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Reflecting on the tragedy I went back and looked at a story WDCS reported on in 2007. It was from a LA Times article.

The full piece is available via the link above, but the synopsis is 'a report in which state investigators concluded that it is 'just a matter of time' before a captive orca at Sea World’s Adventure park killed a trainer', has been withdrawn by the agency that issued it after two days of talks with Sea World officials.  In rescinding the report, state department staff claimed that they did not have the expertise required to investigate the matter fully and promised to review their own record of events.

The report, by the state Department of Industrial Relations' Division of Occupational Safety and Health was released following the attack on a
trainer by a killer whale at Sea World Adventure Park in San Diego last November.
 

During a show on Wednesday 29th November [2006] at Sea World’s San Diego theme park, a 30-year-old orca known as Kasatka, a 7,000-pound, 17-foot-long female, grabbed a trainer’s foot and pulled him underwater twice, before letting go so he could escape from the pool and be taken to hospital for treatment. The incident happened towards the end of the show during a routine which was supposed to include Kasatka and the trainer diving under water to emerge with the trainer jumping off her nose.  

The report also stated that the animals prove deadly to their human trainers by virtue of their size alone, and that as carnivores, are armed with teeth that could tear “flesh and bone”. It was recommended that Sea World staff be prepared to use lethal force to prevent the loss of human life by one of the captive orcas, a recommendation that has
been withdrawn following the repeal.'

So should someone now be asking why was the report withdrawn and who now should shoulder the responsibility for what someone once described as an incident that was going to happen but it was 'just a matter of time'?

You can see CNN investigation on this issue, including our HSUS colleague Dr. Naomi Rose

The original LA Times reporting the 2007 Health and Safety Report before meetings with Sea World led to its retraction

And some more thoughts on the whole issue from our colleague Sue Rocca 

I don't understand why the Sea World spokesperson I can see here in the UK on TV broadcasts appears to be saying that 'we have never experienced anything like this before'. I am sure that there has been numerous accidents and incidents, and Sea World should have been well aware of Tilikum's past history in which two people died. There have also been numerous near misses as Youtube would testify too.

There are a lot more details here

With such amazing but essentially wild social animals confined in small tanks that are completely unrelated to their natural environments away from family and social groups, no wonder these 'accidents' are always lurking as possibilities.

Time to let the orcas go free, -that's not just the best for the orcas, but its the best way to avoid any accidents, and definitely avoid such a tragedy like this from happening again.

It strikes me that if the commercial whalers are welcoming the initiative from the IWC then I would suggest that something is really, really wrong with the ideas that are being discussed.

When they are talking about reviving their declining industry and hunting more species one must wonder what the heck our legislators are proposing?

 

"WDCS experts will be at the IWC Meeting this week to give whales a voice. You can get up-to-the minute news about these discussions from our expert in attendance by following WDCS on twitter at http://twitter.com/WHALES_org and http://twitter.com/alleyesonIWC"

On the day that many of our elected officials forgot what we mandated them to do, - end whaling - and seem to believe that their job is to reward the whalers with what they want - legal whaling,  scientists in the US have called for an end to the "inhumane" slaughter of dolphins in Japan. But  how can we save dolphins that swim in the waters of Japan if countries are not willing to stop them on the highs seas.

What are countries like Sweden doing trying to destabilize the EU's opposition to whaling with their unfettered support for Greenland's thirst for more whales? Their actions are precipitating an enfeebled EU that is unable to organize itself to oppose commercial whaling whilst Norway, Iceland and Japan simply kill more whales until the blackmail the conservation-led countries into giving in.

Its a sad day when the IWC proposes the killing of humpbacks, sei, sperm, minke, Bryde's and fin whales - All because the whalers want them!

Which countries will step forward and take up the mantle that Sweden and Denmark are stripping from the shoulders of the EU? Who will champion the whales now?

WDCS experts will be at the IWC Meeting this week to give whales a voice. You can get up-to-the minute news about these discussions from our expert in attendance by following WDCS on twitter http://twitter.com/WHALES_org and at http://twitter.com/alleyesonIWC"

In the first of an occasional series of expert commentaries WDCS is pleased to present a pertinent memoir on Norwegian whaling by Dr. Sidney Holt

The current whaling discourse appears to be focused on how to accommodate the self-authorized commercial whaling of Norway,Iceland and the so-called ‘scientific whaling’ of Japan. The not so public debate is centered on what may be conceded to Japan to end its continued use of Article VIII to circumvent the 1982 decision of the IWC for a moratorium on all commercial whaling and appears to include granting it, Norway and Iceland, sanctioned commercial whaling off their own coast in exchange for Japan withdrawing from whaling in the Antarctic.

