The ongoing debate about keeping whales and dolphins in captivity at the Vancouver Aquarium has elicited strong opinions throughout the Lower Mainland, but the debate might not even exist if the facility hadn’t decided 50 years ago Wednesday that it should harpoon a killer whale.
“It would not be acceptable in any way today,” aquarium president and CEO John Nightingale told CTV News. “But that wasn’t today. That was 50 years ago.”
In 1964, not much was known about orcas. The public perception was that they were violent, dangerous animals that depleted salmon stocks for fishermen and would kill and eat humans if given the chance. They were so disliked that a machine gun was mounted in Seymour Narrows to kill them on sight.
Today, the whales are seen as gentle, friendly, and fun-loving, and no one complains about the salmon they eat.
This dramatic change in perception began with an accident. On July 16, 1964, a team from the fledgling Vancouver Aquarium set out to kill an orca so that it could create a life-sized, anatomically correct model for display. They ended up doing something much more important.
Capturing Moby Doll
The team harpooned a whale near the eastern tip of Saturna Island, but the animal didn’t die. It also didn’t struggle.
“We thought that it would turn and attack us,” said Dr. Murray Newman, who led the expedition as the aquarium’s founding director.
The whale didn’t attack. Instead, it became very docile, and Newman began to wonder if it could be kept alive.
“If it stayed alive, it really would be world attention and we would also learn a lot more from it,” Newman said.
The team literally towed the whale to a North Vancouver dry dock, and announced to the world that it had brought a killer whale into captivity for the first time ever.
The captured whale was dubbed Moby Doll, and it became an instant sensation. Some 20,000 people visited the newly captured cetacean that summer, roughly the same number that attended a Beatles concert at Empire Stadium that year.
When Newman first got back to Vancouver with the whale, he called in doctors from the University of British Columbia to inspect its wounds. In those days, there were no veterinarians with expertise in treating orcas.
The doctors recommended penicillin, which was administered with a syringe on a 10-foot pole because of the animal’s reputation for violence. Soon, however, Moby Doll shattered that perception, and the 10-foot-pole treatment was replaced with hand-feeding of fresh salmon.
“Moby turned out to be a dog on a leash,” Newman said.
Moby Doll’s legacy
Eventually, Moby Doll was moved from the North Vancouver dry dock to an enclosure at Jericho Beach, where it died of a skin infection 88 days after being captured.
In that time, Moby Doll had become a celebrity, and the public’s desire to see captive killer whales turned into “a miniature gold rush” for people capturing them, according to Nightingale.
“Moby Doll started it,” Nightingale said. “We can’t go back and rewrite history, but we can go back and look at this absolutely clear-cut deflection in the course of our understanding of nature and public appreciation for it.”
After Moby Doll’s death, the aquarium did build the anatomical model it had originally planned, Newman said, but it’s no longer on display.
Both the scientific understanding and popular perception of marine mammals has continued to evolve since Moby Doll was captured. As researchers and the general public have more access to the animals in captivity, their knowledge of the animals grows, and their perspectives on their captivity change, Nightingale said.
“As people learn more, then they question, of course, well, is it right to take them out of the wild? Are they kept in good facilities?” he said. “Those questions, naturally, are part of this learning curve.”
These days, as a result of that learning curve, capturing wild whales and dolphins for display is something that just isn’t done in North America, Nightingale said.
Another result of this evolution will have to be an increase in concern for the marine environment, he said. There are more boats, more pollutants, and fewer salmon in the waters off of B.C. today than there were in 1964, when Moby Doll set society on this toward a better understanding marine mammals.
“Things aren’t easier for those killer whales than they were 50 years ago. They’re harder,” Nightingale said. “It’s really up to us now to use our appreciation that we’ve learned seeing them in person ... to protect and help them survive less impacted by humans in the wild.”
Cetaceans at the aquarium today
Even if it wanted to capture wild cetaceans today, Vancouver Aquarium is prohibited from doing so under Vancouver Park Board bylaws. According to the bylaws, the aquarium may only keep cetaceans that were born in captivity, caught in the wild prior to September 16, 1996, or were already being kept in the park as of that date. It may acquire new cetaceans only if they are members of an endangered species and their arrival is approved by the park board, or if they are injured and in need of rehabilitation.
These rules haven’t stopped members of the public as prominent as Mayor Gregor Robertson and biologist Jane Goodall from calling for the aquarium to end cetacean captivity. More than 16,000 signatures have been collected on an online petition aimed at doing just that.
The aquarium currently houses two beluga whales and two Pacific white-sided dolphins, as well as Jack and Daisy, a pair of harbour porpoises deemed non-releasable by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. It’s scheduled to give a presentation on its work with large marine mammals at a special park board meeting on Saturday, July 26, at 9 a.m. The park board is scheduled to review its bylaw relating to cetacean captivity in 2015.
