Don't Go Postal - Go ORCA!!

Tiffy had been swimming with dolphins in Curaçao, and she told me it was tons of fun but that you could tell the dolphins didn't really care about you one way or the other, they just wanted their fish. Then when we both went swimming with dolphins in Puerto Vallarta, I saw what she meant - it's just a job to them, and I can respect that. Nemo and Ali were jeuvenile bottlenose dolphins but still much larger and stronger than we were, and I thought to myself that they could really do some damage if they wanted to, but they were perfect caballeros and did what they were told.

Then there was the recent story of Tillikum (aka. "Shamu") who killed his trainer. If young bottlenose dolphins seemed powerful, I can only imagine what a full-grown killer whale must be like. Now I don't know anything about Tillikum and his trainer and what their relationship was like, and considering that he had already killed two other humans, he might have just been getting the whale equivalent of an advanced degree in @$$hole Studies. Still, when I heard this story, all I could think is, "Tillikum - livin' the dream! Man, wouldn't I love to do the same thing to my boss!" But of course I don't have the kind of size advantage he does.

Anyway, this got me to thinking: is it right to keep intelligent animals which are meant to travel great distances penned up in small areas? Is it right to force them to do menial tricks for peanuts, or fish, or minimun wage? People seemed shocked by Tillikum's actions, but they chalked it up to the fact that he is a wild animal living in a non-ideal environment. I would argue that we should either call this a case of workplace violence or acknowledge that humans who freak out at work are also being kept in a manner that they are ill-suited for. We have such fantastic long-range vision, yet in most of my jobs I spent all day unable to look more than 10 feet away. We are built to travel vast distances but spend most of our time cooped up in tiny pens, I mean cubes, doing stupid tricks for a tiny paycheck.

I am not advocating that we return to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, although I'm about ready to give it a try personally. I'm just saying, can't we make working conditions more humane? And maybe we should offer orcas positions instead of not giving them a choice. Maybe some would still choose to do tricks for humans. In this current economy, few creatures get a choice about how they make a living.

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