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 2 with Brianna Bowman
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
The movies freed Willy, but what about Keiko? For the second part of our trilogy on the biggest aquatic star of the 90s, deep sea correspondent Brianna Bowman takes Sarah through Keiko’s journey to the Oregon Coast Aquarium for rehabilitation and the developing plan to return him to the open ocean. But first, both marine scientists and rich benefactors have to try to teach a killer whale to be wild again. Digressions include the books of Jean Craighead George, the tragedy of the puns we missed, regurgitated meat influencers, and Star Trek IV.
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 pt2
Sarah: What if that Manta shrimp is like the little girl in The Exorcist and it's like you're going to die up there?
Welcome to You’re Wrong About the podcast where we tell you about your favorite Oregon celebrities, and of course, the best one of all is Keiko. And with me today to talk about Keiko is certified orca girl and also dolphin girl, Brianna Bowman.
Brianna: Hi. Yes, I really should put that on my business card, I think. Certified Dolphin Girl.
Sarah: Dolphin girl.
Brianna: Dolphin girl. Did I ever tell you Sarah? This is kind of embarrassing.
Sarah: Good. Great way to start.
Brianna: This is how much of a Dolphin girl I am. Do you know what my first email address was?
Sarah: Dolphin girl?
Brianna: No, I was trying to be a little…
Sarah: Squeak. Squeak.
Brianna: I was trying to be a little cooler than just Dolphin girl. It was DolphinChica4@hotmail.
Sarah: That's so beautiful though. Okay. Do you know what my first AOL username was? I bet I've told you this before.
Brianna: No, I don't know.
Sarah: AmoreDragon88. Aren't those two both so on brand?
Brianna: They really are. We haven't changed at all.
Sarah: Yeah, you're still a dolphin chicken. I'm still in a moray dragon. You're at aol.com and then I read in like, you know, 17, it was like, you should never put your birth year in your email. And I was like, oh no.
Brianna: Oh, well what have I done? Oh, I have to say though, I think I was definitely a dolphin girl as a kid, and I think as a woman.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: I am an orca woman.
Sarah: That's interesting.
Brianna: I'm obsessed.
Sarah: Because you obsessed. Used to be really cute and people pleasing, and you would jump through hoops. And now you just want to attack billionaire's yachts.
Brianna: Yes. Actually that's a fair summary.
Sarah: It's pretty accurate. I feel like we should do a bonus episode on my lingering question of like, what is the deal with the orcas allegedly attacking billionaires yachts?
And do they hate capitalism specifically, because that would be very exciting.
Brianna: Say that again, but in a Jerry Seinfeld voice.
Sarah: What's the deal with these orcas? Why do they keep attacking billionaires?
Brianna: What is the deal with these organs?
Sarah: So, okay. So this is part two of the Keiko story. If you don't know who Keiko is, we bring you up to speed in the last episode. But if I may, in classic You’re Wrong About fashion, I'd like to attempt to summarize it, and you can correct me as needed.
Brianna: Go for it.
Sarah: Okay. So Keiko is a lovely, little whale, killer whale slash orca. And he certainly is killer and he is a sweet little guy.
Brianna: He’s very sweet.
Sarah: Yeah. And he was born around Iceland, obviously not in Iceland, in the seventies and was captured in 1979.
Brianna: Yeah. Oh yeah, ’78 or ‘79. Good memory as usual, Sarah.
Sarah: Thank you. At a time when random dick wheels were going around capturing killer whales for fun and profit, and to exhibit them and make ridiculous movies about them.
I realized after we recorded the other day that I actually have a poster for a different killer whale movie on my bathroom door. I forgot.
Brianna: Oh, you do?
Sarah: Yeah. Let me go open the door and then I can read it to us. Are killer whales an apex predator?
Brianna: Yes. Yeah, there's not really anything that is a threat to a killer whale besides people in the ocean.
Sarah: Yeah, I was going to say killer whales are the cutest apex predator, but actually, I think it's got to be polar bears.
Brianna: Oh yeah. Polar bears are pretty stinking cute, right?
Sarah: Because kids love polar bears. They're in Coke ads, they're drinking coke, they're looking at the sunset or the Northern lights, I guess.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And yet, according to Blair Braverman, who certainly would know in real life, polar bears see us much as I would see a delicious Taco Bell gordita.
Brianna: Oh yeah. Yes. No, polar bears are, I know we're supposed to be wary of grizzly bears if we're out in the woods.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I certainly don't want to force them to be friends with me.
Brianna: No. And with a grizzly bear, it's…
Sarah: I know how that goes.
Brianna: It's mostly like, you just don't want to surprise them because they might hurt you that way. A polar bear will, as far as I know, try to eat you. They do see you as a tasty snack. So not a good situation if you're near one.
Sarah: So, just so you know. Okay, so let me read you this Namu poster. So it's got a lovely painting of Namu.
Brianna: Namu. Yeah. I think.
Sarah: Namu, the killer whale with some asshole holding onto his fin and riding him while he leaps. Of course we love the idea of just like riding a beautiful animal.
Brianna: Yeah. We really wanted to make orcas like the horses of the ocean for us, I think.
Sarah: God, yeah. That's so depressing. And it's like, I mean, I guess if a horse could hold its own against a great white shark, I might think a little bit more about that. It's amazing that we got our way with horses. We should quit while we're, not ahead, Exactly, but, you know.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And the text says, “Anybody want to make friends with a very big, very wet, very playful killer whale?” Very wet question mark, three exclamation points. “He is the biggest hero in the whole wide world of adventure.” And then it's got a little girl with pigtails saying, “Don't let them hurt in a boo mommy. I love him.” See, you can see that Free Willy is working on a precedent that maybe had not been perfected yet.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: But sort of existed because there's so many narratives in American culture, and I'm sure pretty much any culture about kid and animal who become friends and understand each other.
Brianna: Yeah. Those still are my favorite stories. They were my favorite stories when I was a kid. I definitely gravitated to any story where a protagonist that's a young child making their best friend some sort of animal. Like, what was it in My Side of the Mountain, didn't he have a hawk?
Sarah: Peregrine falcon.
Brianna: A Peregrine falcon.
Sarah: Frightful.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: I think about frightful more often than actual people I have known in my life, or like family members, you know?
Brianna: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I can't remember this plot of Julie of the Wolves, if she actually had a connection.
Sarah: She is married off as a 13-year-old, I think. She's married to a fellow kid.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: I think she's in like Barrow or something, and she runs away and loses her bearing. And then she's adopted by a family of wolves. And they go hunting and then they regurgitate meat for her, which is so gross, and so great.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: You got to do what you got to do.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: I'm sure there's an influencer today who's thinking, you know what we should all be eating is regurgitated wolf meat.
Brianna: Oh God. There probably is, honestly.
Sarah: That's the next thing billionaires are going to pull, I swear to God.
Brianna: Oh, probably.
Sarah: While they listen to the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. We're predicting some really big trends here, I think, today.
Brianna: We really are.
Sarah: But I mean, I'll say that the success of this show, which has been listened to by more people than I would ever imagine possible when we started out, is to me further proof of my theory that obviously, people are different from each other, to quote Eve Sedgwick. But that there are a lot of basic human tendencies and drives, and one of them is that we're very curious and we love learning. If we didn't love learning, we wouldn't have landed on the moon.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: With computers that had less memory than probably what it takes to power one of those games where you have to save a king by sorting jewels.
Brianna: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We wouldn't have landed on the moon, and we wouldn't have to bring it back. We wouldn't have tried to free Keiko, I think.
Sarah: Exactly. And you wouldn't be listening to this wanting to know how this happens. Because this is also a way, I think, for you to tell us about some of the concepts in science that are behind everything that is happening and that we're going to learn today.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. It was an astronomical feat and we learned a lot, and it also did not go perfectly.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: And that is part of the process of science and learning and trying new things.
Brianna: I just want to say, people try to talk about the Keiko story in terms of was it a success or was it a failure? And I certainly used to think of it in those terms of this is very black and white. Did they achieve their goal or did they fail? And I think like all stories and just real life in general, the more interesting question is about what we did learn.
Sarah: Hmm.
Brianna: And the parts where we did fail to reach the goal and how we can do things differently next time. And understanding the nuance involved and all the shades of gray in between. And that's where the real interesting part of the story lies. It's not just a yes/no binary of whether we did what we set out to do.
Sarah: Yeah. I guess like in the newsboy strike.
Brianna: Yes, exactly.
Sarah: Well, and I feel like one of the things that we're going to get into maybe is also when so many people are working on a project, there being conflicting ideas of what the goal is.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: And so to catch us up, so he's a lovely little whale.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: He is captured, he ends up in a theme park that is now a Six Flags in Mexico City. So he's a whale at altitude.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: Which is funny to think about, but also worrying. And he's in a tank that's like, and I remember this from when I was a kid, to be clear, because our chapter last time ended with Keiko on its way to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which I remember. And which everyone was excited about in my memory, and it was huge, basically. Certainly for children, but I think kind of for everybody. And especially in Oregon. And that became kind of part of our identity, certainly as millennials, that we had provided transitional housing for Keiko.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: But, so he was in a tank that I remember learning as a kid was like, and that you reiterated in this episode, was consistently just too small and too warm for his needs, based on his species.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And then when they were making Free Willy, they were like, we need a whale. A whale that can act, that works well with people, and that isn't owned by SeaWorld who don't want us to work with their whales because for some reason they don't want to help with a movie that's about freeing whales.
And this theme park in Mexico was like, yeah, you can film with our whale. And so of course then we have our adolescent protagonist opening a door in Astoria, Oregon and then going through it, and he's in a theme park in Mexico City with Lori Petty and Keiko. And so it's like a lovely movie where they free Keiko, and he goes back to his pod and they're together again. And as we also talked about, killer whales are very social.
Brianna: Yes. Very social.
Sarah: And would it be fair to say don't thrive as loners?
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Which might be foreshadowing?
Brianna: Yes. There are some examples of loner killer whales, but I think it's sort of similar again to people in that it's not really the norm to have a completely isolated life.
