Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity - Hardcover

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Marine Biologist
 
 
Naomi Rose fell in love with dolphins at the age of thirteen. It happened in 1975 while she was watching An Evening with John Denver, a major television special that aired that year.
To Naomi, nobody was better than the Rocky Mountain songster with the boyish grin and dirty-blond mop. John Denver was the reason why she had purchased a cheap, used acoustic guitar and started strumming simple sounds from a chord chart. She had every John Denver album there was and soon taught herself to play many of his songs, belting them out with gusto.
Denver’s 1973 smash hit, “Rocky Mountain High,” had made Naomi a fan, but it also sparked her desire to work around wildlife, move to Colorado, and become a park ranger.
Another John Denver song, “Calypso” (1975), made her want to become a marine biologist. Calypso was the name of the retired minesweeper that Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a longtime friend of Denver’s, converted into a floating marine research lab. John Denver wrote the song—one of his signature hits—in celebration of Cousteau, his crew, and the beloved white vessel they made world-famous.
Naomi had tuned in to see her pop-country idol extol the wonders of the mountains and free-roaming wildlife. She wasn’t expecting a special appearance by the old marine biologist with the white hair, red cap, and cool French accent. But there he was on-screen with Denver, during a moving tribute to Cousteau’s work—the two of them sailing together on the Calypso as a cluster of dolphins surfed in the bow wave.
Naomi was transfixed. She watched the music video, primitive as it was, her eyes pegged to the screen.
As Denver’s song “Calypso” played over the images, Naomi stood and clapped along, bedazzled by the dolphins leaping through the white foam from the boat. She listened in amazement to the tune that changed her life:
Like the dolphin who guides you, you bring us beside you
To light up the darkness and show us the way.
The scene had a profound, lifelong effect on the young girl. Thanks to Denver and that seafaring Frenchman, Naomi was hooked on dolphins at a young age. (“John Denver was the gateway drug,” she would joke years later. “Jacques Cousteau was the addiction.”)
Naomi went into the living room to deliver the announcement to her folks. “I am going to study dolphins,” the thirteen-year-old declared with a calm smile. Her parents smiled back. They told Naomi that they trusted her judgment, and they gave her a lot of credit for knowing what she wanted to do, even though she was only a teenager. Naomi realized they didn’t believe her. After all, what thirteen-year-old kid knows what she wants to be?
But Naomi knew. She had never been so certain of anything in her life. There was something about those dolphins on the Denver special, just the sight of them playing at the bow of the boat. Naomi had watched Flipper as a kid, but that didn’t make her want to work with dolphins. It was just another fictional wildlife show. Naomi also watched Daktari, but that didn’t make her want to move to Africa and work with lions.
Someday, she promised herself, she would work on a boat and swim in the open sea, observing the dolphins, just like Capitaine Cousteau.
Naomi Anne Rose was born in Hastings, Michigan, a typical small town far from the ocean. But her family soon moved to the tidy suburbs of Milwaukee, where she spent her formative years. Her father was a chemist by training and worked as a medical technologist, testing blood, urine, and other samples in commercial labs. Her mother, who did not finish her college degree until she was fifty-three, worked with her husband in the medical-testing field. The couple moved frequently to take new jobs.
Naomi’s mother, Reiko Kim, was born in Tokyo and lived there through the Pacific war. Her family moved to Okinawa soon after the fighting ended. There, Reiko learned to speak English and received her primary education at the local US Air Force base. Her Korean father was a translator for the US government, and all of her friends were American military brats.
The Kim family emigrated to Hawaii when Reiko was eighteen, and a few years later that’s where she met Naomi’s father, Raymond Rose, who was stationed there during his stint in the army. The two were married in 1958, and Naomi’s oldest brother, Greg, was born in the territory of Hawaii, in 1959. Her other brother, Lawrence, was born in the state, in 1960.
