sarah: Oh God. Yeah.
Brianna: That don't have, like, we just kind of take our feelings in the given moment and that's the frame of the happy thing or the sad thing adjacent to the animal's facial expression. And we're like, oh, they're happy too. Or oh, they're sad about this. Or, you know, we let our imaginations run wild.
Sarah: Right. Well, and infamously, that's why the not live action because it was so computer generated, but that's why the like weird hyper-realistic Lion King. I think part of why it weirded so many people out. Because lions don't have eyebrows. Like we gave them eyebrows in the animated version because animators recognized that they needed to be made to look more like dogs so that they could have facial expressions that people could read. But if you just do a lion with no eyebrows, then it's like those lions were not emoting.
Brianna: No. I mean, I haven't seen it because I just on at this point refuse to see it.
Sarah: Because your life is too short to watch a non-emotive lion? Because I think that the stage show of the Lion King probably feels more real to people because then it's like these extremely stylized, basically puppet versions of the characters. But it's like a story about human emotions.
So if you're mapping that onto animals, and then you go to the literal animal that doesn't convey those emotions because it was a human invention to begin with, then it's going to be weird.
Brianna: Yeah. It's kind of missing the point of what made it a compelling story? I mean, yeah, it's cool that they're lions. Like, I'm not saying that I don't love that aspect of it.
Sarah: We all love lions.
Brianna: But there's a limit. We love lions, but that's kind of missing the point of what made it a compelling story. And what made it a compelling story is the emotions of it.
Sarah: Right. You know, and then the stories that humans tell about animals are often about ourselves, you know? I mean, with exceptions. And Free Willy is kind of an exception. But it's also the whale story as an allegory for the kids' story.
Brianna: Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah: You know, this whale and this kid have both been bounced around, and that he's kind of a foster whale as in real life.
And where does he go after he is in the scary holding facility in Iceland? Like what's the path that he takes to Hollywood?
Brianna: He eventually, again, this time period is a just a little blurry. And he just, from what I can read, he was just sold to an amusement park in Mexico City called, Aventura, which is still around today. It is a Six Flags now and it's in the middle of Mexico City. Which Mexico City is in a high desert. The elevation is something like 7,800 feet and really dry weather. So basically, a whale has never experienced anything like that before, that I can safely say.
Sarah: Willy’s never dreamed or even wanted to go to the mountains, and yet here he is.
Brianna: So yeah, there he was.
Sarah: Wow. And poor Keiko, my God. It's like as far from the ocean as you can get, in a way.
Brianna: In a sense, yeah. Especially vertically. He gets to Ventura. They immediately have to change his name for the final time. Because, well, you'll remember his name now was Kago.
Sarah: Oh, yes. I remember enough Spanish 101 to know where this is going,
Brianna: So I'm sure that he arrived and they were like, what's his name? They're like, Kago. And they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We can't have a whale that means, “I shit”, which is what I believe it means. Or like two shit or something.
Sarah: Jokes just write themselves, you have to admit it.
Brianna: Poor Keiko. Like he didn't want to be Keiko. Well, he didn't even have a name. You know, who knows?
Sarah: Like, he doesn't care. Again, we're just going to be dancing on this line the whole time.
Brianna: Yeah, right. So they changed his name to Keiko, which is actually like a feminine Japanese name that means ‘lucky one’, which feels very prescient for his story.
And Keiko, by all accounts, was just absolutely adored by his keepers in Mexico City. He had three young, female trainers, Claudia Terron, Renata Fernandez, and Carla Corral. So while Keiko was in Mexico City, he did appear in a few telenovelas.
Sarah: Oh my God. What? What was he doing in these telenovellas?
Brianna: I honestly, I don't even know. Like my Spanish isn't good enough for me to follow, but you can find him on YouTube.
Sarah: Okay. We need to find out if it's at all possible. Because we're going to do this in two chapters. For chapter two, did anyone get dangled over his enclosure in a telenovella? Was he used in a James Bond kind of a way? Was he friendly? We’ve got to know.
Brianna: I thought you died when you fell into Keiko's tank. No, that was my twin sister.