Many of those officials who are charged by their governments to achieve a negotiated settlement may be acting under either good intentions or bad instructions, but either way neither is enough for them to truly understand the consequences of their current actions.

What is lacking is a historical perspective that very few IWC Commissioners could be expected to have due to their more recent appointments to serve as their national representatives. Some of those who do remember are the very individuals who would like to see such a history forgotten or at least fudged, as a clear understanding of what has happened before is a sure temper to inappropriate action today.

Dr. Sidney Holt is in a unique position to illuminate the darker history of the IWC. He has not only served as advisor to several IWC country delegations but has been a fundamental cornerstone of the IWC Scientific Committee for the last fifty years. His knowledge of the thinking of both the various conservation-led initiatives and of the pro-exploitation strategies that have been played out over the years is second to none.

He will hopefully forgive me for saying that he has also been around long enough so that very few ideas at the IWC are new to him. The current US Government endorsed strategy to deliver coastal whaling for Japan appears to be the same idea that has raised its muddled head in two previous incarnations, but this time it may be even more dangerous -because people have forgotten the lessons of why it failed twice before.
Dr Holt’s timely paper moves our attention from the focus on the intransigence of Japan to remind us of previous attempts to circumvent years of progressive conservation policy at the IWC and into the depths of strategy of various Norwegian delegations.

He traces the critically important years of the mid-1980s when Norway, facing the threat of the moratorium ending commercial whaling, systematically set out to undermine the recommendations o the Scientific Committee, and some of its own scientists, to create a new classification of whaling, and to create a myth that the moratorium decision was not based on science.


The history of trying to control that destructive human activity we call whaling has unfortunately been one mistake after another. Never has there been a truer example of Santayana’s warning that ‘those who forget history are doomed to repeat it’ and Dr Holt’s paper is a timely reminder of how the past can illuminate the machinations of our current elected politicians who would gamble with the lives of whales they have told us they were dedicated to protecting.

You can read Dr. Holt's full paper here and if you are a country that is contemplating voting for a resumption of commercial whaling in whatever guise, let history remind you of the mistake you will be making.

WDCS experts will be at the IWC Meeting this
week to give whales a voice. You can get up-to-the minute news about
these discussions from our expert in attendance by following WDCS on
twitter http://twitter.com/WHALES_org
and at
http://twitter.com/alleyesonIWC"

Just how many whales did swim in our oceans centuries ago? Fred Pearce writing in New Scientist of the 9th February reports that some scientists think it might be a lot more than we originally thought.

He reports that genetic techniques for analysing whale populations, alongside fresh historical analysis, suggest that whales may once have been the dominant species in the world's oceans. Pearce notes that Stephen Palumbi and Joe Roman of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station have argued, to a mostly hostile audience it must be said that whilst the IWC believed that before large-scale whaling began, the North Atlantic was home to about 20,000 humpback whales, Roman and Palumbi estimated the pre-exploitation population was more than twenty times as great, at 240,000. Globally, they suggested, there may have once been 1.5 million humpbacks, rather than the 100,000 estimated by the IWC.How many whales were lost in early whaling, let alone in the industrial whaling of the 20th century.

The Norwegian naval captain N. Juel (1892) described whale spearing as, ‘…highly destructive for the whale population but gives only a small and uncertain yield’. Indeed spear whaling, with a struck and lost rate greater than the 50% of the Old Basque whaling, was officially characterized as ‘the most wasteful of all hunting methods’ and in order to prevent its revival was banned under the Norwegian Whaling Act of 1896.

Of course this is an embarrassment to the IWC as it would mean that whaling would never resume, and so so far many government scientists have refused to contemplate the work as it challenges the foundation of their assumptions. It would also make a mockery of all the clams that whales need to be 'culled' to allow other marine life to thrive. Indeed a recent paper on genetic studies of Antarctic minke whales just published in Molecular Ecology, states‘… research suggests that direct competition for food is not keeping the [other species] large whale populations from recovering’.

So an ocean that teemed with whales and  a healthy environment may have been our inheritance, and could be the future - but only if we learn to leave the whales well alone.