the whale who went
Hvaldimir escaped captivity and became a global celebrity. Now, no one can agree about what to do with him.
BY: FERRIS JABRherever Hvaldimir goes, he is followed by a small but passionate entourage of human defenders and devotees.
On April 26, 2019, a beluga whale appeared near Tufjord, a village in northern Norway, immediately alarming fishermen in the area. Belugas in that part of the world typically inhabit the remote Arctic and are rarely spotted as far south as the Norwegian mainland. Although they occasionally travel solo, they tend to live and move in groups. This particular whale was entirely alone and unusually comfortable around humans, trailing boats and opening his mouth as though expecting to be fed. And he seemed to be tangled in rope.
When a commercial fisherman named Joar Hesten got a closer look, he realized that the whale was in fact wearing a harness: one strap girdling his neck and another gripping his torso just behind his flippers. Hesten contacted a local scientist, and word eventually reached out to the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, which dispatched an inspector, Jorgen Ree Wiig. After several failed attempts by Wiig and a colleague to free the beluga while onboard a dinghy, Hesten put on an immersion suit and plunged into the water. Though the whale was not quite as hefty as an average adult male of his species, he was still a formidable presence, by best estimates close to 14 feet long and about 2,700 pounds. Swimming beside him, Hesten managed to unclasp one of the straps. Together, they used a grappling-hook-like device to remove the rest of the stubborn harness from Hvaldimir.
A few days later, the beluga followed a boat to Hammerfest, one of the northernmost towns in the world, where he took up residence, frequently interacting with people in the harbor. News of the friendly white whale spread quickly. In early May, a video of the beluga went viral, eventually earning a spot on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” In it, several young women stand on a dock in Hammerfest, speaking excitedly with their hands outstretched just above the water. The beluga levitates to the surface in an upright position, as smooth, plump and silent as a balloon. There is something in his mouth — something rectangular. “Oh, my God!” one woman exclaims as the whale returns a smartphone her friend dropped in the sea. The women cheer and caress the whale, whose mouth continues to hang open. Later viral videos would show him stealing (and returning) a kayaker’s GoPro and playing fetch with a rugby ball. By midsummer, he had become an international celebrity, drawing tourists.
All the while, marine experts had been speculating about the whale’s origin. Clearly this animal had spent time in captivity — but where? The first major clues came from the harness: One of its plastic buckles was embossed with the words “Equipment St. Petersburg.” And it appeared to have a camera mount, hinting at reconnaissance of some kind. The beluga also knew how to closely follow boats and had a habit of wrapping rope around propellers, which could suggest specialized training.
As several experts told media outlets at the time, the whale had most likely escaped from the nearby Russian Navy. Based on a poll of more than 25,000 respondents, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation christened the beluga Hvaldimir, a portmanteau of hval, the Norwegian word for whale, and the Russian name Vladimir.
The military conscription of a beluga whale might sound like a conceit plucked from less-than-convincing spy fiction, but it is actually a well-documented practice. Since the 1960s, Russia and the United States have trained dolphins, seals and other marine mammals to assist their naval forces by tagging enemy divers, detecting mines and recovering items from the seafloor. Satellite photos of Russian naval bases near Murmansk, not far from the spot where Norwegian fishermen first found Hvaldimir, reveal the type of sea pens often used to hold belugas. Audun Rikardsen, a professor of marine biology at the Arctic University of Norway, told me that international contacts have since confirmed that Hvaldimir belonged to the navy.
hen a commercial fisherman named Joar Hesten got a closer look, he realized that the whale was in fact wearing a harness.
In the years since Hvaldimir first entered the global spotlight, the very qualities that make him so endearing — his intelligence, curiosity and charisma — have put him in perpetual danger. While traveling along the coasts of Norway and Sweden, he has inadvertently hooked himself on fishing lines and suffered multiple gashes caused by boat strikes. Incessant chewing of ropes and chains has worn his teeth to nubs. Overzealous spectators have swarmed for photos, prodded him with brooms and thrown rocks in his vicinity to draw his attention. Some Norwegians have threatened to seek warrants to shoot and kill the beluga because he has damaged salmon farms and underwater structures.
Hvaldimir is now at the center of a dispute over his welfare. Although he has become more independent since his early residence in Hammerfest, he has not completely relinquished human companionship. He has retained enough survival skills to feed himself, yet he has also ventured into warmer waters where there are no belugas, insufficient food and numerous threats. Even as he swims freely through the ocean, he is caught in a tangle of conflicting human ambitions, some noble, others misguided, nearly all distorted by inadequate understanding. Whether to intervene, and how to do so, remain contentious subjects among scientists, activists and government officials. Many advocates would like to see Hvaldimir reunited with wild belugas or at least moved to a nature reserve.