Sarah: So we're telling the story of human beings coming together, kind of inadvertently making Keiko a symbol of what happens in the movie. He's the star of which, as you pointed out in the past, you can't think, and I can't think of a single example of this happening in any other case where fact imitates fiction to this extent. Unless you count things like Fantasia from American Idol playing herself in a movie, which I've also always found trippy.
Brianna: Oh yeah. The only other example I can think of President Zelinsky of Ukraine. Wasn't he an actor in a show about becoming president?
Sarah: Something like that. Keiko is really the president Zelinsky of the ocean. So, okay. As far last since we ended with Keiko on his way to Newport, Oregon.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: And the plan at the time, which I didn't realize as a little kid, because I'm sure no one explained this to me with enough nuance or I just ignored it possibly, was for him to be there for a while. But then ultimately to be brought back to the waters outside Iceland, where he was from.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: And my first question based on that, which I feel like we were a about to get into is, how do you transport a whale, especially if you don't have the Enterprise, like in the Star Trek movie I made you watch?
Brianna: Yeah. It's not easy, but you'd be surprised how much whale transport takes place.
Sarah: Okay. Say more about that.
Brianna: Well, it primarily happens by air.
Sarah: Oh.
Brianna: I believe that the plane that transported…
Sarah: I want an action movie about this.
Brianna: I know, right?
Sarah: The clock is ticking when you've got a whale on the cargo hold.
Brianna: Yes. And speaking of a ticking clock, I think where we ended last time, I was saying that there was a budget shortfall at this point in the story. So Earth Island Institute, we had our protagonist, David Phillips.
Sarah: What does David Phillips look like? Does he wear Tevas at all?
Brianna: So I was thinking about this. I was thinking about who would I cast in my movie about Keiko?
Sarah: Mark Ruffalo?
Brianna: Ooh, that's a good one actually.
Sarah: Okay.
Brianna: I was thinking Tom Hanks, actually
Sarah: Okay. Pro Tom Hanks.
Brianna: Okay, nice. Yeah. And with a beard, like grizzled looking.
Sarah: Kind of fed up with everybody, but still very nice in the end. Yeah.
Brianna: Yeah. I've spoken with David Phillips, and he is a very pleasant guy, really passionate about the work that he did. And he is very strategic. He was involved in a lot of media campaigns around Save the Dolphins in the seventies when it came to tuna fisheries.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: And yeah, I think he's very savvy, and he understands how to make these big projects come together. He's a project manager, essentially, in this story.
Sarah: Which is real world talk for a producer, from what I understand.
Brianna: Oh yeah, that's true. That is kind of, it is the same thing now that I'm getting more into this space. I'm like, oh yeah, that is what a producer is.
Sarah: There's an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where they take Richie's class on a field trip backstage to the Alan Brady Show, where the premise is that Dick Van Dyke is a comedy writer. And they try to introduce, I think, the kids to their producer who's walking by saying, “Don't talk to me. I got a big problem.” And I was like, that's a great depiction of producers.
Brianna: Okay, so we have David Phillips and he is like, “Crap, we need money. Like, now.” And they had at this point secured that they're going to take him to Oregon, the facility in Oregon that was going to house Keiko in the tank. It wasn't already in existence. They built that specifically for Keiko.
Sarah: Just like making Titanic. They built a tank for that, too.
Brianna: Oh really? I didn't know that.
Sarah: Yeah. That's a little trivia.
Brianna: So they built this tank for Keiko, and the deal was with Oregon Coast Aquarium, that the Free Willy Keiko Foundation was going to pay for it. So Oregon Coast Aquarium just got this huge facility for free, essentially.
Sarah: Oh, great. Sorry. I thought you were going to be like, and then they refuse to pay. I’ve become so jaded.
Brianna: Oh no. But they were behind on how much it would cost. Warner Brothers chipped in some money.
Sarah: Well, they're from Hollywood. They should have anticipated going over budget, but they never do.
Brianna: Yeah. And Earth Island Institute, they started fundraising quite a bit. So this is when we started getting these Keiko adoption kits that people, mostly kids.
Sarah: I remember this. Oh my god. Yeah. Yes. Wow. Holy shit, dude.
Brianna: So for a few dollars, you could get little updates about Keiko in the mail and get a picture of him and you can get a little certificate saying, “I'm helping free Keiko”, or whatever it said.
So they started that kind of fundraising. Keiko certainly had a personality that people felt like they knew and identified with.
Sarah: Yeah. And it does feel like we're really drawn to animals that possess what we see as kind of a humanoid intelligence. But interestingly, what that often means is that they're more likely to be dangerous to us, you know?
And I'll also just say another story I heard recently. There was this woman, I think in the Netherlands, at a zoo who kept visiting this gorilla. Maybe you've heard this story. This gorilla named Bokito. And she was like, we have a bond. And part of that bond is sustained eye contact.
Brianna: Oh, I vaguely remember this.
Sarah: And I visit this gorilla all the time, and I love this gorilla. And then after this gorilla had a particularly stressful day, he somehow escaped his enclosure and attacked her. And went on kind a bit of a rampage, and it all ended up okay. But it turns out that that's a sign of aggression for gorillas. But for a person, sustained eye contact is what they make you do in acting class to open up your emotional pores, you know? So it's just like a complete difference in how we process something and assuming that human body language is universal, especially with primates.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: You know, they didn't have to gun down Bokito, which is good.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: But also, this woman kept visiting and kept looking at it.
Brianna: Really? After she got attacked?
Sarah: Yes.
Brianna: Oh wow.
Sarah: She's just a girl who can't say no.
Brianna: She was still convinced of their bond, even after. Oh geez.
Sarah: So there's just this theme here, I think, in all of our interactions with animals that you and I have already been talking about.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And one question maybe that I want to bring to you that I think might be a thread here is like, it feels like there were people throughout who were like, well, we must get Keiko back to the wild as he deserves. And that is the only possible course of action it seems like. Maybe it would be fair to say.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: And it's also interesting to ask the question, I think, of whether that might inevitably be influenced by the very human perspective that values freedom as a value that possibly is a value that orcas might not have.
Brianna: Yeah. No, I think you nailed it. Because yeah, they're kind of throughout the course of the Keiko story, and especially during what I consider kind of the second half of the story, there were these two main threads that persisted throughout the Keiko story.
And one was that he's going to be released, he's going to be free, he is going to find his family. We're going to help him do that. That's what he wants.
Sarah: He said it in therapy. He said it himself.
Brianna: Because of course he wants it. Because every being deserves to be free. And we screwed up by putting him in captivity in the first place.
Sarah: And what's the situation socially here? Because was there a hope that they could get him back with his family? Or was there the sense that there was a fallback of finding other, or to make him be friends with? Because I feel like this part, because it's hard enough to put a human child in middle school, so the social aspect here seems difficult.
Brianna: Yeah. It's interesting talking to people that were involved with the project. And I will talk more about one person in particular who is pretty critical of how the end of the project went. But there was this sense that there would be this intuition or instinct from Keiko that he would just kind of find his family. I don't know how else to put it.
Sarah: Like he would just know, which is always worrying.
Brianna: Yeah. There were attempts and plans to get information on the whales around Iceland to try to narrow it down. They were going to try to record vocalizations of Icelandic whales so they could maybe find his pod through identifying the dialects, which we explained last time. Killer whales have dialects amongst pods.
Sarah: So all these whales sound like Bjork.
Brianna: Yeah. So they could maybe identify them that way, but then they were also going to look for genetic data and try to do that. But it was like, in hindsight, I think that was one of the things that people learned in the project, that was a key piece of information that they did not have enough data on.
Sarah: Yeah, because how are you supposed to find someone's whale family from the seventies? That's like having a kid get lost in the mall, right? And you're like, it was in Illinois.
Brianna: Uh huh.
Sarah: I mean, look, that might be a really silly comparison.
Brianna: No, I've made this exact comparison.
Sarah: Okay. Listen, I'm no scientist, Brianna, but I've heard that the ocean is pretty large.
Brianna: It's a big place. Yeah.
Sarah: It's famously not a pale green dot. It's a pale blue one.
Brianna: Yeah. Well, and then on top of that, there's not just a handful of killer whales in the North Atlantic, there's thousands of them. Like they're doing pretty well population wise. So narrowing it down to Keiko’s specific family was going to be a bit of a needle in a haystack situation. Especially at the time, I believe now there's a lot more data and there's a lot more researchers that are documenting the genetic lineage of killer whales in the North Atlantic.
Sarah: Wow.
Brianna: And documenting their dialects and identifying them by individual and that sort of thing. But it's still a much larger population. It's harder to keep tabs on than, say, the Pacific Northwest southern resident killer whales. Which as I mentioned, there's only currently tentatively 75.
But one key thing before we leave Mexico, so they didn't have enough money. And another really important character in the Keiko story enters here. His name is Craig McCaw. Craig McCaw was a tech billionaire from the early nineties.
Sarah: Who would you cast to play him in our movie?
Brianna: Well, I need some help with that one.
Sarah: Can you send me a picture of him?
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Okay. Craig McCaw.
Brianna: He was the one person I couldn't figure out.
Sarah: Interesting.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: I got to say, Bill Paxton.
Brianna: Oh, right.
Sarah: With a sweater on?
Brianna: Yes. We'll go with Bill Paxton.
Sarah: Vertical Limit era Bill Paxton.
Brianna: Yes. Bill Paxton with a comb over.
Sarah: So we got Bill Paxton and Tom Hanks. It's a star studded spectacular.
Brianna: In terms of a character and what role he kind of serves in this story, he's definitely our John Hammond from Jurassic Park. He just has a lot of money and is very enthusiastic about this project.
Sarah: And may I just say, if you have way too much money, as so many people do these days, why not free a whale for God's sake?
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Having a big building with your name on it won't help you. Teenagers will put gum on it.
