By now I'm sure you've heard about Dawn Brancheau, a veteran trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, being killed by 2 time convicted human murderer, Tilikum the Killer Whale last week. If not go here. Let me just say that I'm pretty sure someone is going to take this post the wrong way....*Kanye shrug*.It's unfortunate that she lost her life and my prayers go out to her husband and her family. With that said, being a Killer Whale trainer has to have it's fair share of occupational hazards, death being among the many. I'm not trying to be insensitive, but the fact that the media keeps making this out to be some sort of unimaginable "accident" is bearing on the side of plain insanity. It's not like a pack of vicious Geese pecked this woman to death while she was leaving Walmart...nothing about what happened with Tilikum should be considered unnatural or come as a surprise. Yet, you have people making statements like...
"It's just hard to fathom that this has happened." - Mike Wald, a spokesman for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration office in Atlanta.
No it's not Mike...a Killer Whale killing anything seems pretty natural to me. You know what doesn't seem natural to me?
Swag Surfin' on a Killer Whale's back...
...askin' a Killer Whale to 'Signal The Plane' or 'Pon de' River'...
...or reenacting scenes from Dirty Dancing with a Killer Whale...
....all of that shit should be hard to fathom Mike. Leave it up to man and his "conquer all, I'm the superior species" attitude to think that the things above are okay.Jack Hannah had the most logical response to this whole thing: "What happened is something that happens; it happens in our line of work....they are dangerous animals; they're wild animals."
The bottom line here is a wild animal, that we happen to call a Killer Whale, being kept in a big ass bathtub when it's used to swimming up to 100 miles a day in the open ocean, being "trained" to splash water on children so corporations like Sea World can make millions of dollars in profit, is bound to cause harm to people at some point. Whether the harm caused is intentional or accidental is irrelevant because the end result is the same.
The messed up part about this whole thing is that I don't think Tilikum killed her on purpose. He was probably just playing with her on some "Ha, ha, you're it" type of shit. But unfortunately if you're ever in a situation where a 12,300-pound Killer Whale decides to play "it' with you, death is pretty much inevitable. Leading to my point...
Killer Whales are too damn big and too damn dangerous to be held in captivity, let alone be turned into circus acts. Free Willy (No Luke). But what does SeaWorld do? Three days after their veteran trainer's death, they slap together a brief video montage of her and get back to business as usual.
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