Orca

How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean's Greatest Predator

By: Jason M. Colby

Narrated by: Paul Heitsch

Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

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. 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.

©2018 Oxford University Press (P)2019 HighBridge Company

Hard to hear, but NECESSARY

At 14 hrs, I thought I would like finish this title in a couple of days, but the truth is that took me a couple of weeks. Some chapters brought me to tears and I had to stop and give the audiobook a long rest for a few days before I could pick it up again. Mr. Colby lays out in sometimes harsh and unrelenting detail the terrible accidents, often through carelessness and just plain greed, that have caused the deaths of Orcas in the scramble to capture them for display and show purposes. And it's beyond frustrating to listen to the sheer ignorance displayed by capture teams and oceanarium owners which points to the fact that they shouldn't have been keeping these whales in the first place.

Narrator Paul Heisch reads the facts of what happened in a very matter-of-fact way, which strangely enough, makes some of those facts hit that much harder. Beyond the accidents like cables on slings breaking while in the air and loose nets entangling the whales, there's the sheer incompetence of oceanarium owners repeatedly making the same mistakes because NOTHING was understood about orcas at the time.

And yet, it's only BECAUSE they were on display that anyone took an interest, that anyone started studying them and watching their mating habits and their feeding habits and learning anything about them. We only started studying them, caring about them, and conserving their numbers once those marine parks started showing the animals.

It's important to read/listen to this book, even when it gets hard to, and to realize how fundamentally the captivity of killer whales is WHY we came to love them in the first place. Some of the men who hunted them for capture are haunted by it; some of them only seemed to ever care about the money, right up to the end. But only through their efforts of bringing the whales to be viewed by the general public did they turn the ocean’s apex predator into mankind's friend.

Without the capture and display industry, would we give a damn about killer whales in the first place? Without captive orcas on display, would they have ever outgrown the title of being killers? Would anyone have fallen in love with them enough to start studying their social habits, their vocalizations, and how to tell them apart from one another? It's possible, of course, but a lot less likely.

For better or worse, the display of captive orcas kick-started conservation efforts, gave birth to organizations like Greenpeace, and implemented a *nearly* world-wide moratorium on whaling. Rather than furthering scientific knowledge by killing and dissecting orcas, we moved slowly into watching the creatures living in their natural habitat. We know as much as we do now because we loved seeing those captive orcas, but we couldn't stand seeing them being kept captive.

It's not an easy book to get through, but it's an important one to read/listen to.

My heart is forever Orca filled.

This book taught me so much and I fell I inlove with these beautiful animals. My wish is that they could all be free but I know that if not for a trip to Sea World in Florida, where I became mesmerized by their beauty, I doubt I would have ever been able to see one in the wild. Thank you Jason Colby for writing this amazing book and thank you Paul Heitsch for your wonderful narration of it, I was captivated.

informative yet heartbreaking - we must do better

One of my favorite recent listens. This book goes into great detail to explore our relationship with orca whales since the 1960s. Super interesting, heartbreaking, and a call for us all to think more critically about how we interact respectfully with the ocean and its creatures. The narrator is a bit monotone but it really doesn’t matter - you can get over that by the first chapter.

Heart rending but necessary read!

I learned so much about orcas, and humans from the stories in this book, but chapter after chapter of death, abuse, ignorance, and arrogance was hard to take. The reader was easy to understand but very haulting and unexpressive. Overall, a humbling history and legacy worth knowing.

The history and story is amazing!

Such a great book. I learned so much about the pacific northwest in such a short time! And about the connection between human and orca.