Brianna: Yeah. And so he got involved, because literally he and his wife saw Free Willy and they were moved by the story. They were happy to chip in some money at this early stage. Something in the order of like a million dollars or $2 million to help with the shortfall of specifically just the stage of getting Keiko out of Mexico.
So one other significant donation that happens at this point is David Phillips was able to get UPS to donate a plane to fly Keiko to Newport, because this is a great PR thing to get in on.
Sarah: Right? Like, even if it's a stunt for some people. It's like, who cares if you want to look good by charming the kids of America by being the Keiko mail place. Then it's a great idea.
Brianna: Absolutely.
Sarah: I'm all for corporate manipulation if it's basically harmless and just kind of annoying, if you try really hard to be cynical, which I obviously sometimes do.
Brianna: Yeah. And many people will kind use Keiko in this way. So then we're leaving Mexico, and it was supposed to be a secret. Keiko was supposed to leave in the wee hours of the morning of January 7, 1996, and it was supposed to be a secret. I don't know why they thought they could keep it a secret.
Sarah: Keiko and Princess Diana are the two main characters of 1996, I realize now.
Brianna: I know. Yeah. I've thought about Princess Diana so many times during this story, too.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: But of course, people knew he was leaving. It wasn't a secret that he was leaving. I don't know why they thought that people wouldn't show up, but apparently the streets were just lined with people wishing Keiko a good farewell.
Sarah: That's so beautiful.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: It's like the ending of Dead Poets Society. It's so beautiful. At the same time, it's so funny to think of Keiko being like, I'm just a whale. I don't really understand what I know this is about, to be honest.
Brianna: It didn't go as David Phillips had hoped it would go. He wanted it to go a lot more smoothly than it did. But they make it to the plane, which is like a C1300, which is just an enormous plane, obviously, you would need. He makes it to Newport finally. They had to do a couple refuelings on the way there.
Well, this is where we can introduce the town of Newport in the story, which is where I currently live. And honestly, seeing Keiko here when I was a kid was probably what planted the seed in my brain of, hey, I would really love to live here one day.
Sarah: Yeah. We would go there for weekend trips when I was growing up. And I feel like for people in most states with a coastal part, there's a place where you eat taffy. And Newport is the place where you eat taffy. Astoria is also very pretty, but it's on a river. It's not right on the coast,
Brianna: Astoria is also home to the Fisher Poets gathering, which I think is my favorite festival I've ever been to.
Sarah: Yeah. Which I have to go with you.
Brianna: Yeah. But Newport's wonderful. Like I said, I wanted to live here since I was a kid, and now I do. And I made the best possible decision for my life moving here. I just love it.
Sarah: What's something that to you exemplifies what Newport is like? Like what's a Newport thing?
Brianna: I think the thing that I love, I walk on the beach every day with my dogs, and I live close to the bay entrance. So the river bar is not too far from me, and I love when I am walking on the beach near sunset and I look down south towards the bar and I can see fishing boats coming in. And I see like their big, bright, glowing sodium lights and can see them making their way back into the harbor.
And I don't know, Newport just encapsulates everything that really excites me. Like I love the ocean, I love learning about the ocean. I love marine science. There's the Hatfield Marine Science Center here, so there's world class research happening in this tiny town.
Sarah: Yeah. What is it like when Keiko comes to town?
Brianna: He had a huge procession that said for wealth to him from Mexico City. And there was a sizable crowd here in Newport, but it is a small town and so it wasn't as many people. But I think that actually, like for David Phillips, I think he was a lot more comfortable with that. He wanted to keep things a little more low key.
Sarah: Hell yeah.
Brianna: And Keiko arrives. He goes from the airport to the aquarium. They put him in his brand-new fancy tank. But there's still not enough money?
Sarah: It's very stressful, I imagine, to be running out of budget, because you have a whale you have to keep feeding now.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And I bet he's eating a lot.
Brianna: Yes. Specifically the budget for the tank itself, that was going to all be paid for by the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. Again, they were short some money for that, specifically.
Sarah: I feel like if I'm Joe Hollywood, I would just go to a Dodgers game and just ask the people in my row, just pass down a memo pad and be like, will you plug some money to the Free Willy thing? Write down how much.
Brianna: Like a congregation in a church passing down the offering plate. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's basically what David Phillips was doing. It just didn't happen fast enough, is my understanding.
And the thing is, they were building it and they knew they were short of the money. But there was so much pressure to finish it from the public and from kids, that the contractor didn't want to be the bad guy in the situation.
Sarah: Oh, nice. Okay.
Brianna: So they were like, okay, we'll finish this project even though you owe us literally a few million dollars. Like I can't imagine finishing a project where I'm owed that much money.
Sarah: Well, no.
Brianna: I think is was actually pretty generous of them.
Sarah: Well, it's because the contractors are coming home to little Timmy every night, and having to explain the whale situation, I hope.
Brianna: Well, and also if they didn't finish Kaiki’s tank, Keiko's health was deteriorating in Mexico City. And so they kept saying, he's not going to last much longer.
Sarah: And what's the issue with his health? Because we haven't talked about that since the first episode,I don't think.
Brianna: Overall he just wasn't thriving.
Sarah: Doesn't he have HPV or whale HPV? Whale papilloma virus.
Brianna: He's got the Papilloma virus. So it was a skin condition, and it was really bad in Mexico City. And part of that was to do with the temperature of the water in his tank. It just kind of allowed the virus to thrive and get out of control. And I believe it was having a negative effect on his immune system.
So anyway, they finished the project. But then David Phillips was like, oh my God, I have so much money that we owe these people. And that's where Philip approached Craig McCaw again, and Craig McCaw was like, all right, I will give more money to this project, but this is the deal I want to make. The Oregon Coast Aquarium will give a percentage of its sales to the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. And he also pressured Warner Brothers to hold up an end of an agreement. Warner Brothers did say they were going to contribute some money, but at some point they kind of backed out of the deal.
Sarah: God damnit.
Brianna: So anyway, McCaw made sure that they were going to honor their end of an oral agreement. And then McCaw said, “If I'm going to be basically bankrolling this project from now on, I'm going to be the chair of the board of the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. And so then, therefore, he would have a lot more say and control over how the project was going to be executed. This was quite the big shift for the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. So David Phillips was the executive director of the board before.
Sarah: Okay.
Brianna: So David Phillips was like, okay, I guess I'm going to hand over leadership of this conservation projects to a billionaire.
Sarah: So Craig McCaw is like, it's my money, it's my show.
Brianna: Yeah. He wanted to have a lot more control.
Sarah: Which is to one degree, understandable. And to another degree, stupid. Because he's not a scientist.
Brianna: There's a lot of people that start to get involved with the leadership of this project that are not scientists and they're not animal behaviorists, they're not trainers. There's a lot of documentary filmmakers and that sort of thing going into it. And that in itself isn't a bad thing, but sometimes the goals are not aligned.
Sarah: Yeah. Because I mean, not to even accuse anyone of shadiness, but if you're making a documentary or if you're trying to create media, you have some degree of interest in interesting things continuing to happen.
Brianna: Yes, exactly.
Sarah: And that you might feel pressure to shape the story a certain way based on the needs of your industry.
Brianna: Right, exactly.
Sarah: Which has led to some unfortunate outcomes in the past.
Brianna: Yeah. The documentary filmmakers or the people with that kind of leaning, they wanted to make sure they documented the Hollywood story of Keiko swimming off with his family. And so their priorities were not aligned with the priorities of the people that kind of understood more of how a reintroduction process would take place.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: And it's not a one and done kind of thing. And with that shift of the leadership of the board, of the foundation, from an environmentalist leaning to a more kind of capitalist perspective, other members of the board began to become a little uneasy of whether the foundation was going to remain true to its goals of the rehabilitation and release.
Some of the people on the board felt like maybe Craig McCaw and his underlings were maybe secretly in cahoots with SeaWorld, and they were just going to try to get Keiko back into SeaWorld somehow.
Sarah: That's what would happen in the Ryan Murphy show, for sure.
Brianna: Yeah. So people were like, why does this guy even want to help Keiko? And it might've been mostly his wife, Wendy McCaw. Even later on in the story, when Craig McCaw kind of ducks out, Wendy McCaw stayed involved with the project. So there was just some skepticism about what his motivations were.
Sarah: Yeah. And to speak about skepticism, I guess it's just fair to say that when someone has enough money to exert control over a project, that kind of always puts everyone in a precarious position, even if they make great decisions the whole way through. Because it still means that for someone to have more control than anyone else in a situation of this kind, especially coming in kind of later in the day is just like, it creates the potential for someone not being able to be overridden, basically. And I think in a way that's always worrisome, regardless of who's playing that role.
Brianna: Yeah. Even though there's a board and it's supposed to be this sort of democratic structure.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: Kenneth Brower, the author of Freeing Keiko, his analogy was that it operated a bit like the Roman Senate under Julius Caesar. So it was like, yeah, we're all making this decision together, but everyone's kind of looking at Craig McCaw every time.
Sarah: But what do you want to do? It's like whale Succession.
Brianna: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah: How's life for Keiko at the aquarium? What's this chapter like from his perspective?
Brianna: Yeah. This is, I think, something really positive to focus on in this story is Keiko's health really improves during his stay at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. So he has this much, much larger tank where he can actually dive all the way down and completely submerge himself, do lapse around the tank. It just is really substantially larger than his tank in, in Mexico.
It has actual sea water pumped in from Yaquina Bay and the temperature is a much more pleasant temperature for a killer whale. The sea temperatures around here I think are in the forties in the winter and then maybe in the low fifties in the summer or something like that.
Sarah: That's why we don't swim in the ocean.
Brianna: Or you wear a wetsuit.
Sarah: That too.
Brianna: But yeah, it's cold.
Sarah: It's real cold. Even with a wetsuit, I imagine it's pretty freaking cold.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: Because you still get your poor little face and your hands are in contact with the ocean.
Brianna: Yeah. You'd be surprised. I mean, I go surfing here and I mean, I do wear gloves and booties too. Because I mean, my hands and feet are just cold all the time anyway.
Sarah: But perfect for a killer whale.
