AR-News: Beautiful editorial on Keiko

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Editorials
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Keiko's wild life 
The celebrity killer whale never learned to be truly free, but he 
demonstrated all that it meant to be tamed 

12/17/03
K eiko started out as a perfect children's story, but this last chapter 
complicates things. All those kids clutching stuffed killer whales imagined Keiko 
reuniting with his long-lost family and swimming happily ever after in the deep 
blue sea, not rolling up dead on a lonesome Norwegian coastline. 
                        
The kids may be unconvinced, but it is fitting that Keiko's Hollywood life 
ended with such an ordinary Nature Channel death. It was always too easy to 
forget that Keiko was in fact a creature of nature, not of Hollywood. 

Keiko's lasting importance is not the gentle, sappy "Free Willy" movies or 
the sparkling aquarium his celebrity built in Newport. The lovable orca's real 
legacy is what he demonstrated about the complexity and coolness of killer 
whales, and what it means for an animal to be truly wild and free. 

People all over the world understand and care more about orcas than ever 
before. Without Keiko, it is hard to imagine the rescue of Springer, a 2-year-old 
female orca lost in busy Puget Sound, where she'd wandered after her mother 
died. U.S. and Canadian wildlife agencies worked together to capture Springer 
and successfully return her to her family pod in Canada's inland waters in the 
summer of 2002. 

And if not for Keiko, wildlife agencies might not be preparing now to capture 
and move Luna, a confused 4-year-old orca who has spent the past two years 
alone in Canada's Nootka Sound, so desperate for companionship that he's bumping 
into fishing boats and approaching seaplanes. 

Authorities also are now studying whether to list the U.S. population of 
orcas on the endangered or threatened species. The population of the U.S. group, 
which spends most of its time in the waters between Vancouver Island and the 
inland U.S. and Canadian coasts, has dwindled from an estimated 125 animals to 
84 today. 

It is ironic that all these wild orcas will benefit from the experience and 
celebrity of a killer whale that could not be free again even when he had the 
chance. Keiko's nearly 20-year term in captivity was too long. He never learned 
how to feed himself. He loved people too much to leave them behind. In the 
most practical sense, the experiment to free Keiko was a failure. 

Still, it was worth trying. Keiko's release showed just what is taken from a 
wild animal when it is captured and contained in a zoo or an aquarium. If 
Keiko never relearned what it meant to be wild, he demonstrated all that it means 
to be tamed. 

People complained about the costs -- tens of millions of dollars -- and about 
lavishing money and attention on one whale while ignoring other societal and 
environmental problems. But it wasn't their money anyway. 

It belonged to the dreamers, the private foundations and the parents of the 
kids who left the Oregon Aquarium with a Keiko memento and a new appreciation 
for killer whales. 

They buried Keiko on Monday in a pasture next to the Norwegian fjord where he 
died. A lot of people thought they should have towed Keiko's body far out to 
sea, the way they commonly dispose of dead whales. 

The quiet burial on shore was more appropriate. When Keiko could swim free, 
he did not roam the high seas. He showed up on the Norwegian coast to frolic 
with children. Keiko was buried where he spent his life, with people. 


 
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