she s very lucky to be alive, that s for sure. i believe it s 70-plus, maybe even more, just killer whale trainer accidents. maybe 30 of them happened prior to me actually being hired at seaworld. and i knew about none of them. i ve seen animals come out at trainers. something is wrong. i ve seen people get slammed. the whales, they re just playing or they re upset for a second.
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whale-on-whale aggression was just part of your you know, the daily existence. we ask that you use the stairs and aisle ways as you exit. please do not step on the seats. these areas may become wet, and therefore slippery to some footwear. thank you. in the wild when there s tension they have thousands of square miles to exit the scene and they can get away. you don t have that in captivity. could you imagine being in a small concrete enclosure for your life when you re used to swimming 100 miles a day? sometimes this aggression became very severe, and in fact whales have died in captivity because of this aggression. i think it was 1988 kandu tried to assert her dominance over corky. rammed corky. it fractured her jaw, which cut an artery in her head, and then she bled out.
it s not just tilikum. we have to separate what happened to dawn, and as tragic as it is and no one wants to see it happen again. can seaworld create an environment where it never happens again? yes, i absolutely believe they can. what if there were no seaworlds? i can t imagine a society with the value we put in marine mammals if those parks didn t exist. i m not at all interested in having my daughter, who is 3 1/2, grow up thinking that it s normalized to have these intelligent, highly evolved animals in concrete pools. i don t want her to think that s how we treat the kin that we find ourselves around on this planet. i think it s atrocious. this hearing is expected to last all week with osha continuing to work toward this theory. that seaworld knew there was a calculated risk of injury or death, but put trainers in the water with the whales anyway. while seaworld will say that dawn brancheau s death was an
whale holding area. she apparently slipped or fell into the tank and was fatally injured by one of the whales. at first seaworld reported a trainer slipped and fell in the water and was drowned. that was the first report. it wasn t until eyewitness accounts disputed that that they had to go back in their huddle and say, wait a minute, we ve got to come up with a new plan. late tonight seaworld has confirmed a killer whale pulled a woman into the water. she didn t fall into the tank as the sheriff s department initially reported. the new plan is that he grabbed her ponytail. this is a subtle way of placing the blame on dawn s shoulders. she shouldn t have had a long ponytail. or if she did have that ponytail, it should have been up in a bun. dawn, if she was standing here with me right now, would tell you that that was her mistake in allowing that to happen. they blamed her. how dare you? how disrespectful for you to blame her when she s not even alive to defend herself.