Brianna: Yes. Perfect for a killer whale.
Sarah: Because this is literally, I mean, are there ever killer whales off the actual Oregon coast historically? Is this where he would normally be?
Brianna: There are. The southern resident killer whales occasionally make their way down here.
Sarah: Nice.
Brianna: It's not super common, but during the winter they…
Sarah: Take a little trip.
Brianna: Yeah, they take a little trip. There's also the biggest transient killer whales and then offshore whales.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: Some other groups that live further offshore, they're different culturally than southern resident killer whales.
Sarah: This is so good.
Brianna: They are primarily marine mammal eaters, like they hunt other marine mammals. So they'll go after seals and sea lions, and they can be spotted off of Oregon.
Sarah: Okay. So this is like, he's in something that is at least much closer to his habitat, while still being in captivity.
Brianna: It's way better than being at 7,200 feet elevation in the middle of the desert, which is where he was in Mexico City.
Sarah: And a small enclosure that gave him the curly fin.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. And so that virus that he had on his fins, that is starting to clear up. The cold water alone just kind of helps keep the virus at bay. And then of course he's getting really good veterinary care at this point too. So they're doing everything.
Because part of his eventual conditions for release, those involved with a project are going to have to convince the government agencies that they have to apply for a permit from that. Keiko is in good enough health to be released. They can't ethically release him if he's really dependent on veterinary care, on medicine or whatever it is. So part of this middle stage between Mexico and Iceland was bringing him back up to health.
Sarah: So he is in rehab basically?
Brianna: Essentially. Yeah. Rehabilitation and release were two of the main concepts of this project. Rehabilitation was a big part of it, and I would say that they really did that successfully at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. And once his health started to return, they started to introduce a program to get him trained up to exhibit wild behaviors again.
Sarah: So tell me more about that. Because what was he like that told them that he wasn't showing wild behaviors? And what did those look like that they were trying to teach to him?
Brianna: I know one of them specifically was they were working on his diving time. I mean, it was basically impossible for him to.
Sarah: That's so cute.
Brianna: Yeah, I know. He is like in a little swim class or whatever. Swim team at school. I love him improving his times, but he of course couldn't really dive hardly at all in Mexico.
Sarah: See, and this is again, we were doing the thing we're talking about where he is an adult marital predator and we're like, he's our baby boy.
Brianna: I know. We just want to see him do well and we're like, oh, I think I know what you need. And it's really hard to just not naturally do that. Even just talking about him in hindsight.
But yeah, he couldn't hardly dive at all in Mexico, so that was one thing they need. He needs to be able to dive and like…
Sarah: He's all out of practice.
Brianna: Hold his breath for longer. They wanted to up his…
Sarah: I’m sorry. It's just so cute.
Brianna: I know. I know. He's on a little training program.
Sarah: He’s a minnow, working his way up to tadpole, and then after a few more levels, he'll be at himself.
Brianna: They wanted to improve his stamina because wild orcas swim a lot, you'll be surprised to know.
Sarah: I guess they would have to. Huh? Do they swim while they're sleeping? How's that work?
Brianna: Yeah. So for citations, for dolphins and whales how they sleep, in a nutshell, is they sleep with half of their brain at a time. I was like, how do I say this? It's so cool. I don't think enough people talk about it because it is really cool.
Sarah: See, you're learning to be a science communicator, and this is a great context because you're like, I don't want to explain this to somebody who's kids are yelling right now. Which is the condition under which perhaps you are listening to this right at this moment.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Maybe your kids are shouting at you because they want another waffle.
Brianna: So yeah, the whales and dolphins, they sleep with half of their brain at a time. Because this is the important thing when a whale or dolphin needs to breathe, they have to think about it. Right?
Sarah: Oh!
Brianna: I mean, we can kind of switch between consciously controlling our breath, like we do when we're meditating or whatever.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: Or you can go the whole day without thinking about breathing.
Sarah: Yes. Years, in fact, for me, personally.
Brianna: But a whale, as you can imagine, cannot. They have to think about every breath that they take. So if they sleep, they can't completely go unconscious because the way that their brains are wired to their lungs, they would actually just, I guess, stop breathing. Because there would be no part of their brain telling them to breathe. So they have to keep one half of their brain alert so that they can continue swimming to the surface.
Sarah: I've never understood why people think that God and evolution are such counterintuitive ideas. Because if you believe in God, surely you can believe in a God who invented whales. And I was like, and then half at a time, I don't know. God, I really painted myself into a corner with this one.
Brianna: He made the whale and his angel assistant is like, “Oh wow. Beautiful work. Um, just one thing…”
Sarah: And then he gets thrown his “World's best God” mug.
Brianna: But honestly, what he came up with is pretty cool. Like hemispheric sleeping is a pretty, pretty cool adaptation.
Sarah: And then it's like, is that semi-conscious?
Brianna: From what I understand, the half of their brain that's asleep is something called slow wave sleep, I believe.
Sarah: Hmm.
Brianna: And that sounds good. I believe the half of their brain that's awake, I can't imagine that it's super alert. And when pods of dolphins and whales and killer whales are sleeping, they'll sleep together. It'll be like nap time and they'll kind of swim close to each other. They're pictorial fins might be touching each other, so they're like, you know, they're keeping an eye out. They're also collectively sleeping at the same time.
And another thing that I think is interesting about hemispheric sleep, which I think that's the term that I read in a paper, is that dolphins and whales don't go into REM sleep. Ever. Like the deep sleep.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: They just don't do it. Which to sleep scientists is interesting, because it was thought that REM sleep is necessary for proper brain function. Like you need that deep sleep.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: But apparently whales and dolphins don't.
Sarah: It makes sense. Are pretty different about, you know, because humans also can't live in the ocean and eat fish the whole time.
Brianna: Yeah. Whales and dolphins are just multitasking all the time and they're doing a great job.
Sarah: Okay. So Keiko is at the aquarium. The aquarium, as Sandra Lee would say. And I would love for us to talk about the chapter where he is delighting the school children of Oregon, and about your memories of going to see him and what that was like for you personally as a dolphin girl.
Brianna: Yeah. So if you as a listener, go to my Patreon page for the podcast that I'm making about this story, I have posted a couple pictures of me and my mom and my sister. And we're standing in front of the tank and Keiko is right there. He looks like he's photoshopped in, he's just posing perfectly for this photo.
Sarah: He's like, yeah, that'll be five bucks.
Brianna: And I remember this from visiting Keiko, he was so engaged with people.
Sarah: I will get my story out of the way, which is that I went on a class field trip to see Keiko in second grade. It was a huge deal. We got to school at like seven, and we got back at like 7:00 PM or something like that. Because it's like two-and-a-half-hour drive from Portland, I would say.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Or at least two hours. And I remember buying a book in the gift shop about bats. And I remember the gift shop having that very nineties thing where there was a bunch of tiny TVs all arranged in a grid on a wall in a store. And they each had a part of the same picture, so they all became like a giant screen, but one that was made out of little TVs. Do you remember that?
Brianna: I think I do. Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah: And I remember, this is so silly, but it's also so cute. I was like, everyone's gaga for Keiko. I'm going to show I'm not like other girls by ignoring Keiko. And I think truly I felt that I was going to be like Bella Swan for Keiko. You know? I was like, I must distinguish myself from Keiko. Because secretly I love Keiko so much, I didn't know what to do.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And now I realize that whales and men are simple creatures, and you really just have to just be direct, as you were. And so I didn't know that he was interactive and that's, I don't know. That's so cool.
Brianna: Yeah. No, this is something that came up for many people as well that I talked to, just how much Keiko was engaged with people at the aquarium in this underwater viewing area. And how much he preferentially liked to engage with the kids that visited him.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Brianna: How could you even imagine a better whale to cast in this role?
Sarah: I know. And what was that engagement like for him?
Brianna: From what I understand, he just would hang out at the window where you could see him and he would just watch you. So kids would be doing silly things.
Sarah: He was just an extrovert.
Brianna: He was. I mean, it's funny. He is an extrovert in that way in terms of the skills he needed to be a wild whale and engage with other whales. He was much more introverted.
Sarah: It's that classic thing where humans, I think we feel deficient in how far we've gotten away from animals in the way we live, and we want animals to include us. And then we make them worse at surviving among their own.
Brianna: Yeah. And kids loved him. The public loved him. I have a video that I would love to share with you.
Sarah: Yeah. Please do. Let's do it.
Brianna: It'll bring you back to this time visiting Keiko at the aquarium.
Sarah: Oh my God. Yeah. God, I remember that viewing area. And it's where you would see seals, I think normally, where you kind of go into this almost theater type environment. There he is. He's hanging out by the glass, and the kids are touching the glass. And they're holding up little toys of him to the class
*recording*
Thank you all for coming to Keiko’s get-well party...
Sarah: They’re having Keiko’s get-well party children.
Brianna: So there's this lady with a big check. And I think it's a donation from Mattel. So Mattel made a Barbie.
Sarah: Yeah. Mattel knows what's good.
*recording*
We really wanted to help, too. So we created Ocean Friends Barbie, and a portion of the proceeds from Ocean Friends Barbie will go towards Keiko's recovery. So I'm very happy today to present to you, Beverly, on behalf of Ocean Friends Barbie and everyone at Mattel, this donation for $500,000 for the continuation of Keiko's rehabilitation.
Very, very generous. Thank you very much.
Brianna: Yeah, but Keiko's just hanging out. Yeah, he's watching. He's like, whatcha guys up to. I talked to someone here at the Oregon Coast Aquarium down by the bay. And you can see Keiko's Tank was not in the ground. It was all above ground. So it was the biggest above ground pool you can imagine. And if you walked along the bay, you could look towards the aquarium and you could possibly see him jumping out of his tank.
I'm like, what? That would be amazing. I , I'm glad that we made the attempt to put him back in the wild, but it would be pretty cool if I could still see that. But yeah, so I just love that video because I feel like it captures that moment in time of visiting him at the aquarium.