So he was loved by his trainers and he was loved by people in Mexico. And I haven't listened in full to the Serial podcast yet, I've just kind of scanned the transcripts to make sure we're not overlapping too much. And I will eventually, I'm very excited to listen to the first episode, because the first episode was done in collaboration with a Mexican radio station. And so the first episode was from what I can tell, just stories about Keiko from the perspective of people living in Mexico City and just how much everyone loved him. And he was like, I think they said he was like Mexico's pet. He was like Mickey Mouse.
Sarah: Which is so similar to the way Oregonians have felt about him. And it never, for some reason, never occurred to me that people there loved him just as much.
Brianna: Right. He spent like 13 years there. I believe he arrived in 1985. And then he would go to Newport in 1996.
Sarah: It's like 11 years.
Brianna: Yes. Yeah. 11 years. So he spent a good amount of time there.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: Unfortunately, the issue in Mexico is that as much as people loved him, the park was not really well equipped to take care of an animal like Keiko.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: Killer whales prefer high latitudes, meaning you're getting towards the sort of polar regions. They like colder climates and inhabit more further north and further south across the globe. They're not really equatorial, and the water in Keiko's tank was always too warm for him. And so he became very, in order to not overheat, he just wouldn't move around that much.
Sarah: Hmm.
Brianna: From what I understand, the water was just like the city water that had chlorine in it. And then they would add salt to it to make it salty, but it just wasn't really the best quality sea water for him.
And then of course, I think infamously, his tank was really very small. The tank that you see in Free Willy, where he is in the stadium, that's his tank in Mexico City.
Sarah: Okay. I love how that kid opens a door in Oregon and walks into an enclosure in Mexico.
Brianna: It’s the wardrobe to Narnia.
Sarah: It's a subtle knife. Yeah. Well, and how does he get the curly fin?
Brianna: So that's an interesting point. Because I think people, including myself, thought like, oh, that's just something that happens to killer whales when they're in captivity. And that's sort of true, but there's a little more nuance to it.
This was explained to me by Dr. Naomi Rose, who was involved with the project, and she explained that male killer whales, they have a very, very tall dorsal fin that gets to like six feet. Female killer whales, their dorsal fin never gets that tall. They kind of stay in proportion to themselves. Like they just kind of become a bigger version of a baby whale versus a male killer whale when they go through puberty, their dorsal fin all of a sudden becomes really tall, like around six feet or so. Their pectoral fins get really big and their flukes of their tail also get really big.
And they get so big that they also curl around. And this is also a little different depending on killer whales around the world. So you have what's called different eco types, which is basically like an ecologically distinct population. And they'll, I guess kind of, maybe this is a little bit of a stretch, but I think it's similar to people. They're all the same species and then depending on where you are in the world, they look a little different from each other.
So killer whales in Antarctica, they have eye patches, like really weirdly small. When you look at it like, it looks very different from a southern resident killer whale, where you're like, huh.
So the male killer whales, they have this big, tall fin and that happens during puberty. So if they are caught before they hit puberty and then they are in captivity and they spend a lot of time at the surface, they're, their dorsal fin will likely fall over. Not like guaranteed, but it's just that it's…
Sarah: Because it's spending too much time out of the water.
Brianna: Yeah. There's not that okay. I don't know that hydrodynamic support they get from traveling long distances. Because killer whales in the wild, they can travel like a hundred miles in a day. They are covering so much ground all the time and they're not hanging out at the surface all the time. I mean, obviously they come up to breathe, but they're not just lulling around on the surface.
There are examples of male killer whales in captivity though, that they were caught later in their life and so their fin shot up before they were caught, and so kind of developed, I guess, more structural integrity. And so their fin doesn't flop over in captivity. But Keiko, as I mentioned, he was caught when he was like two or three years old, so his fin was likely going to flop over no matter what.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: So in Mexico, he doesn't have the best conditions. His tank was 90 feet long by 43 feet wide by 20 feet deep. And I believe when Keiko got to Oregon, eventually he was 20 or 21 feet long. He was still like a sub-adult male so he could barely, like if his nose was touching the surface, his tail would be touching the bottom. Like there just really wasn't, his tank was designed mostly for bottle-nose dolphins.
He shared the tank with a couple of other dolphins and no other killer whales. He was the only one during this time because his tank was too warm. He developed what was called a papilloma virus on his fins, and I believe a little bit on his tail stock. So papilloma virus is something similar to like a herpes virus. Keiki developed these painful warts.
Sarah: And now he's at an increased risk for cervical cancer.