Regina Crosby Haug, founder of the nonprofit OneWhale, and her former colleague Sebastian Strand near Gothenburg, Sweden, in July. - Joakim Eskildsen
But rehabilitating a formerly captive whale is nothing like the triumphant leap to freedom in “Free Willy”; it’s more like helping a severely traumatized victim of abduction with society. For creatures of such size and sentience, confinement to relatively tiny, sparse and lonely cells exacts a heavy physical and psychological toll. Like Hvaldimir, many captive cetaceans are in-between creatures: born to whales but raised by humans, not quite domesticated but no longer wild, suspended somewhere in the middle of instinct and compliance. Hvaldimir is a living bridge between their circumscribed existence and the nearly limitless one from which they were barred. What happens to him now — whether he becomes a rare example of successful rewilding, transitions to a more sedate life in a sanctuary or meets a tragic end like so many of his predecessors — will influence efforts to liberate the thousands of cetaceans in confinement today.
Wherever Hvaldimir goes, he is followed by a small but passionate entourage of human defenders and devotees. One individual among them has become especially prominent and controversial: Regina Crosby Haug, an American filmmaker whose entanglement with Hvaldimir is largely a product of circumstance.
In 2019, after rekindling a relationship with her high school sweetheart — a Norwegian man who came to her Idaho hometown as an exchange student — Crosby Haug started splitting her time between Southern California and Norway. When she learned of Hvaldimir, she decided to take advantage of their proximity and visit him in Hammerfest, where she hoped to collect some interesting footage. Their first meeting took place near a salmon farm. “He swam up to our boat full of people with a fish he had caught and gave it directly to me,” Crosby Haug recalls. “I was blown away. I couldn’t believe he could make that kind of connection. I thought to myself, I think I just made a friend.”
The more Crosby Haug learned about Hvaldimir, the more she feared for his future. In addition to the daily dangers he faced in the water, there was little regulation of the crowds that flocked to see him. And some individuals in the oceanarium industry, Crosby Haug heard, might have their eyes on him. Over time, what began as a short upbeat video grew into a feature-length production — and a life-consuming mission.
hales and dolphins are basically the last animals on Earth that have to perform seven days a week until they die.
In the fall of 2019, Crosby Haug created an informal advocacy group called Friends of Hvaldimir. This group helped to raise awareness of the beluga’s plight. The following summer, she officially founded the nonprofit OneWhale, which is dedicated to protecting Hvaldimir. Several esteemed cetacean scientists — including Ingrid Visser, Diana Reiss and Roger Payne — joined the organization as advisers.
Other people in Norway were falling for the whale, too. In July 2021, Sebastian Strand, a burly, softhearted, 24-yearold diver and graduate student in marine biology, chanced upon Hvaldimir swimming circles in a harbor in Vevelstad, not far from his hometown. As he walked along the docks, Hvaldimir surfaced and approached him. Strand immediately called his friend and canceled their planned fishing trip. Instead, he spent the next eight hours interacting with the inquisitive whale, eventually entering the frigid water in just swim trunks and a shirt. By early 2022, Strand was working for OneWhale full time, in tandem with its network of volunteers.
Strand has devoted nearly every day to watching over Hvaldimir and assessing his health, following him by car and boat, never knowing exactly where he might have to travel next and often sleeping in a vehicle, at a hostel or on a kind local’s couch.
Depending on the situation, his work has entailed public outreach, crowd control and first aid. Over the past two years, Hvaldimir has very likely formed a stronger bond with Strand than with anyone else. “Hvaldimir has opened my eyes to a new level of animal intelligence,” Strand told me.
“Over the time I have spent close to him, he has gone from a curiosity with a potentially tragic background to an individual I care about deeply. In many ways, I see him as a person.”
OneWhale’s efforts fill a vacuum created by the ambiguity of Hvaldimir’s situation. Because he is a formerly captive animal living in the wild, it’s not clear who, if anyone, should be responsible for him. Russia has never claimed ownership of Hvaldimir, nor has anyone else. No prominent international animal rights or conservation group has volunteered to oversee his welfare. In May 2019, when Hvaldimir was noticeably emaciated, a research group called the Norwegian Orca Survey set up a program to feed him frozen herring by hand. By fall, fecal samples indicated that Hvaldimir the whale was learning to catch live fish for himself and survive on his own. Since then, the Directorate of Fisheries has maintained a position of mild indifference, insisting that Hvaldimir is a wild whale and can fend for himself.