And another fun story that someone told me about why Keiko was so engaged with people in the underwater viewing area. So in Free Willy with movie magic, they made it look like there is an underwater viewing area where they filmed it in Mexico City, but that didn't exist in Mexico City. They didn't have that, actually. So when Keiko came to Oregon Coast Aquarium, that was the first time that he had been in a place like that where he could look at people. And I'm sure he was like, whoa, this is different. All you guys are underwater. Like you're not usually underwater. And yeah, the person that mentioned that, they think that was part of his curiosity and where that interest came from was, it was just new. It was novel to him.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: He was gaining weight, his health was improving. And then they mentioned he was eating fish. And one of the biggest points of contention in the Keiko project was whether Keiko was successfully eating live fish or not. So they started this process at the Oregon Coast Aquarium of teaching Keiko to eat live fish.
So this was something that they was one of the criteria for release to the wild that they could demonstrate that he could hunt live fish and eat live fish and be able to sustain himself that way. Which makes a lot of sense. Like of course you need to be, if you're going to be wild again, you're going to have to be able to feed yourself. It is a little funny to think that we thought we had the capability of teaching an apex predator, like a killer whale, how to hunt.
Sarah: Hubris. We're like, we're going to find your family. We put an ad up. So it's only a matter of time until they see it in the paper.
Brianna: And it's not to say that I think it was wrong to try. I'm just glad we did. I'm glad we tried. But yeah, we might've been a little aspirational.
Sarah: Well, it's like people are nostalgic about the kind of optimism of the nineties or the way we see that now. And one of the counterpoints to that is that just because you're optimistic, doesn't mean you're right.
Brianna: Yeah. And we need that optimism, but it's complicated, as we've mentioned many times.
Sarah: Yes. And we're going to keep getting into that. So how long is he at the Oregon Coast Aquarium? I'm going to guess. Is it like three years?
Brianna: Yeah, about three years. So he arrived in 1996. And then Keiko is making improvements over the next few years. And the next big step is, okay, we got to figure out where he's going to go next, right? And you would think they always thought he was going to go to Iceland. That's not true. They actually had a couple of other places in mind too, which I won't go into too detail on, but they were looking at Ireland, and they were looking at Scotland.
At one point, Iceland was actually the last place they wanted to go for a few different logistical reasons. And also the fact that Iceland culturally, especially at that time, was a pro whaling nation. And so they just thought that Iceland was not going to be cool with the idea of this whole project in general. Iceland also had some history with environmental activists, specifically Greenpeace activists. There's this really wild story of some Greenpeace activists sinking a couple of boats in a harbor that were commercial whaling boats back in the seventies or eighties.
Sarah: Yeah, Greenpeace will fuck up your boat.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: From what I understand.
Brianna: Yeah. And so David Phillips and a couple other people, they went to Iceland to schmooze the right people. They talked to the Prime Minister, they talked to the Minister of Fisheries, and they got a few different mixed messages you can imagine.
Like the Minister of Fisheries, which I believe that encapsulated the whaling industry at the time, he was not a fan and made it very clear that if anything… people in his kind of world and personality, he was inclined to say things like, “You should just butcher Keiko.”
Sarah: That's the kind of humor that sometimes doesn't translate very well.
Brianna: No, it doesn't. And I don't even think he was making a joke. I think he was actually fairly serious.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, come on.
Brianna: Yeah, so there was some conflicting sentiments about Keiko. But then David Phillips spoke to the Prime Minister, and Prime Minister was really on board. There was this shift in Iceland as well at the time, of people recognizing like, hey, we can still make money on whales. We just take people to go watch them instead.
Sarah: Yeah. It's the inevitable outcome of any American industry. We're teaching them of our ways, right?
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. That saga I do find pretty interesting, but an Icelandic saga, if you will.
Sarah: Sometimes people in comments are like, “Sarah, you missed this pun you could've made.” And I'm like, I know. No, I know.
Brianna: You're really good at it, Sarah, but they're so many.
Sarah: There's so many that you miss. We can't get 'em all.
Brianna: No, unfortunately.
Sarah: Moment of silence for the puns we didn't do.
Brianna: Yeah. Pour one out for the puns. The other thing about Iceland, of course, is that the narrative of this whole endeavor, the most satisfying ending is for Keiko to go back to Iceland. Like it would've been a little weird to be like, and now he lives in Ireland, right? He is not from there.
Sarah: But he is learning to love fish and chips.
Brianna: Yeah. And Guinness. He now loves the Irish. But even though there's all these things… also, Iceland weather is just really difficult to deal with. There's a language barrier. So just logistically it was going to be challenging. There was just a lot of logistical things that it was not appealing to people.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: And so Phillips, putting on his media campaign hat from back in the day, of like, oh, this could be an opportunity to shift hearts and minds in Iceland, too.
Sarah: Oh, nice.
Brianna: Of one of the few remaining whaling nations in the world.
Sarah: This is our Tom Hanks character, and he can't be stopped, as we know.
Brianna: He can't, no. He's very persistent. So David Phillips and his colleague, Catherine Hanley, they were the pro Iceland team. And then there was another team with Jeff Foster, who was another trainer. He was a former SeaWorld trainer that got involved with the project, and he went and scouted out Scotland and Ireland, and he was very pro Scotland and Ireland.
And what happened is that they presented their cases to the board. And remember, Craig McCaw is the executive director of the board.
Sarah: Sorry, Bill Paxton. Yeah.
Brianna: And David Phillips is making his case for Iceland. Jeff Foster is making his case for Scotland and Ireland. And I'll just read this from Kenneth Brower's book,
“David Phillips had noticed that when McCaw came out in favor of something, suddenly all his corporate people were enthusiastically for it, too."
Sarah: Oh, no.
Brianna: “And as the meeting progressed, Phillips glanced at McCaw occasionally trying to gauge the billionaire's mood. ‘I don't understand’, McCaw broke in finally, Keiko is from Iceland, and we're thinking of bringing him somewhere else?’
When Jeff Foster started to explain the logistical difficulties, McCaw broke in again. No, no, no. We're bringing him to Iceland’.”
Sarah: This is why I don't do group projects.
Brianna: Right. Philip Hanley and Dr. Cornell, who's the veterinarian, tried to not look at one another and they fought to stifle grins. They had expected to have to battle fiercely for Iceland, but the fight was over before it began.
Sarah: Ah.
Brianna: So it was just funny because there was so much scouting of locations.
Sarah: Yeah. Okay. And then a guy is like, “Hey, what if we sent him to Iceland? I like the sound of that”, basically.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And that's the world we live in, in a big way now. Where it's like we're kind of at the mercy of the whims of billionaires. And even when they happen to be right, maybe it's still like, well, it's just still uncomfortable how we got here.
Brianna: Yeah, I've noticed that. I've been working with a few nonprofits, and then I work for a public radio station, and it does feel like there's this shift of, okay, all the grants are drying up, so now we got to figure out where all the rich people are.
And to be fair, you had to know that before, but now it's just like you have to rely on that. Even more, you have to rely on the whims and interests of rich people.
Sarah: And then let them transfuse the blood of our firstborn children into their desiccating bodies or whatever.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. It's not a great system for getting things done. Unless you have really binding contracts, I guess.
Sarah: I mean, when people call something medieval, which of course is a very oversimplified term, and really we should do more episodes of this show about what the Middle Ages were actually like and what we're wrong about. Which I'm sure that would be most of it.
But that what we're really referring to is this, I think, idea that we have of how the Middle Age has functioned. Which is of course true to an extent, just not in every way and without nuance. Where I think one of the things we're describing is the concept of might making right, right? And this idea that I think the way that a lot of people have distinguished today from what we feel to be kind of the darker, intellectually ages of various periods of history, is that you can no longer theoretically use the alleged God-given power of the monarchy to try to stop science from proving what it absolutely does, right?
Like the enlightenment that we're living in, such as it is, that isn't like a gift granted to us by the fact that time has progressed. It only happens if we continue to protect actual scientific findings from being changed by people who have amassed a lot of power and don't like it.
Brianna: Yeah, we live in very weird times, but it's not actually something that we haven't seen before. And I think that we've been, unfortunately, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security that those days were behind us. And now we have all these institutions.
Sarah: Well, that's the thing about growing in the nineties, people are moving whales around. You're like, well, God, I guess things are kind of figured out. And then you grow up and you're like…
Brianna: Life's great!
Sarah: No, we got to keep an eye on everybody.
Brianna: Yeah, we sure do.
Sarah: But we get to do it together. Um, yeah. Okay, so we have, I guess, a random rich guy whim that happens to go with what some of the experts on this team are wanting to do anyway, which is always nice when that happens.
Brianna: Yeah. It aligned well at the time, so it was fine. And they were like, cool. We're going to Iceland. We're taking Keiko to Iceland. And I just love this little story where two of the board members went to Iceland to scout out locations. Like of course they knew Iceland, but where in Iceland are they going to put him?
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: They had a couple of different ideas. David Phillips and Catherine Hanley had a couple of different places they had in mind, but a couple of board members went, and they ended up in the Westman Islands. Which is a little island off the southern coast of Iceland, or a few islands off the southern coast of Iceland, famous for a volcanic eruption that happened in the early eighties, I believe.
But they were like, okay, well this place has a harbor and they have an airport so we can get Keiko here. And they have facilities and all that, so it seems like it'd be a good location. And they go out with a guide in the bay in what's called Kluts (Klettsvik) Bay, which is where Keiko will end up eventually.
And they go out on the boat, and I'm just imagining them in their suits. Because even though I'm sure they didn’t, I just imagine board members.
Sarah: Like the lawyer in Jurassic Park.
Brianna: Yeah. And the guy takes them out. And so this bay has this, I've seen pictures. It's got this amazing rock wall feature from the many volcanic eruptions that have happened over the millennia. And it's just this really high, flat, enclosed space or concave space at the north end of this bay.
And so they're kind of scouting out the bay and the guy takes him over there and the guy's like, “Hey, check this out.” And he opens up a case on the boat, and the board members are like, oh, what's he going to do? He opens it up and there's a saxophone inside. And he proceeds to play Amazing Grace on his saxophone. And it's echoing off the rock walls. And that's when these two board members look at each other and they're like, yep, this is the place.