Brianna: Yeah, that's true. They have to get screened every so often, but if you watch Free Willy, you can see it, they couldn't hide . And it just looks like these little lumpy growths where his pictorial fins meet his body.
Sarah: Okay, cool.
Brianna: And like a little bit again, on his tail stock. And it was just probably not comfortable for him and just his body's just kind of fighting a virus continuously. So he was not in the best of health.
His food also was not high quality either, I don't believe. The park really had great access to really fresh fish. According to Kenneth Brower in his book, the fish that he got was trucked down from San Diego, like from SeaWorld in San Diego, at times, in an unrefrigerated truck.
Sarah: That's got to be a long drive.
Brianna: Yeah. I think it's like a 13-hour drive, or no, sorry, 31-hour drive according to Google Maps.
Sarah: Well, that's even longer.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: So yeah, the heat, the poor diet, and the virus, this all just contributed to his deteriorating health. And this is the state that Keiko is in when people see the movie and start calling that 1-800 for whales number asking about, hey, whatever happened to Willy.
And you know, the movie did really well. They made it for $20 million, it grossed $153 million.
Sarah: Man, $20 million for a movie where you have to work with a large predator is, you know, we're never going to get back to there.
Brianna: So reading some of the interactions between Aventura and Warner Brothers or Earth Island Institute. Sometimes I feel like, I don't know, I could be reading this wrong, but I feel like Reno Aventura just wasn't fully briefed on the financial resources that Warner Brothers had.
Sarah: Hmm.
Brianna: I just feel like they didn't really leverage their negotiations as much as they probably could have. But the movie did way better than anyone was expecting.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: And then the phones were ringing off the hook for 1-800-4-whales, and they got supposedly around, and I'm not sure exactly the timeframe, Philip said it was just within the next several months they received 300,000 phone calls.
Sarah: I believe it.
Brianna: Yeah. No, I do too. I mean, it was like we did it. It was pretty easy to just call and leave a message. And I think an interesting point here is that Philip's, he's done really great campaign work on other environmental issues regarding the ocean and whales and that sort of thing. And I think he had a bit of a misjudgment here in that he thought in putting the number at the end of the movie, people were going to call asking how they can help whales in general. And he was very surprised when pretty much every single phone call was just asking about Keiko.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: Which to me, is like well, yeah, of course. That's how human beings work, right?
Sarah: That's human behavior for you.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: You're like, hey, wouldn't it be great if you could think about whales more? And we're like, what about that one whale? Tell us about the one we were looking at for the last two hours. We get attached.
Brianna: Yes, exactly. It's easier for us to empathize again, with an individual, rather than thinking of a population. And I understand conservation workers, they have to think about the population at large, they can't really be too concerned about the suffering or trials and tribulations of individual whales.
And at the time, Earth Island Institute's main concern in regards to whale conservation was whaling activity taking place in other countries. To them, that was the tie in. It was like, okay, we'll do this movie about a whale that'll get people to care about whales and be able to push political leaders and legislation about banning products from countries that are continuing commercial whaling practices.
So Phillips recalls that the phone number, he thought that this phone number would be sufficient and get kind of people galvanized around caring about these whaling issues overseas. But what becomes very clear is that people are, and very notably to the Kaiko story, children were very concerned about Keiko.
Sarah: Do you remember this? What's your personal experience of this part of the story?
Brianna: I have been trying to remember. Like I followed the Keiko story really closely, and I wouldn't be surprised if I either called this number or wrote a letter or sent a postcard or whatever, being like, you need to like, you need to make sure Keiko gets released to the wild. Because that's what a lot of kids did.
Sarah: What do you remember just about that feeling of being invested in it? Like do you remember, I don't know, seeing the movie and what feelings you had about Keiko at that age?
Brianna: I think why it was partially really powerful to children is that I think kids can really understand the fear of being separated from your family.
Sarah: Mhm.
Brianna: I think it's a really primal fear that we all have. And it is like being separated from your family for a child is like you are not going to do well without your family. Your chances of survival are, are definitely lower. And I think that's just ingrained in our DNA as social beings, especially that we need our families to survive.
And so then you have this story about a very charismatic animal. I'll also say, have we said the words ‘charismatic megafauna’ yet? Because I'm surprised it hasn't come up more.
Sarah: No, we have not. Tell us about that for a second.
