Column SFF Bestiary Killer Orcas Anyone who has worked with large animals can tell you how easy it is to get hurt… By Judith Tarr | Published on June 30, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share It’s amazing that in sixty years of captive orcas, including orcas bred in captivity, the human body count is quite low. Small weak humans and large, powerful animals can be a volatile mix, with the humans very much on the losing side. And yet in all that time, there’s been a scarce handful of fatalities in the orca tanks. Injuries there have been. Trainers, handlers, and more or less random persons have been bitten, battered, and nearly drowned. Some injuries have been serious, if not actually fatal. Anyone who has worked with large animals can tell you how easy it is to get hurt. They don’t always know their own strength, and a moment’s lapse on the part of either human or animal can have unfortunate results. [Content warning: This article contains descriptions of serious injuries, trauma, and death, as well as a discussion of animal welfare that some readers may find upsetting.] One of the most notorious non-fatal incidents happened at Sea World in 1971. Shamu, the first intentionally captured orca, had been showing signs of mental distress, but money ruled, and the show had to go on. As part of a publicity stunt, a park employee in a bikini was ordered to ride the orca. Shamu had been conditioned to respect trainers in wet suits, but a human in a bikini was a different animal. She dumped the rider, Anne Godsey, and pulled her under. Godsey survived, but needed 200 stitches in her leg and hip, and suffered severe emotional trauma. So did Shamu. She was retired from performance after that incident, and died four months later, at the terribly young age of nine. That did not deter the park from continuing its “Shamu” shows. In 2010, almost forty years later, trainer Dawn Brancheau was performing in front of a large audience with an adult male orca named Tilikum. Brancheau was an experienced trainer, and she believed she had a special relationship with Tilikum. The day she died, she had completed a lunchtime show and lain down on a ledge beside the tank for a “relationship session” with the orca. Her long ponytail trailed out in the water. Tilikum seized it and pulled her in. Brancheau fought hard, and her fellow trainers did their best, but there was nothing they could do to stop six tons of orca. Brancheau died in full view of a horrified crowd. Brancheau was not the first trainer to be killed by one of the park’s orcas. Keto, a male who had been born and raised in captivity (unlike Tilikum, who was born in the wild), had killed Spanish trainer Alexis Martinez two months before during a training session at Loro Parque in Tenerife. It was a similar situation: trainer working with orca, orca pulling trainer down and resisting efforts to save the trainer. Tilikum’s very public attack was not his first. He came to Sea World in 1991 from Sealand in Canada, where he and two female orcas had drowned a trainer who fell into their tank. At Sea World in 1998, his caretakers came in one morning to find a naked and very dead man draped over his back. Daniel P. Dukes had hidden in the park before closing and apparently gone swimming with the whale in the night. He did not survive the experience. After Brancheau’s death, Tilikum continued to perform solo or with other orcas, but never again with humans in the water. He died in 2017 at the age of 35; he had sired a number of offspring and grandoffspring, and was one of the longest-lived males in captivity. Was Tilikum a serial killer? Did his life in orca hell—ripped away from his family, confined to concrete and metal tanks, subjected to training and conditioning, forced to perform day in and day out—cause his mind to snap? The first killing may have been accidental, with a surprise human-shaped toy thrown into the tank he shared with a pair of aggressive females. The second could have been an accident, too: no one knows; apparently there were no cameras in the tank. The third happened in full public view, and there is video. Did he intentionally kill Dawn Brancheau? Had he been pushed to the limit of what he could stand, and he took it out on a convenient target? He did indicate that something was not right. His quality time with his trainer normally ended with her commanding him to dive down toward the observation windows and offer a photo op for the patrons below. That day he didn’t wait for the command. He grabbed her hair instead and dragged her down with him. Or was it essentially a cultural clash? An orca can stay underwater for long periods. It might not have occurred to him that a human can hardly stay under at all by orca standards. When Branchard’s long hair slipped into the water and streamed out, maybe, like a cat, he pounced on it as if it had been a toy. She just happened to come along with it. Once he had her, he wouldn’t let her go, though park staff did their best. He shook her and dragged her and pushed her along with his nose, until eventually he let himself be herded to a small tank with a floor that could be lifted to confine him and to extricate Brancheau from his jaws. Did he think he had a toy? Prey? Toward the end, was he trying to do what orcas will do with one of their own who is injured or sick, supporting her and carrying her up to the surface? Or maybe it was a combination of all of these things. He was in no way suited to the life he was living. He was designed for the open ocean, for a complex culture and a close-knit family. Just about everything he did during his life in captivity conflicted, in one way or another, with his nature and instincts. Sea World insisted that it gave him and the rest of its orcas the best possible facilities and care, with expert trainers and a wide range of enrichment activities. Dawn Brancheau believed sincerely that she had a wonderful relationship with him; she loved him and was convinced that he loved her. Maybe that was true—right up until it wasn’t. Anyone who lives and works with animals learns sooner or later that animals are not humans. Even dogs and cats, who live intimately with us, still have their own agenda, to which they will default. The dog who digs up your garden, the cat who claws your furniture, is doing what comes naturally. Training and conditioning only go so far. There comes a point when nature takes over. With a truly wild animal, which hasn’t been bred for generations to cooperate with humans, even the most careful training and handling can fail. It says a lot for the nature of the orca that there are no verified cases of humans killed by wild orcas, and that captive orcas have only killed a handful in sixty years. These huge predators with their powerful jaws are literal death to fish, squid, and marine mammals, but aside from their natural prey, they’re very much into live and let live. It may be that Shamu and Tilikum and Keto simply snapped. It’s remarkable that dozens of other orcas haven’t and didn’t. Marine parks are still holding orcas captive, and still putting on shows. Sea World announced in 2016 that it was ending its captive breeding program, but it refused to consider either retiring its orcas or releasing them into the wild. What remains, according to them and other parks, is the study of cetaceans in captivity and in the open ocean. They’re too educational (and too lucrative) to let go. It’s probably too late for these animals anyway, barring a Keiko-style, full-on, complex and expensive project. The ones who were captured in the wild can’t return to their families—it’s been too long. The ones who were born in captivity have nowhere to go and lack the knowledge or the skills to survive outside of the tanks. The only viable option is what Sea World is doing: letting time and attrition put a gradual end to their programs. Eventually there may be no captive orcas, but the knowledge gained from the them may help protect and manage the wild population.[end-mark] The post Killer Orcas appeared first on Reactor.