This is a story from Kenneth Brower's book. And I don't know, it's hard for me to confirm whether that actually happened, but I just love it so much.
Sarah: Why would anyone make that up?
Brianna: Exactly, why? But anyway, so we're about to bring Keiko to Iceland. They sort of scouted out and thought, oh, this looks nice, this could suit our needs. It's a big bay. It's pretty protected. There's a small harbor, but a really small town nearby. So there's services and places for staff to stay and all that sort of thing.
Sarah: Right. And what are their needs, and what level of staff are we talking about here? Like maybe this is a good time to talk about what their goals are exactly.
Brianna: So there's going to be the large sea pen where Keiko's going to stay inside the bay, in the Kluts Bay. You're going to need food for Keiko, so there's going to need to be a warehouse with hundreds of pounds of frozen fish accessible daily for him. Staff were rotated in and out of Iceland.
They were staying within whatever the labor immigration laws were for Iceland at the time. So staff were on a three-month rotation. As you can imagine, there's not many people in Iceland that know how to train a killer whale or have done any kind of killer whale husbandry. There's probably been a handful, but not many.
Sarah: There's probably not that many in any country, to be honest. Right? And that's the whole problem.
Brianna: Yes. I think actually, yeah, the U.S. kind of had that market at the time.
Sarah: Because we were the ones who decided to abuse killer whales to begin with. And then they were like crap, we got to learn how to keep these guys alive a little bit longer.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I mean, once killer whales started to be in captivity, once we started to put them in captivity, it was a new job in animal husbandry training that was appealing to people.
Sarah: This is a question I always have about Jurassic Park. How many times have you seen Jurassic Park?
Brianna: A few.
Sarah: Okay. I've probably seen it between 30 and 50 times.
Brianna: Okay. Not that many times.
Sarah: For me, not to brag, I'm not bragging or anything. I'm ashamed and I'm not proud to quote Arlo Guthrie. But there's a part, because you know the premise is that they're calling in Sam Neill and Laura Dern is like the preeminent paleontologist and paleobotanists in their field. Or possibly Sam Neill is the preeminent paleontologist and Laura Dern is his girlfriend, but she seems good at what she does. And not to insult her abilities, we just don't get any sense of her having a reputation. It would've actually been nice.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: But there's that sick triceratops that they're treating like a dog who got into the garbage because she ate something she shouldn't have. And the pupils are dilated and they have a vet on staff at Jurassic Park - which hasn't opened yet - being like, no, the triceratops don't eat the African lilac berries, they're toxic.
And you're like, and my first question, honestly is like, where did they hire this guy? Like they didn't bring in the preeminent paleontologist to consult on dinosaur health, but they did find someone else. Do you see what I'm saying? Where it's just, if you're going to start a dinosaur theme park, how do you find people to take care of the dinosaurs?
Brianna: Exactly.
Sarah: Because people can't even find vets for their chameleons half the time right now. And that's a lot more modest of a need. So I feel like that has bearing with the Keiko thing where it's like it's worth remembering, as you're saying that like, this is a field that didn't basically exist maybe 30 years before this was happening, it seems like.
Brianna: Right. And of course there's been large animal veterinarians for a long time, but a whale is on a different scale. And then every species has their own physiological needs.
Sarah: Yeah. Because horses aren't giant and aquatic, and they couldn't eat a great white shark, probably, most horses.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: Okay. So they've decided on Iceland for good and random reasons.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: How does this go for Keiko?
Brianna: Well, okay, so obviously the next step in this huge project is to now bring Keiko to Iceland. Which they did once again with a plane, and once again Keiko had a farewell procession from Newport and a welcoming procession in Iceland. He's like the royal family.
Sarah: He's our special little guy.
Brianna: Yeah. He has a welcoming committee everywhere he goes. As you can imagine, when he gets to Iceland there's a huge amount of media presence there. The community is in a lot of places, divided between the older generation and the younger generation.
So the kids are just stoked to have Keiko there. And of course, the older generation is more like, what are these Americans doing? I think Kenneth Brower said that the Icelanders found the American’s enthusiasm off putting.
Sarah: Well, you know…
Brianna: Which I get.
Sarah: Americans are the most enthusiastic people in the world.
Brianna: We are.
Sarah: Yeah. Okay, so two questions. What is the goal here, right? Because we're bringing him to Iceland.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: But what do people want to do? And is there kind of disagreement already about how this is supposed to play out? And is one person in charge of this or is it a group effort where it's not necessarily clear if there's a leader or something?
Brianna: Yeah. So what I have gleaned from the reading and the research that I've done is that so far up until Iceland, there's been this very clear, Almost like a narrative arc to this project of moving forward. And yeah, there's little challenges along the way, but we still manage to make forward progress.
And then Iceland, there's still forward progress, but it gets a whole lot messier. And that is because there's just differing opinions on the way to go about this next stage of the project where the goal is to release Keiko back to the wild. And in essence, that seems like, oh, we know what that means. But when you start to really tease that apart of like, okay, well what does that look like for Keiko?
Sarah: And this idea of finding his family, which it's not clear. Or his pod, I guess. Which it seems like no one can really say how they're going to do it, exactly.
Brianna: Yeah. So actually, I have a question for you, Sarah. If you were in charge of this project…
Sarah: Oh my god, this is too much pressure.
Brianna: Do you resign already?
Sarah: Yes. Shortest tenure ever. Like the guy who was king of Spain for 15 minutes.
Brianna: I guess, yeah. My question is, if you were going to try to define what successful release for Keiko would look like, what comes to mind for you?
Sarah: It's tricky, because I do feel like… I mean, I don't know. Because I'm not in this field at all. Some trivia for you guys, I've dealt mostly in pop culture.
Brianna: We're very much armchair quarterbacks for this.
Sarah: Yeah. But it feels like having an animal who has lived captive for perhaps basically his whole adult life, that maybe there is an open question still at this point of whether being in the wild is what's best for him. Because it does also seem like he's become extremely social with humans and acclimated extremely well with them. And also, it also seems like he hasn't had that many opportunities to socialize with other killer whales.
Brianna: No.
Sarah: Yeah. And so I feel like if I were in charge of this, I would maybe kind of see the first perhaps 12 months as a research period. Where we're going to attempt to gather whatever data we feel is potentially relevant to the question of whether his best quality of life is being released and living without humans, or whether he knows how to live that way or would thrive that way anymore.
And I'll of course, obviously I have a feeling based on what I think. I remember that I wish Keiko had been around for longer because he's not with us anymore. Not that he would be listening to a podcast if he was, but yeah.
And I guess we're going to get at the end to kind of maybe what you think about all this. But that would be my concern. Because I do feel like perhaps we haven't really tried to do this before. I mean, have we released other killer whales to the wild in the past, at this point in time?
Brianna: I've come across some stories of releases. But I think one of the main points, and whether those were actually successful or not, is unclear to me.
Sarah: Because they weren't tracking the whale afterwards. Right, right. So yeah, that's not really informative, I don't think.
Brianna: Yeah. And I could be wrong. Like if someone is out there like, “Whoa, you didn't know about this?” Yeah, there could be one that I'm not aware of.
Sarah: You forgot Trixie.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: We released Trixie and she lived for 13 years and became a mother. That would be nice to hear.
Brianna: I am aware of a release project that happened after Keiko that actually involved some of the same people involved with this project and it was successful. But there was a couple of really key differences.
One was a young whale who was named Springer. He was a part of the southern resident killer whale population. He was only in human care for a couple of months, I believe.
Sarah: Oh.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: That's how my parents took care of a pigeon for a month one time.
Brianna: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah: Like I don't think that pigeon had time to forget how to be a pigeon. Again, not that I know anything about pigeons.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: If someone is an expert on pigeons, please let us know about pigeon memory. I assume it's got to actually be pretty good, because if you think about homing pigeons, they never forget how to get back to where they're from.
Brianna: Yeah, I'm sure pigeons are like, it's one of those species where we kind of dismiss their intelligence, but I'm sure they do things all the time.
Sarah: Yeah. Not that that means they can do Wordle or anything, but you know.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: Because also, speaking of anthropomorphizing, I feel like we want animal intelligence to manifest the same way human intelligence does. And it's like they're intelligent in so many different and frankly better ways than us.
Brianna: Yeah. I think it's hard for us to comprehend that something we're always thinking of intelligence as this hierarchical thing, and we're at the top.
Sarah: Right. Because that's comforting for us because we're so crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery, gooey, delicious to all the other big animals.
Brianna: Yeah. But it's probably just more of a difference in types of intelligence more than…
Sarah: Or you know, adaptation to your environment.
Brianna: Yeah. As a species, you adapt specifically to your environment. And there's things that we probably just can't even understand.
Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like it's probably when you're learning animal trivia as a kid, or at least when you and I were kids, not every kid does this. But I think probably most it's because fun where you learn because the trivia about animals, like who can leap the farthest proportional to their size, and it's actually a flea. And who has the biggest penis, and it's a barnacle, because he has to reach the other barnacles. Have you seen that video? I saw that video.
Brianna: I am pretty sure I have.
Sarah: They showed it to us in eighth grade and it's like, look, you asked for this. And so I feel like maybe you could also measure intelligence in terms of who is best adapted to their circumstances, and it would not be humans. It would probably be razor clams or something like that.
Brianna: Yeah. I mean, when I think of the notion of different animals with different types of intelligence, I always think of… are you familiar with mantis shrimp?
Sarah: Yes. A little bit. But tell us about mantis shrimp,
Brianna: I think it's peacock mantis shrimp is one of the species. But they're this shrimp. I mean, they're large, I'd say. They're like almost the size of a rodent, like a rat or something.
Sarah: Gross.
Brianna: I think rats are cute.
Sarah: No, I like rats too. But the idea of a shrimp the size of a rat just trips something that's gross, uncomfortable in my brain.
