Aquarium rejects calls to free whale that drowned Dawn Brancheau

From timesonline.co.uk

A senior official at SeaWorld in Florida rejected calls yesterday to free the killer whale that drowned a female trainer in front of horrified spectators after grabbing her hair.

Chuck Tompkins, curator of zoological operations at the Orlando entertainment complex, said that releasing Tilikum, also known as Tilly, the largest killer whale in captivity, would kill the 20ft, five-tonne bull. “Tilikum has been raised in a zoological environment. Putting him in the wild would be signing his death certificate,” he told The Times.

The killing of the trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld on Wednesday was the third human death involving Tilikum, who was captured off Iceland in 1983.

Ms Brancheau was lying on a poolside platform petting Tilikum in front of spectators who were eating lunch as part of a show called “Dine with Shamu”, when the killer whale was apparently provoked by a swish of her ponytail. Spectators said that the whale pulled her under water and reappeared on the other side of the tank holding her.

“He wouldn’t let her come up. The force by which the woman was pulled into the water . . . her shoes were pulled off, it was terrible,” Gary Biniak told a local television station.

Suzanne and Todd Connell from New Hampshire, who had taken their son Robby to SeaWorld to celebrate his 10th birthday, filmed the accident. “She was laying down, rubbing him, playing with him, kissing him and then it was like, within a matter of seconds, all of sudden he turned and grabbed her by the head, and a very hard thrust . . . she went down and I screamed and she screamed,” Suzanne Connell told Boston’s WCVB television station.

“She was under for a good three minutes. It seemed like forever. And then [the whale] brought her up. . . and her face was . . . you could see the fear in her. And then he just took her back down and it must have been five or six minutes,” she said.

In 1991 Keltie Lee Byrne, a trainer at Sealand in Canada, died after falling into a tank that contained Tilikum and two other whales, which prevented her from climbing out.

In 1999 the naked body of Daniel Dukes was found draped across Tilikum’s back at SeaWorld after he apparently slipped past security to go swimming with the whales.

A post-mortem examination showed that Ms Brancheau had died from drowning and multiple traumatic injuries. Local police said that rescuers had been unable to get to her because of the whale’s aggressive nature. Her body was recovered only after the whale was coaxed into a smaller pool.

Friends and relatives of Ms Brancheau, 40, who was married without children, said that she had dreamed of working with whales since the age of 9.

Tilikum is the largest of the 42 orcas held in captivity in aquaria around the world. Animal rights groups have long condemned the practice. SeaWorld was closed yesterday as officials re-evaluated their safety procedures before resuming performances. Tilikum, who is used as a stud and has sired more than a dozen calves, was being kept in a pool away from other whales.

(Julie Fletcher/Orlando Sentinel/AP) Dawn Brancheau, shown here performing in 2005

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