Brianna: ‘Charismatic megafauna’ is a term I think mostly actually used in the conservation and environmentalist space. And using a charismatic animal like a panda or a tiger or a whale to inspire people to care about an environmental issue of some form. So there's deforestation or pollution or climate change or whatever it is, and megafauna usually comes from the fact that these are usually large animals. Because we just seem to be drawn to lot larger animals and using these symbols to then inspire change, inspire action that would protect other animals that are kind of under the umbrella that would be impacted.
So like if you pass legislation that reduces overfishing or something in order to protect whales, well that's not just going to protect the whales. It's going to have really positive outcomes for other species in the ocean too. But you can't really get people as excited about like plankton, even though it's a very important part of the ecosystem.
Sarah: Because we don't empathize with plankton sufficiently.
Brianna: No. Yeah.
Sarah: We could probably all spend an hour per day sitting around attempting to empathize with plankton, but life has just gotten so busy.
Brianna: Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's kind of like a shortcut, like an emotional shortcut.
Sarah: Right. Or it's like that animal is like president of the ecosystem or something.
Brianna: Yeah. Right.
Sarah: Yeah. Where it's like, there's probably like within, I don't know, to use the northwest as an example, probably lots of little mammals and bugs and little clams that are extremely important to the balance that we're trying to maintain. But you're not going to get people excited about them, but that we will be excited about, what's an animal and I don't know, bears.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. Or I think of, there's a big push on the Oregon coast to restore sea otter populations.
Sarah: There you go.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: We love an otter. We'll do anything for otters.
Brianna: We freaking love otters. I mean, they are an important keystone species in kelp forests along the coast. And we do need them, but they also, just in bringing them back, it's going to have a kind of cascading effect of things that are positive for the sea urchin populations. And that they'll help control the sea urchin populations on the coast, which will have a positive effect on the kelp. And, you know, it just has these domino effects,
Sarah: Which is nice, because it's a case of humans being kind of silly in our own way and being like, I like that they hold hands. But, right. Our desire for cute things is actually causing us to accidentally do something that's helpful in many more ways than that. So that's kind of nice.
Brianna: Yeah, it's a useful tool that a lot of groups do use, and whales are definitely a charismatic megafauna that has been used in that way.
Sarah: I'm imagining whales being like, “Oh, I don't know. I just like to tell stories.” That's my whale impression.
Brianna: So, yeah, Philip concedes that, alright, this is going to be about Keiko. As much as I think our time and effort would be better spent focusing on killer whales or just whales at large across the world, he shifted his perspective and realizing like, okay, Keiko becomes a symbol that people can relate to.
He said, “But then I saw the power in it concentrating on Keiko as a metaphor, getting Keiko back to his family, or at least doing the best we could for Keiko. We didn't know whether we could get him all the way back to his family, but we knew getting him out of Mexico was important. Right from the beginning, the goal was rescue, rehabilitation, release. We wanted to bring him back to health and we wanted to release him. I started seeing the power in that. I can talk about it, the impact of fisheries on marine mammals until I'm blue in the face, and lots of times the little kids nod off. Talk about Keiko and they're totally wide-eyed. I had never experienced that.”
Sarah: Hmm.
Brianna: So from his perspective in this, in the conservation work, he's like, all right, this is the thing that's going to get people to care about these issues. So he takes on, with some conversations with Warner Brothers.
So Warner Brothers is also getting a lot of heat at this time from the media. because there's literal children being like, “What's happening to Keiko?” And the media's just eating this up.
Sarah: Free Keiki. Keiko is innocent.
Brianna: And so the media is putting a lot of pressure on Warner Brothers to do something about it. And this is where I feel like Warner Brothers probably starts to feel a little bit like Michael Ironside in the movie, where they're like, God, this whale's a pain in our ass.
And so notably, after this is all said and done, once Warner Brothers steps out of the picture they make it very clear, we are never having a real whale in any movie ever again. It's never happened after.
Sarah: Michael Ironside.
Brianna: They didn't want him to die, but they they…
Sarah: He’s like, you give these environmentals an inch, they take a mile. It's all Transformers from now on, or whatever we make next.
Brianna: Yeah. Well, and all the follow-up Free Willy sequels, it's all animatronic.
Sarah: If we put a charismatic megafauna in a movie, it's going to be Ben Affleck.
