The two had known each other for 16 years, ever since Dawn Brancheau began working as a trainer with killer whales at SeaWorld Orlando. The whale, Tilikum, or Tilly as all the trainers call him, had been brought from a park in Canada a couple of years back.
Brancheau and Tilikum had just finished what was described by fellow trainers as a “very good session”. She had been petting him and hugging him from the side of his tank and he had been performing spins for her.
“We thought they were playing,” said Wayne Gillespie, who was with his children in the audience. “Next thing she was in the water with it. We noticed it thrashing more than normal and there was water everywhere. Someone said to us: ‘You might want to turn your kids around’,” Gillespie added.
Another visitor to the centre, Victoria Biniak, was watching through a glass window underwater when Tilikum “just took off really fast, came back around, bobbed up in the water and grabbed her. He was thrashing her around pretty good”. Despite the death, SeaWorld said it would not destroy the giant whale, but would review all its procedures to ensure a similar incident never happens again. “He is going to be a part of our family for a long time to come,” Chuck Tompkins, head of animal training for SeaWorld Parks, told CNN.
In a blog posting, the park said: “We have every intention of continuing to interact with this animal, though the procedures for working with him will change.”
For Brancheau it was a violent end of what her mother said had been her childhood dream ever since she was taken, aged 10, to see the whales. In 2006, Brancheau told the Orlando Sentinel: “I remember walking down the aisle and telling my mum, ‘This is what I want to do’.” One of the Orlando park’s eight killer whales, Tilikum was captured at the age of about two in the waters of Iceland and has been in captivity for almost 30 years.
In 1991, along with two female orcas, he was involved in the death of a trainer, Keltie Byrne. Eight years later, a man was found dead in the animal’s tank having broken into the park after hours.
Partly out of recognition of Tilikum’s huge size — at 12 tonnes he is the largest orca in captivity — and partly out of knowledge of the past, the park’s 28 trainers were never allowed to swim with him.
But Brancheau’s death has provoked debate about the appropriateness of captivity for such giant seafaring creatures.Some have argued the whale should be put down. “Tilikum is a casualty of captivity; it has destroyed his mind and turned him demented,” Russ Rector, a former dolphin trainer in Fort Lauderdale who now runs the Dolphin Freedom Foundation, said. “If he was a horse, dog, bear, cat or elephant he would already have been put down after the first kill, and this is his third,” Rector added.