Naomi’s mother is, as Naomi has put it, “very Asian—inscrutable, quite reserved.” But Reiko was a good mother, if not the warm, June Cleaver kind. She was a good cook and knew how to make terrific Halloween costumes and kept her sons busy with judo lessons and her daughter enrolled in dance class. Naomi’s father, Raymond, never really understood Naomi, though he made it abundantly clear that he was proud of her. To a young Naomi, he was a distant dad, often away on business trips. Raymond moved his family around a lot because his ambitions sometimes got the better of him. It made for an unstable childhood.
Then there were the arguments between husband and wife. They weren’t violent, but the conflict and bickering often made life at home uncomfortable. When Naomi was eleven, the precocious girl flatly suggested that her parents seek a divorce.
Naomi’s brothers were fond of their kid sister, but often gave her a hard time. The bullying was typical sibling rivalry, but Naomi had no intention of putting up with it. The boys might win the physical fights, but Naomi got them back by finding ways to get them in trouble with their mom. Did that make her a tattletale? Perhaps, but it also kept Naomi from growing up as their personal doormat. Within a few years, they had worked out a suitable détente.
Naomi was always the good girl, and quite a little square: gifted in school, well behaved if a bit too opinionated for someone that young. Naomi had always been more confident than most people, even as a young girl telling her older friends what to do.
The Rose family moved several times as Naomi was growing up, living in Wisconsin, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York. When she was fifteen, they moved to Southern California. Though she was wary of yet another relocation, at least her new home offered access to two major marine entertainment parks. She could not wait to visit them: San Diego’s SeaWorld, home of the original Shamu, and Marineland of the Pacific, on the Palos Verdes Peninsula south of Los Angeles. Marineland had two famous killer whales: Orky II, the male, and Corky II, the female. Naomi loved seeing all the shows at both places. Now that she knew she wanted to become a marine biologist, she wanted to experience cetaceans up close. At this young age, Naomi saw only the excitement and spectacle of Corky, Orky, and Shamu leaping from the water, without giving any thought to what might be going on behind the scenes of the marvelous display. Not until years later, when she saw orcas in the wild, did she begin to think about what life must be like for them in captivity.
That summer before her junior year, the short, scrappy Asian-American teenager with wavy, dark hair, brown eyes, and steely self-confidence went on a scientific field trip up the coast of California. It was part of a summer school course she took on intertidal organisms and marine biology offered by the LA County Unified School District. After a few weeks in a classroom learning to identify tide-pool species, Naomi and several other students chaperoned by two adults drove a large RV up to Big Sur for a few days of seaside study. To her, it was the ultimate in student field trips.
The students were divided into small groups and assigned a tide pool to observe over time. They took measurements of salinity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, and pH. They created graphs and tables and did field drawings showing where all the organisms were located in each pool. They sketched individual organisms and conducted censuses by species. They did sediment analyses, took weather readings, and compiled other scientific measurements with an impressive arsenal of equipment. All the while, just offshore, Pacific sea otters played and foraged in the kelp, carefree as monkeys. Naomi loved every minute of it.
But Naomi wasn’t like the other, wilder LA kids. They liked to procure illicit bottles of Boone’s Farm white zinfandel and get rather buzzed and giggly while writing their field reports. Not so Miss Rose. When offered some wine from one of the boys, she politely declined. The boy thought that was pretty cool. “You can say no without being a buzz kill,” he marveled.
At sixteen, Naomi asked if she could go away to study at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School—mostly because she wanted to stay in one place for the rest of high school. That the boarding school was near Aspen, John Denver’s home, was an added benefit. Naomi was so square that she still liked the singer and admired his environmental work. She didn’t think she’d run into the star, and she never did. But the secret hope remained.
School was easy for Naomi and she excelled in all her classes, earning straight A’s without much effort. She loved science most, especially animal behavior and ecology. Mostly Naomi just liked knowing things. She possessed an extraordinary memory to store them in: a brimming internal database of assorted factoids, both weighty and trivial, that she could retrieve at will with unnerving alacrity.
In selecting a college, Naomi made a counterintuitive choice, given her desire to study marine creatures. She planned to attend school away from the coast and wanted to get a good, solid biology degree before she specialized, she explained to her friends.
She selected Mount Holyoke, the Massachusetts liberal arts college for women, and f...