Brianna: Yes. Only humans and CGI from now on, or animatronics. But yeah, they're getting heat from it and they're calling David Phillips and being like, “We need help. We don't know what to do.” And this is when Phillips is like, okay, Earth Island Institute is going to take on this monumental task of helping Keiko. And the goal, like he said, was we're going to try to get him back to his family, but they're sort of taking it in incremental steps.
So first they were like, we just need to get him out of his situation in Reno Aventura, because he's not going to last much longer. And several people said that. They said he's not going to make it if he stays here much longer.
Sarah: He's chronically elderly.
Brianna: Yeah, yeah. He has chronic health issues. So that's when this project starts to form. So there's the formation of the Free Willy Kaiko Foundation, which is a foundation housed by Earth Island Institute. And they immediately start trying to fundraise and trying to figure out, okay, well if he's not going to live in Mexico anymore, where is he going to live? And they looked at several different options.
They had a few different bids on places that Keiko could go next. One of them, they had some applications from a girl from a place in Canada who put together this whole packet of like, oh, Keiko could come live in this bay by my house. And they said it actually was like, I think they were like pretty impressed with this proposal she put together. But for a few different reasons it wasn't going to work out.
Another notable option that wasn't really much of an option was Neverland Ranch. So Michael Jackson actually put in his offer of well, Keiko could come live at my place at Neverland Ranch.
Sarah: Michael. No, no.
Brianna: I'm sure this wasn't really entertained by anybody, but one of the main legal reasons this couldn't happen is that within the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Marine mammals, if they are in captivity, have to be on public display. They can't reside at a private residence.
Sarah: Oh, interesting.
Brianna: I don't know why we can't make this the case for every wild animal.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: Or you know, exotic animal.
Sarah: I guess I assumed because the precedent had already been set, and it's harder to change it once it's already kind of, you know. So it's like we already set it up so that weird, shady guys can hoard big cats and we can't change it now.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: That's my impression of the American legal system.
Brianna: It's good. Yeah. It's, uh, so thankfully, you know, that was never going to be an option. But there's a few places they considered. And I am not positive exactly how the Oregon Coast Aquarium came up. One story that I came across is, you know the artist Wyland”
Sarah: Of course! Brianna, I lived in Honolulu as a kid. It was Wyland on every corner. It was like the beautiful murals of the apple cheeked children riding orcas around. Do I know Wyland? I think we had a Wyland book when I was a kid.
Brianna: My parents have that print in their house. Like this is, yeah.
Sarah: I loved Wyland.
Brianna: Yeah, yeah. I know. I love Wyland, too. My parents had this book because again, they love Wyland. They had that print, they have a bronze statue, like First Breath or whatever. It's like a humpback lifting a calf.
Sarah: Oh my God. I've seen that statue in your parents' house. Yeah.
Brianna: My sister and I would hang Christmas ornaments on it at Christmas time, which my parents were like, okay. But we also had this book, and it was about Wyland murals. So if you go to almost any major city on the west coast, including Alaska.
Sarah: Oh yeah, you showed that to me.
Brianna: Yeah. There's likely a building with a Wyland mural and it's of a whale, and he called them Whaling Walls. So there's one here in Newport. I can't believe it's taken me this long to mention that I live in Newport, but I do as of a year and a half ago. And there’s a Whaling Wall in Newport on the bay front, and it's of gray whales.
There's one in Anchorage, Alaska that I would see all the time. That one was of, I think, Bowhead and Belugas. There's one's in San Diego, they’re just all across. And he was doing this tour and it was a conservation message behind it as well. He was trying to bring attention.
Wyland's done a lot of work with environmentalists and activists that are fighting for conservation of whales and dolphins. And he got to Oregon and he was at first approached by the director of the Oregon Coast Aquarium at the time, Phyllis Bell, asking if he could paint a wall on the side of the outside of the aquarium. And he eventually decided to not do the aquarium, but that was how he got in contact with Phyllis Bell, according to Wyland. He was one of the people that suggested to Phyllis Bell like, hey, you should think about taking in Keiko. And he certainly thinks he had something to do with that.
And I haven't come across yet how David Phillips came across the idea of Oregon Coast Aquarium. I don't know if like Phillips. Bell reached out to David Phillips after she spoke to Wyland, being like, hey, we'd love to have him. And for those listening that aren't familiar with the Oregon Coast Aquarium, this aquarium opened in 1992 in Newport, Oregon.
