Today, what I am going to try to explain to you, is the amount of emotional trauma that an orca goes through when they are captured in the wild. It is extremely important for you to note that studies on orcas have been proven to show that they hold the same emotional capacity, if not more than humans do. In other words, orcas feel the same way humans do. They feel sadness like us, they feel happiness like us, and they feel every emotion in between like us, especially anger.
Again, much like humans, orcas form close motherly bonds. When a baby orca is born, it shares an emotional connection with their mother who they look up to for their whole lives. Yes, their whole lives. Orcas travel together in pods, much like a family, or a community. Usually, one female orca is the leader of the pod. If anything were to happen to the mother, the other orcas of the pod would then follow the lead of the sister or cousin of the orca who previously lead them. There is a friendship, a connection, a bond, between all of the orcas in pod. This pod could range in size from 6 orcas to 40 orcas. Regardless of the size of the pod, they all protect and love each other, as research shows.
Orcas communicate by whistling, by producing echolocation clicks, pulsed calls, low-frequency pops, and jaw claps. Their elaborate language actually differs from pod to pod, further more showing the tight-knitness of the individual pods. These pods travel together as they swim hundreds of miles a day in the wild, “singing” and “talking” to each other for communication purposes, navigation purposes, and hunting purposes.
So, what do we have so far? We have determined that orcas have as much emotional capacities as humans do, they form strong mother-child connections, again, just like humans, and they stick together in pods, much like families and communities.
When orcas are captured for entertainment purposes, the entertainment industry prefers to capture them when they are young because they are smaller and easier to train. Massive boat and corresponding helicopter teams work together to capture these smart animals, who are able to sense trouble and try to hide, who are unfortunately spotted by the aircraft and having their location reported back to the boats with the nets. The huge nets come down, capturing as many orcas as possible, but only taking the young ones, letting the older ones go. The young ones cry to their pod and thrash around the net as the older ones cry back, watching their young be captured. Many times, even after the capture is complete and the boat begins its journey back to land, the older, free orcas follow the boat, continuing to communicate with their young as the boat speeds back. The older ones just saw their young taken from them and the younger ones watched as they were taken farther and farther from their familiar pod, unable to do anything to stop it.
You can only imagine the emotional trauma this causes, and the results are unbelievable. Next week I am going to explain how life in the wild, as I just explained, has a huge impact on the whales captured for entertainment purposes. Stay tuned.