The Collapsed Dorsal Fin
It’s a signature feature. Standing up to six feet tall, the orca’s dorsal fin not only makes the marine mammal highly recognisable but also helps provide it with stability when traveling at speed, and aids in regulating its body temperature. Despite its size, the fin is made not of bone but of collagen, a structural protein. Go to the oceans and you’ll see pods of orcas gracing the wild waters, fins towering.
Visit an aquarium and it is all very different. Collapsed dorsal fins are commonplace, and one could be fooled into thinking this very unnatural condition is natural.
“Collapsed or collapsing dorsal fins are rare in most wild populations and usually result from a serious injury to the fin, such as from being shot or colliding with a vessel” confirmed the US National Marine Fisheries Service.
But the Fisheries Service doesn’t monitor aquariums. For that, I turned to Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), who advocate on behalf of the almost 4,000 whales and dolphins held in captivity across the world.
“Dorsal fin collapse has been observed in one percent of wild orcas. Yet one hundred percent of captive adult male orcas have collapsed dorsal fins” WDC shared.
Speak to the aquarium operators and with a fake sincerity, they suggest the collapsed dorsal fin is not in fact a collapse but a natural state. In a now infamous video, a member of SeaWorld suggests: “Basically, what it all boils down to is each dorsal fin is unique … It’s kind of like our hair. Some people have curly hair, some people have straight hair; some whales have flopped over dorsal fins, some have perfectly straight dorsal fins.”
What is omitted in SeaWorld’s flawed explanation is the common denominator of collapsed dorsal fins, by an indisputable margin – captivity.
Two decades earlier, Wende Alexandra Evans produced a 120-page research paper on flaccid fin syndrome (dorsal fin collapse). Evans canvassed expert opinion, collated results, and concluded that in almost eighty percent of responses ‘captivity was mentioned most often as the main causative agent’ of dorsal fin collapse. Evans’ work established that holding orcas captive, isolated in small pools, fed on artificial diets and forced to perform tricks, was physiologically damaging to them. I wish Evans had continued with her research, enquiring about the psychological damage captivity inflicts on orcas.
Rescued or Kidnapped?
Kshamenk (pronounced shah-menk) is thirty-five years old and hasn’t seen his pod in thirty-two years. On November 19th 1992, aged three, he was separated from them in Samborombon Bay, Argentina. There is a claim that he beached himself, was discovered by local fisherman and was ‘rescued’ by Mundo Marino, a marine park located in San Clemente, at the southern tip of the bay. Coincidentally, Mundo Marino had an empty pool and were looking for an orca to complete their marine line up after the premature death of eleven-year-old orca Milagro, who himself had been ‘rescued’ after a beaching in August 1985. And then there was Belen (pronounced bay-len), a one-year-old female orca who had also been ‘rescued’ in January 1988. Many were suspicious, some questioned whether the so-called beachings were in fact engineered.
Belen – Child Bride
After the ‘rescue’ there was the captivity. Kshamenk joined Belen in the small holding pools at the marine park. The pools were dirty and shallow. Kshamenk was trained to perform inane tasks for cheap laughs, and in February 1998 he fathered a stillborn calf with Belen. She would become pregnant again but died on February 4th 2000. The foetus was four months old and didn’t survive. Belen was thirteen when she died. She had spent twelve years in captivity and had been impregnated twice. The average female orca in the wild starts mating when they are around fourteen years old.
The Sexual Assault and the Rape
In late 2001, there were discussions to ship Kshamenk to the US, to participate in a breeding programme at SeaWorld. Discussions dragged on for several years before the plan was eventually dropped due to technicalities under Argentinian law – Kshamenk is legally owned by the Argentinian government as he is considered native fauna.
Undeterred, in 2010, trainers from SeaWorld arrived at Mundo Marino to collect twenty-four samples of Kshamenk’s sperm. The sperm collection process had begun two years earlier and involved a perverse set of procedures – suffice to say, it would have been incredibly unnatural behaviour for him and psychologically disturbing.
Kshamenk’s sperm was used to artificially impregnate a captive orca in SeaWorld San Diego named Kasatka, who gave birth to a son in February 2013, and another captive orca in SeaWorld San Antonio named Takara, who gave birth to a daughter in December 2013.
Kasatka died in August 2017 after forty years in captivity. She had been captured aged one, in waters off Iceland. Takara was her daughter.
PETA, a non-profit organization that works to end animal abuse worldwide, posted this tribute to Kasatka:
The Activist and the Judge
By this summer, Kshamenk’s physical appearance had changed. He had lost weight, formed a dip behind his skull, common in emaciated orcas, and his body is reported to have developed a kink from being confined to small spaces. He lays still, not moving for hours at a time. Unsurprisingly, his dorsal fin has collapsed.
“So he’s been there basically since 1992, it’s been 32 years” says Markéta Schusterová, co-founder of Urgentseas, a Canadian not-for-profit organization whose mission is to end captivity and create a world where marine life thrives, and oceans are protected.
Markéta, a Sea Shepherd veteran, continues: “When I first saw the footage, and I saw the size of his [Kshamenk’s] tank I was shocked. He does the [performance] show and then he goes back in a tank that is pretty much the same size as him. And if you look at him from an aerial perspective, when he stretches from one side to the other side of the tank, he can barely move around. So, when I first saw the footage, I didn’t believe it was real.”
Markéta tells me of a petition started a couple of years ago that has amassed 600,000 signatures. And there is the legislative bill, commonly referred to as Kshamenk’s Law, that was presented to the National Congress in October for consideration. It proposes banning shows in Argentina that involve marine animals, as well as outlawing their capture and incarceration. The final part of the bill will mandate aquariums such as Mundo Marino transfer their marine mammals to approved sanctuaries. Failure to do so could carry a prison sentence.
“Male orcas in the wild can live up to seventy years old. Kshamenk’s thirty-five. His living conditions are not great – his food is questionable; the size of the pool is too small, and he is lonely. So, considering all these factors, I don’t know. Does he have five years? Does he have ten years? Does he have twenty years ahead of him? Do we have a chance to get him out? I certainly hope so” says Markéta as we finish our call.
Watching the footage of Kshamenk is saddening. As he lays still, barely submerged in what resembles a child’s paddling pool, I wonder what has been inflicted upon him – kidnapped, confined, isolated, assaulted, and denied his natural intuitive behaviours, all in the name of entertainment. When I first heard about Kshamenk I thought our relationship with non-humans was dysfunctional, but as I write this, I realise it is our relationship with ourselves that is troubled and broken.
Elena Liberatori is an Argentinian lawyer and judge. In 2015, she became the first judge in Argentina to recognise an animal’s non-human personhood rights when she presided over the case of an orang-utan named Sandra, who had spent ten years in isolation. In her ruling Judge Liberatori declared Sandra was legally a non-human person, entitling her to certain legal rights and a certain quality of life. As a result, Sandra was moved to the Centre for Great Apes in the US, where she was re-introduced to an orang-utan community.
More than most, Liberatori seems to get it: “Captivity is an activity that only human beings enact. It is incredible that if we cherish our freedom, we cannot understand that animals also cherish theirs, and even worse, that we have naturalized their captivity. We need legislative changes, we need civil servants, legislators, judges, teachers, society as a whole to change the archaic paradigms of reification, the archaic paradigm of anthropocentrism, of spectacularized violence of profit at the cost of suffering, to put an end to the naturalisation of all that which is incapacitating consciences and annulling our critical observation.”
I hope for Kshamenk’s sake the civil servants, legislators, judges, teachers and society at large are listening to Liberatori.
©2024 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