Sarah: I had no idea it was so new. That's amazing.
Brianna: I know. Isn't that crazy? It was really new. And the Oregon Coast Aquarium has a special place in my heart for many reasons. The Keiko story, and then I also volunteered there when I was like 12 years old, and I really love it as an institution. They're very education focused. They aren't about big, flashy shows with jumbotrons that say, ‘believe in magic’ and a random guy playing the electric guitar.
Sarah: They're about gently touching an anemone in a tide pool display.
Brianna: Yeah. Yes. And you know, they do have sea lions and seals and sea otters. A lot of them are, especially the ones that are still there now, are animals that were injured and were rehabilitated and then deemed like, you know, they weren't going to be able to survive in the wild anymore. So they become an ambassador for their species in that way. So they weren't like collected necessarily.
Some of the animals are collected, like the fish and octopus. But I know the marine mammals are not, and they're involved in a lot of rescue and rehabilitation of animals on the coast. They're actually in the process of building a marine wildlife rescue center. And it's not going to be a center that's available for public viewing. It's just going to be a place for if someone finds a sick seal or sea lion on the coast, then they have the appropriate facility and permits to restore that sea lion back to health and then release it.
So anyway, as an institution, I have really loved them and their work. And this seemed, and I think that appealed to David Phillips as well. He was like, okay, this is the kind of place I could see Keiko going. And then the environment was more appropriate for Keiko as well, the water. They were going to be able to pump in actual sea water from the Bay, from Quinta Bay.
Sarah: Just like when they filmed Titanic.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. They were just going to have better access to resources. And so once they landed on Newport being the location for Keiko's next home, they started building his tank. And again, this is like where the money side of things really comes into play.
So Warner Brothers gave some money to help relocate Keiko, and Earth Island Institute was really, really starting their fundraising campaigns, asking people to donate a few dollars here and there. And a lot of kids donated money, so there's lots of stories of classrooms getting together and breaking open their piggy banks and pulling their money together and sending it to Earth Island Institute.
As you can imagine, even with all of that goodwill and altruism demonstrated by the public and by these young kids, it still wasn't nearly enough to fund this astronomically expensive project. The success of a project comes down to leadership and to money, and that's going to change fairly substantially and is going to set the course for really the remainder of the project. That big decision is waiting for them when Keiko finally arrives in Oregon, which I will tell you about next time.
Sarah: And you know what else is waiting? A whole lot of gift shop stuff.
Brianna: Yes. We can go over my collection.
Sarah: And we can talk about the time I saw Keiko. Your experience with Keiko.
Brianna: Yes. Oh my gosh.
Sarah: With the acceptance that I am inevitably projecting my own emotions onto Keiko. I sure do love him.
Brianna: Me too. I really do love him. He's been a kind of companion to me, all these years thinking about him, and I'm so happy to share his story with you.
Sarah: Where can we find more of you while we wait for installment two to come out?
Brianna: Yeah. You can check out my website, briannabowman.com. I'm not so much on social media, though I am on LinkedIn if anyone wants to find me there. And I also am working on a podcast about this very story. It would be a narrative limited series podcast. So more of a kind of cinematic telling of this story. I've interviewed a lot of people involved with the project and if you would like to support that project of mine, you can go to the Patreon for it. The title of the podcast is, Rewilding: The Keiko Story.
Sarah: And you're also on the radio.
Brianna: Oh, yeah, that's right. If you happen to be in Central Oregon or the Willamette Valley or the Central Coast, you can hear me on the weekends for a weekend edition on KLCC. You can stream it online too, so support your local public radio station. Support NPR.
Sarah: Support your local whale.
Brianna: Support your local whales. Yeah.
Sarah: Brianna, thank you so much for coming and talking about Keiko and being so generous with your time and enthusiasm, which is the backbone of this show. Unbridled enthusiasm for Northwesterners, who no one could find a tank big enough for.
Brianna: Thank you.
Sarah: Until next time.
And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening to part one of this whale of a tale. And we're going to have part two for you in two weeks. Thank you to Brianna Bowman, our guest. You can find her website in our show notes. And thank you to the people who helped make the show, Miranda Zeitler is our producer and editor, and Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant. We can't wait to see you again in part two. See you soon.