What do you do with a horny male teen orca? Ideally, the answer would be to find a horny female teen orca and see if there’s any chemistry. Sadly, for some truly unfortunate orca trainers in France, there’s only one option, and it isn’t pretty.
Marine Zoo Marineland Antibes closed its doors in January in the wake of new animal welfare laws banning the use of dolphins and whales in zoo shows. This left the fates of Wikie, 23, and her 11-year-old son Keijo up in the air. They were born in captivity and can’t be released into the wild and outrage erupted after plans leaked to send them to a worse zoo in Japan.
For the moment, they’re being kept in their pools at the closed French zoo and being cared for by their trainers. But, unfortunately, Keijo is reaching adolescence and, according to the managers “has increasingly strong sexual urges”.
This is a problem because he’s in a pool with his mom, and trainers absolutely do not want orca inbreeding in captivity. The solution? Climb into a wetsuit, grab a flipper, and give that whale a happy ending.
“Morally bankrupt”
It’s undignified for both human and cetacean, and footage captured by activist group TideBreakers of the process has raised eyebrows. Tidebreakers member Valerie Greene has never seen anything like it:
“As a former killer whale trainer, I’ve never seen this behaviour performed for anything other than attempting semen collection for use in artificial insemination. … The notion that trainers are providing sexual relief to an orca… is a perverse new low in the captivity industry’s morally bankrupt practices.”
There are also suspicions that the whale semen may be being harvested and sent to Japan, where it’ll be used to artificially inseminate captive orcas. Marineland reps have thrown cold water on that, insisting this bizarre process is designed simply to chill the horny orca out.
They underlined to the BBC that:
“In order to avoid inbreeding with his mother, but also to prevent them from fighting and injuring each other, Marineland decided to sexually stimulate Keijo [to relieve him of his] tensions. Although spectacular, this is natural and totally painless for the animals.”
Orcas are intelligent and sociable animals who can develop strong bonds with humans in captivity, so who knows what this process is doing to Keijo’s psychosexual development? I’m no orca expert, but I doubt spending months training one of nature’s most fearsome predators to associate human beings with sexual gratification is going to end well for anyone. If I were Keijo’s trainers, I’d keep an eye on him at all times.
But, more importantly, get these whales out of this abandoned park limbo and into some kind of dedicated facility that can give them a better quality of life and, I dunno, find him a whale girlfriend! Let’s hope this story has an actual happy ending, not just a figurative one.