Brianna: Oh, I see. Yeah. That's fair. That's fair. But they're incredibly colorful, and they've done a few different experiments measuring their quote unquote “intelligence”, and they are very smart. I just remember at my college where I did my undergrad, there was actually a mantis shrimp in the zoology lab, and you just always got the eerie sense there's animals that'll look at you as you walk by, but it really felt like the mantis shrimp was really looking at you and really observing what you were doing. It was spooky, but also very cool.
And also, another thing with mantis shrimp is that the spectrum of colors that they can see is way beyond what we can see. I think they can see in infrared and ultraviolet and all these other spectrums of the light wavelength.
Sarah: We’re missing out on so much.
Brianna: Yeah. And how would that affect how you move through the world and how you interact with the world?
Sarah: And whether you stare at Brianna.
Brianna: Yeah. Like what if I'm giving off some crazy ultraviolet light and I'm just not even aware of it?
Sarah: What if that mantis shrimp is like the little girl in The Exorcist, and it's like you're going to die up there.
Brianna: That is kind of the vibe I got from it, honestly. It just kind of felt like that mantis shrimp knew things.
Sarah: I really love thinking about you having this kind of ongoing nemesis relationship with a shrimp.
Brianna: I spent a lot of time in that zoology lab. I was the TA for zoology, and I would be grading papers and quizzes, and that mantis shrimp was just always watching me.
Sarah: What happened with that Dutch woman and Bokito?
Brianna: Except with the mantis shrimp I felt like I was trying to avoid eye contact. It's like someone staring at you really intensely,
Sarah: No. Look, you're Bokito in this situation. And the mantis shrimp is okay.
Brianna: So anyway, back to Keiko.
Sarah: Alright, back to Keiko. So we have kind of precedent for like, or I guess after the fact we're like, humans have released a couple of workers back to the wild, but perhaps not one who's at this point spent close to 20 years in captivity it seems like.
Brianna: Yeah. I mean, what year is it? So when we go to Iceland, it's 1998. And he was born ’78, and then caught a couple years after that. So yeah, he's been in captivity for about 20 years. That's a very long time for an animal or a human to be institutionalized in some way.
And so there was, amongst the people involved and the staff involved, there were a lot of different ideas and feelings about how to approach this next stage of the project. And I will say that when they first got to Iceland, it was acknowledged fairly quickly that we don't really have the expertise to do this.
We don't have a lot of people that have worked extensively with killer whales on our staff. We have a couple of people, but they wanted to have additional staff that had that specialized experience. Because some of the people that were involved in training with Keiko at Oregon Coast Aquarium, they had never had any experience with a cetacean, whether it was a dolphin or a killer whale.
Sarah: Because contrary to Star Trek 4, there aren't many captive cetaceans bigger than dolphins in human history.
Brianna: No, I'd say killer whales are the largest ones that we've been able to quote unquote “successfully” have in captivity. Though, you know, their survival rates are on average lower in captivity than they are in the wild. So whether or not you could say that's successful or not is, I don't know. I wouldn't say it was.
Sarah: I could hear you saying “successful” in quotes.
Brianna: Yeah. Okay.
Sarah: Okay. So yeah, so there's just kind of not really enough people with much experience it seems like.
Brianna: Right. And this is a very unique project. There wouldn't be a lot of people on the planet that could really pull this off.
Sarah: Well, it's like starting a space program. It's like you don't start the first space program and then try and hire people who work in previous space programs because there isn't any of that. So it seems like you kind of have to cobble something together based on existing fields, partly.
Brianna: Yeah. And that's a good point because there are people that have worked with killer whales at this point, but they are a part of an industry that people involved with this project are very uncomfortable with. People are really uncomfortable with SeaWorld and their motivations.
Sarah: Right.
Brianna: And so I totally, I understand. I don't think it was necessarily a bad gut feeling to have for people involved with the project. But they did recognize that they needed some people who really understood how to train killer whales, because that's essentially what they were going to have to do with Keiko, which is kind of funny.
Sarah: What were they training him to do, and what was the kind of, because if you break it down into steps. So he's in the sea pen, which does that have netting underwater to keep him in, or what does that look like?
Brianna: Yeah, so on the island there was Kluts Bay where they ended up setting up shop. They installed a sea pen, which I don't know if you're familiar with salmon farms.
Sarah: Surprisingly, not very much, really. And I bet there are people listening who can't even visualize a salmon farm.
Brianna: Essentially, you have a platform or a dock out on the water and then basically a net hanging down. And the net would hang down to the sea floor. And it was a large area, I believe it was larger than his tank at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. And there's the platforms where the trainers could interact with Keiko, do any veterinary care, that sort of thing. So that was going to be where he started.
And there's a key point of that too, is that when Keiko arrived in Iceland, there were permits that the project had to apply for with the National Marine Fishery Service in the United States.
Sarah: Because he was an American whale. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Like Johnny Five.
Brianna: I guess. Yeah, maybe Keiko had a few passports at this point. I don't know. But there was a permit that had to be filed with the National Marine Fishery Service, which is the service that manages marine mammals in the U.S. And I believe because even though he was going to Icelandic waters, he was leaving U.S. jurisdiction and it was a U.S. project.
And then part of that though, was that Keiko had to meet some criteria before he was released. So they couldn't just put him into the bay without any kind of barrier. It was a next step, but there were some things with some of his training and showing that he was feeding himself and showing that he was continuing to improve in health and not rely on veterinary care. And that he was demonstrating that he was not relying on people nearly as much.
And there's a few other criteria as well, but all of these things needed to be met in order for Keiko to then actually be released to the wide-open ocean. So that's why they couldn't just plop him in the bay and see how he does. Oh, and with the veterinary care, an important, important point with that…
Sarah: An important point.
Brianna: You know, say that three times fast.
Sarah: Most importantly.
Brianna: Importantly, they…
Sarah: Headlines don't sell papes. Newsies sell papes. Alright, go on.
Brianna: But they wanted to make sure he was healthy also, not just to show that he wasn't reliant on people for healthcare, but that he wouldn't pass anything on to wild whales. That was a concern, and that was a concern with that papilloma virus that he had.
According to the veterinarian, Dr. Lanny Cornell, he said that virus has been shown in other populations of wild whales. It's just kind of present, kind of like HPV is in humans, I guess. And how extreme it got was mostly dependent on Keiko's living conditions in Mexico. That's why it got so bad. So that was shown that that wasn't necessarily going to be a concern, but there were concerns. They wanted to make sure he was going to be healthy and not introduce some weird pathogen to the wild population of whale.
So that's the first stage of Iceland. As he's in his sea pen, they bring in some new staff that have been involved with killer whale training at SeaWorld. Notably a pair named Robin Friday and Mark Simmons. And there's two main books you can buy about Keiko. One was called, Freeing Keiko by Kenneth Brower, and I've been citing his beautiful book a lot during these episodes. And then the other book was written by Mark Simmons and it is called, Killing Keiko. So you can imagine that Mark Simmons was not pleased with how the end of the project went. And he decided to write a whole book about it.
Sarah: Mark Simmons is not going to make you wait until the epilogue to let you know what he thinks. And I appreciate that.
Brianna: And you know, Mark Simmons has his very particular point of view. And his role in the project and his book is also really well written. And he obviously has a lot of experience. He started working with orcas at SeaWorld, I believe, when he was 18. Like he just went straight into it out of high school apparently. And he really values the science of animal behavior and understanding animal training from that perspective, and as a particular skillset and field that has its own body of literature and best practices. And that was the attitude that he and his colleague, Robin Friday, brought to the project.
They actually had recently left SeaWorld, and they were starting a consulting business. Probably the most niche consulting business you could think of where they're providing their services to other zoos and aquariums on animal training. And I suspect also specifically for killer whale training.
So they were brought onto the project, and because they were former SeaWorld trainers, there was some skepticism among some of the staff of what their motivations were. But from what I can gather from Mark Simmons book and also from interviewing him, they very much believed in this endeavor of releasing Keiko to the wild. They just had a very particular approach that they wanted to use. And from what I understand, they were very systematic.
It was like if Spock - and I believe Mark Simmons used that comparison in his book - if Spock were to run this project, what he and Robin Friday noticed when they arrived on the project was that the impression I get from how he describes it is that there just didn't seem to be many systems in place in terms of how we're going to interact with Keiko. What kind of reinforcement and animal training strategies are we going to use, having it very clear who's interacting with him and who's not.
He wrote in the book that when they arrived on the project, that they felt like anyone in the vicinity that was involved with the project could just walk out to the platform and interact with Keiko, and that was counterintuitive to what the end goal of the project was. If they're going to try to limit Keiko's dependency on humans and seek out human attention, you're going to need to limit the amount of interaction that he has with people. And I totally understand that that would feel really hard. Like I would have a hard time with it.
Sarah: I don't know. I ignored Keiko. I would've been great at this job.
Brianna: They should have hired you, Sarah.
Sarah: I know. Why didn't they? They should have been like, you should have applied adolescent girls with no experience who have ignored Keiko previously. I would've been off like a shot.
Brianna: And I would've been the worst candidate. Because I probably wouldn't leave Keiko alone
Sarah: I mean, I saw three coyotes in my neighborhood the other night while on a walk. And it's very hard when you see a coyote to not go, “Here, kit.”
Brianna: I know. Yeah. I mean, and especially if it's an animal that you have a relationship with. And Keiko was a very friendly whale and likes people.
Sarah: So this is one of those things where it feels like logic and sentimentality are a little bit at war here. And is that what they're saying in terms of dependence on humans, that it's mainly dependent for attention and relationships?
Brianna: Yeah, I believe so. Because of course there's the issue of food too. Like Keiko right at this point has been relying on humans for food for his entire life. And part of it was just the relationship aspect of it. They wanted him to learn how to seek out the attention of other wild whales.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Brianna: And somehow, essentially lose interest in people. Which I understand that that's exactly what needed to happen for this project to succeed. I think hindsight is 20/20, and it's easy to be critical from 2026, looking back on this project. But that does seem like it was always going to be nearly impossible.