Children are especially excited to meet Hvaldimir, who offers his flipper for high fives. - Joakim Eskildsen
Crosby Haug spending some time alone with Hvaldimir. - Joakim Eskildsen
he controversy surrounding Hvaldimir is part of a much larger debate concerning the ethics of cetacean captivity.
When Crosby Haug founded OneWhale, she already suspected that chasing a whale through the immense ocean and trying to keep him out of trouble would not be a sustainable strategy. In parallel, she began pursuing an alternative solution: recapturing Hvaldimir in order to save him.
The controversy surrounding Hvaldimir is part of a much larger debate concerning the ethics of cetacean captivity. Humans have been wresting whales from the ocean and keeping them in tanks since at least the 1860s, when P.T. Barnum exhibited live belugas in Boston and New York. At the time, many Westerners perceived whales as “monsters” that could be hunted, displayed and discarded without misgivings. Since then, research has established that cetaceans are self-aware, empathic and highly intelligent beings, many of whom form lifelong relationships and maintain genuine forms of culture. A growing number of countries, including France and Canada, are now banning all future cetacean breeding and captivity. Some aquariums and marine-mammal parks have already agreed to retire and rehabilitate their orcas, belugas and dolphins.
Many of these changes have been spurred by increasing social pressure. In the past three decades, and especially since the harrowing 2013 documentary “Blackfish,” the public has become much more critical of cetacean captivity, which can result in both deformities and behavioral abnormalities. While there are few verified accounts of wild orcas harming humans, captive orcas have attacked trainers many dozens of times and in several cases have killed them. Yet an estimated 3,600 whales, dolphins and porpoises still live in confinement around the globe. Since at least the mid-2000s, scientists, conservationists and some oceanariums have been trying in earnest to establish what many experts agree are necessary and viable alternatives to standard captivity: open-water sanctuaries. Animals who can’t transition to life in the wild can live out their remaining years in a protected semi-wild space that dwarfs any tank — at least in theory.
A n ideal cetacean sanctuary should be sheltered but still part of the ocean; it should be large, remote and untrafficked, yet still small and accessible enough to staff and manage. In other words, exactly the kind of place that humans like to keep for themselves. This was the predicament the Whale Sanctuary Project, an American nonprofit, confronted when it began searching for a site to establish a haven for orcas and belugas. Following years of staunch opposition from local residents and fishermen, the organization finally found one bayside town in Nova Scotia that welcomed their proposal for a 100-acre sanctuary. They are currently acquiring the necessary permits, a process that has spanned more than two years, and they don’t yet have any whales confirmed for rehoming. In 2016, the National Aquarium in Baltimore announced plans to develop a sanctuary for its six Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, but it has also encountered numerous hurdles, including projected storm surges and other dangers that climate change will ultimately impose on captive creatures with such long life spans. “We took a hard look at the Florida Keys,” says John Racanelli, president of the National Aquarium. “But the hurricanes of 2017 opened our eyes to the fact that we’ll likely be caring for a succession of dolphins across many decades.
Joakim Eskildsen
Our facility still needs to be functional in 2100.” Merlin Entertainments, a global operator of theme parks and other attractions, has been developing an eight-acre beluga sanctuary in Iceland since 2012. In 2019, Merlin and its various partners transported two belugas from a Shanghai aquarium to a bay on the remote island Heimaey — the same bay that housed Keiko, the orca that starred in “Free Willy,” during his attempted rehabilitation in the late 1990s.
As with parallel efforts, the environment has been problematic, especially in winter. Jeff Foster, a cetacean-welfare expert who worked with Keiko in Iceland, recalls wind gusts up to 200 miles per hour and strong waves that displaced nets. Equally challenging has been the complexity of cetacean psychology. One of the belugas is struggling to adjust to life in the sea, perturbed by the unfamiliarity of currents, tides and even rain. Because of her hesitancy, combined with harsh winter conditions and health troubles, the belugas have spent most of the past four years living in a pool in a land-side facility.
Within weeks of meeting Hvaldimir, Crosby Haug began contacting every cetacean sanctuary she could find, but none were willing or able to house a fugitive beluga. Eventually she consulted Ric O’Barry, a renowned environmental activist. In a previous life, O’Barry captured dolphins for the Miami Seaquarium and trained them to perform in the 1960s TV series “Flipper.”
In 1970, one of the show’s starring dolphins died in his arms after failing to resurface for air — an incident he interpreted as suicide. (Unlike most mammals, cetaceans must consciously choose to breathe.) The experience changed him forever. O’Barry and his son Lincoln have established what are, in some respects, the most successful cetacean sanctuaries in the world.
The qualities that make Hvaldimir so endearing — his intelligence, curiosity and charisma — have put him in perpetual danger.