Excerpt from Puget Sound Whales for Sale
PREFACE
I
t’s a story that could best be told in a book.” Those were the words used by Wallie Funk under the title The Great Penn Cove Whale Catch, 1970, one of the noteworthy events featured in the Christmas postcard he and his wife, Mary Ann, sent out to family and friends in December 1994. I knew nothing about that statement when, in 2010, an essay I wrote titled “Whale Watching” was one of the winning entries in the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts Spirit of Writing Contest, which is sponsored by the Whidbey Island Writers Association. The essay told the story of the notorious 1970 Penn Cove capture in Washington State and piqued the interest of a fellow writer, who asked what I intended to do with the material. It was a question I was already asking myself. A 1,200-word essay cannot encompass the finer details of a decade of changing attitudes, politics and legislation, and many pertinent questions about the orca capture era in Washington State remained unanswered. An initial quest for information revealed fragmented articles and stories, but there was little continuity. I set out to fit the pieces of the jigsaw together and to interweave the chain of events leading up to the final brutal capture of six Transient killer whales in Budd Inlet, Olympia, in 1976. I also set out to discover what had happened to all those whales bought and sold for marine parks to satisfy the public’s insatiable desire for “entertainment.” This is the story of the charismatic Southern Resident killer whales, a distinct population of a specific ecotype that inhabits the Salish Sea, a body of water located in the northwest corner of Washington State and southern British Columbia. In November 2005, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), founded in 1871 as the U.S. Commission on Fish and Fisheries, listed the Southern Residents as “endangered” under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Their journey to this protected status was a protracted one, involving the capture and killing of approximately one-third to one-half of their population. It was a high price to pay, fueled not only by man’s desire for domination and power but also personal and corporate greed. These factors, among others, have contributed to the decimation of a small population of whales, from which they are still struggling to recover many years later. Whale watching in the United States is now a multimillion-dollar industry, with the ocean’s top predator drawing the crowds—but not only in the wild. Killer whales are popular tourist attractions at marine parks throughout the world, where they routinely perform a cycle of tricks and stunts daily. Many