And also, I'll say that it would've depended on the whale. I think that's something that I've come across reading a little bit about animal training and animal behavior. And this is true for people too, that you can say like, “Okay, this is how the project's going to go. We're going to limit our interaction with Keiko and then he's just going to slowly lose interest in us, and then he is going to move on or whatever.”
And I'm grossly oversimplifying, but I would say that when you're asking an animal trainer, like a dog trainer, “Would that work for training my dog for better recall or something?”, and I think the sign of a good animal trainer is they'll say, “Well, depends on the dog.” Depends on the individual. For some individuals, positive reinforcement is all you need. Like my dog Murphy, I barely have to raise my voice, and she is cowering in a corner. And I have to be so careful because she's just such a sensitive little soul and she just needs positive reinforcement.
Because otherwise, any kind of negative reinforcement and I know there's really strong feelings on both sides. Like I know there's a whole camp of people that really believe in only positive reinforcement. And I'm not here to argue for or against it, but I'm saying that it just depends on the individual.
And so for Keiko, I think some of the attitudes about how the release side of things was going to go, could have worked for a different whale. For Keiki, what everyone talked about from day one was he was just a very affable, friendly, golden retriever of a whale, even to the point of being passive and not showing a lot of motivation, I guess.
And I'm not saying that's a flaw. If you're looking at Keiko as a whole and whether the approaches they were flinging at him or trying to see what would work, it probably just, I don't know. I just think it was maybe not going to work for him. It could have worked for somebody else, but maybe not for Keiko.
And I think a lot of people involved with the project, and certainly a few of the trainers, definitely Mark Simmons, they all expressed their doubts about whether Keiko was going to be able to be successfully introduced to the wild. And so when Simmons and Friday first arrive, they kind of shake things up and say, all right, we're going to whip this team into shape.
Sarah: There's a new sheriff in town.
Brianna: Yeah. Which kind of also according to Mark, didn't make for the best camaraderie at times. Like some of the other people that were involved with the project didn't really love their new approach. But part of it was having much stricter protocols about who's interacting with Keiko and when, and what kind of behaviors they're going to work on and reinforce.
One behavior that Mark said he had a problem with, was something that they started at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. And I remember hearing about this as a kid. As a kid, I was like, oh yeah, I guess that makes sense. And now as an adult I'm like, well, I kind of see Mark's point. So they introduced this thing at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which they called the Innovative Behavior. And it was basically, they just…
Sarah: They made him do Odyssey of the Mind.
Brianna: No. They wanted him to just do something new, and he couldn't repeat it. So he could go breach in the corner. He could slap his tail. He could do a barrel roll or something, but he just couldn't do the same thing twice.
And the idea, like when I heard about it as a kid was, well if he's going to be a wild whale, he's going to have to be creative. He's going to have to exercise his imagination. And so we want to encourage that. And Mark Simmons, in reading his book, he was like, all it really does is just confuse Keiko. Because Keiko's like, what?
Sarah: It does make you think about, because again, dogs are very different, I know. But even a dog, and I think of dogs as being kind of the animal that understands humans the most, or at least has had the most time to like… I think dogs and humans very much kind of evolve together.
Brianna: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: I can't think of many dogs that I have known that wouldn't hate that.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And I don't know if that's even a meaningful thing to bring up, but that is what that makes me think of.
Brianna: Right. And so you bring up a good point that if a reaction from a dog or a whale is that like, “Oh God, I hate it when they tell me to do this.”
Sarah: Or just like, “I don't know what's happening”. I don't know. Because it feels like training is about repetition.
Brianna: Right.
Sarah: And if I feel like training was a concept that made me a little bit uncomfortable and that sort of like born free as the wind blows, kind of sentimental child brain kind of a way. And now as an adult woman, I'm like everyone needs to be trained, especially me, you know?
And I woke up this morning and immediately made my bed, and I was like, that was some good training I did on myself. Like I had to teach myself how to do that over a very long period.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: And it feels much better to wake up and have little automatic things that your brain does and to be like, what do I do right in the morning?
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Do I breach? Do I swim in a circle? Do I eat a salmon?
Brianna: Yeah. I. That's funny because I feel like that's my New Year's resolution this year is, quote unquote “developing healthy habits”. But it's really training myself.
Sarah: Yeah, you're just behavior yourself. You are Skinner and the pigeon all in one.
Brianna: But as you mentioned, so if a dog or a whale hates it when they say, “Hey, go do something new”, and you're like, “I don't know what you want”. You can see how that would start to incite frustration.
Sarah: Yeah.
Brianna: Keiko actually was starting to demonstrate, according to Mark Simmons, some behaviors that would say that he was frustrated. And he was developing this thing called a thrashing behavior, where basically he kind of tossed his head. And I think he actually started doing that maybe at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.
Sarah: I'm sorry, it's making me picture him with emo bangs. You're all a bunch of conformists.
Brianna: I mean, I think Keiko was a little emo. He's just a sensitive, sensitive little emo kid.
Sarah: Yeah, a sensitive boy.
Brianna: Yeah. Yeah. Where
Sarah: are you?
I'm so sorry, Ray. He's listening to his Walkman and his pen.
Brianna: Oh, little emo Keiko. And he's already got the right outfit for it, too. But he started doing this thrashing behavior, which Mark said was a sign of frustration. And so Mark and Friday sort of tried to get the team a little bit more in sync, a little more cohesive about what their approach with Keiko was going to be.
And one little moment that I loved in his book, there's lots of little scenes. As I mentioned before, if I was writing a movie about this, a scene I would include, there's literally a training montage.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Brianna: Where Simmons is describing all these…
Sarah: Okay, wait, what are you setting? What song is this set to in your movie? And then, yeah, tell me what is he's doing.
Brianna: Mark Simmons already told us what the song is.
Sarah: What? God, I didn't know you were being so literal.
Brianna: I know. Okay. Just imagine people in their wetsuits/splash suits out on the dock. And they got their whistles to do the bridge when Keiko does a correct behavior. Keiko’s jumping outta the water, swimming in circles, whatever it is. So the song that Mark Simmons mentioned in his book was Dancing Queen by ABBA. Isn't that amazing?
Sarah: He’s the dancing queen. He can dance, he can jive. He's having the time of his life. See that whale dig that scene? Oh my God.
Brianna: I know. It's so perfect. But yeah, I guess they would actually play that song to hype up people when they're about to go out on the water with Keiko. Because I mean, I remember this from watching SeaWorld trainers, you have to be very expressive and you're running across platforms and trying to keep, it's a very physical thing. You're not just standing in one place. You have to get the energy up, get people excited.
And also on top of that, Iceland, this came up many times in both Brower's book and Mark Simmons books, that Iceland is a difficult environment to work in outside, as you might be able to imagine. It is very exposed to the harsh North Atlantic winds and storms. And they had to be out there every day, rain or shine, snow or sleet.
Sarah: God, that would've been a good Chapstick ad.
Brianna: Oh my God. That would've been amazing.
Sarah: Yes.
Brianna: Oh my gosh. I can picture it.
Sarah: We should go back in time and pitch this idea. I think we could make this happen. We should. And then perhaps it would have a butterfly effect.
Brianna: Yes.
Sarah: This is such a side note, and it probably makes me sound like Andy Rooney, but I really was annoyed by that TikTok trend that turned into like, because everything devolves in meaning and gets squishier. But where it was like the butterfly effect is crazy because if I hadn't gone to Tulane, then I wouldn't have met my roommate and be in her wedding now.
And it's like, the butterfly effect isn't what colleges you choose. It's a butterfly flapping its wings in Indonesia causes a hurricane in Houston. It's like the butterfly effect is crazy because if I hadn't left my Chapstick on the subway, then I wouldn't have ended up playing Mimi in Rent. Like that's the butterfly effect. You guys, that trend has been over for months now.
Brianna: No, I see what you mean though. It's not just listing a sequence of events. It's not like Back to the Future. I don't think that was a butterfly effect movie.
Sarah: Because when you make a massive choice in your life, it actually is kind of predictable that other large changes will happen because of it.
Brianna: Yeah.
Sarah: Or I guess this is like a separate butterfly metaphor, but the time traveler butterfly, where you step on a butterfly in the cetaceous period, and it changes the entirety of the future, which is a Treehouse of Horror premise, which I know is a parody of something, but I don't know what the original is. I just know It because of the Treehouse of Horror, because that's how people got their cultural education in the nineties. So if we had pitched this Chapstick ad, we might be living in a democracy right now. It's hard to know.
Brianna: We might, yeah. Yeah.
Sarah: But you know what? We're going to have one again.
Brianna: Yeah, we are. We're working on it. Everyone's doing their best right now and we're fighting for it.
Sarah: I saw a high school production of Newsies last night, and of course I got to tell you, the kids are okay. The kids are going to be all right. They were singing and dancing about soaking scabs. Oh, it was incredible.
Brianna: Wait, Sarah, you did that, which is quintessentially you. And then I went to a marine science film festival, and I watched movies about whales yesterday.
Sarah: Which is quintessentially you. Yeah.
Brianna: So we both just had a great Saturday night last night.
Sarah: We really did. Do a Saturday night that if you tell your friend about it later, they'll be like, yeah, of course.
Brianna: Yeah. You'll have a great time.
Sarah: And that is our episode. Thank you so much for listening, and we are going to have the thrilling conclusion to our trilogy out in one week. We can't wait to share it with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Brianna Bowman for being our guest and orca lady.
Thank you to the people who help make this show. Thank you to Miranda Zickler, who's our producer and editor, and Nicole Ortiz, who is our administrative assistant. Please make sure to check out Brianna's website. You can find it in the show notes, and you can find our bonus episodes on Patreon and Apple+. And right now, you can listen to our January bonus with Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson of the Unspooled podcast, who came on to tell me about Ishtar, the worst movie ever made, or is it? We'll find out.
Thank you again for joining us and continuing to share this experience of just caring a whole lot about things. Keep on doing it. We'll see you in one week.