Orca
How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean's Greatest Predator
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- 23,99 €
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- 23,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on the plight of the orca, the most profitable and controversial display animal in history. Yet, until now, no historical account has explained how we came to care about killer whales in the first place.
Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s--the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. But that all changed in 1965, when Seattle entrepreneur Ted Griffin became the first person to swim and perform with a captive killer whale. The show proved wildly popular, and he began capturing and selling others, including Sea World's first Shamu.
Over the following decade, live display transformed views of Orcinus orca. The public embraced killer whales as charismatic and friendly, while scientists enjoyed their first access to live orcas. In the Pacific Northwest, these captive encounters reshaped regional values and helped drive environmental activism, including Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaigns. Yet even as Northwesterners taught the world to love whales, they came to oppose their captivity and to fight for the freedom of a marine predator that had become a regional icon.
This is the definitive history of how the feared and despised "killer" became the beloved "orca"--and what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures.
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Historian Colby (The Business of Empire) takes a revealing look at how the human view of orcas has changed, from considering them bloodthirsty monsters to realizing they are intelligent creature meriting protection from whalers, as well as ocean parks and aquariums seeking specimens to display. He explains that, in the early 20th century, Antarctic explorer Robert Scott's bestselling journal solidified the animal's image as a vicious killer, a view that supported multiple countries' efforts to slaughter as many orcas as possible after WWII. The orca's image only began to be rehabilitated in the 1960s, when live animals were captured and put on display, quickly becoming popular tourist attractions. The acquisition of orcas became a priority for venues like San Diego's Sea World, which acquired the most famous one, Shamu. Colby persuasively contends that, despite legitimate concerns popularized by the 2013 documentary Blackfish, about the effects of captivity on orcas, the animals avoided extinction because their presence in accessible public venues enabled people to relate to them. At times, the amount of detail included bogs down the narrative, as in a section covering an aquarium owner's early life, and other than the Blackfish controversy, the book is curiously light on developments in recent decades. However, for the many readers interested in the orca's well-being, Colby has produced an originally argued and accessibly jargon-free consideration of a hot-button animal conservation issue.
