Katie Emmons
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a new look at the Penn Cove captures

In most educational settings, people are encouraged to ask questions, learn more and get answers, but at marine parks it’s a different story.
In fact, there’s one question that’s sure to make marine park proprietors cringe:

 Sometimes the curious person asking can be quickly assured that the whales they are seeing on display and in shows were born in the facility and have experienced nothing outside of their captive environment; but for other orcas in captivity it’s a much different story.

Orca whales like Tilikum, Lolita, Corky, Katina, Morgan and others were captured from the wild- literally ripped away from their family pods and forced to live lonely lives in small concrete tanks which are inadequate to their species.

Lolita was captured on August 8, 1970 in Penn Cove, Whidbey Island WA. She was one of seven young whales sold to marine parks from this mass capture of over 80 orca whales conducted by Ted Griffin and Don Goldsberry, partners in a capture operation known as Namu, Inc.
Five whales, including four baby whales, drowned during this capture.

The corpses of these animals were slit open, filled with rocks, weighed down with chains and anchors and sunk in the water in hopes that their violent deaths would be hidden from the public eye, but in November of 1970, three of the carcasses washed up on shore.

Six years later, Sea World settled in court, agreeing to never again capture orcas in Washington State, to avoid publicly taking the blame, but below, in incredibly rare footage of this capture, Don Goldsberry of SeaWorld Inc. openly admits that he, and those involved in conducting this brutal capture were responsible for the orcas’ deaths.
Watch, learn and pass it on: the stories of the captive orcas that were taken from the wild begin here:


Top 2 photo credits:
http://phys.org/news/2011-12-whale-activists-sue-free-lolita.html http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Granny-s-Struggle-A-black-and-white-gold-rush-is-1216881.php#photo-671701
footage credit: “The registered copyright for the film of the Penn Cove roundup and other orca capture footage from Puget Sound is SOLELY OWNED by KING Television (A. H. Belo Corporation) and Baby Wild Films (also dba Outpost Productions).  Baby Wild Films has full rights to offer this footage to any party.”