Shamu the Whale Day 2024 is on Thursday, September 26, 2024: is shamu(the killer whale) happy about doing all these shows every single day?

Thursday, September 26, 2024 is Shamu the Whale Day 2024. Where Peacocks Dare!: 9/11 - Exactly what is it that we'll never ... movies to this day.

While it is hard to answer definitely,as you cannot ask an animal, there are ways to measure stress and based on this I am fairly sure the answer is no, they (as there are more than one Shamu) are not very happy about their situation.

There are several indications of this as the increased aggression towards both people and tank mates (even towards their own calves), lower life expectancy, higher disease load.

Trainers (and marine parks) always stress how much they love their charges and what a 'special bond' they have. I don't think the orcas are oblivious to the fact as they are animals that form complex social bonds themselves, however, love alone is not enough as demonstrated by the fact that there are more attacks on people (trainers, so people these animals allegedly have a relationship to) in captivity than in the wild, there is one recorded attack in the wild and that was aborted. Have a look here for a record of aggression towards trainers (about half way down the page):

The only person ever killed by orcas was killed in captivity, held underwater until she ceased to move.

Another good indication of what the 'bond' is really based on are the observations in Dolphin Chronicles, a book written by someone who worked with captive dolphins that were released back into the wild, during rehabiliation, the trainers no longer provided fish to the dolphins but they were secretly put in the pen so that the dolphins would not associate food with the trainers anymore, this is the account of the author:

"Early on Echo and Misha would spend some time playing with people. Michelle didn't want to frustrate them by cutting of their interactions with humans abruptly, so occasionally she would sit in a small inflatable boat and let the boys come by to be rubbed. They seemed to like it at first . Then they started to get snippy about it, sometimes even slapping their tails on the water and making it perfectly clear "i don't need these rubs."

once after a feeding session, when the fish were gone, michelle gave Echo the 'retrieve' sign, thinking he might bring back a ring that was floating in the water. He left and returned with a fish in his mouth. he shook it and ate it in fron of her- as if to say, "i don't need your fish, either."

The boys also felt less need for human made toys as well. both occasionally pushed the buoy around but Echo didnt seem to have the same sexual fixation on it that he had had back in the lab."

So basically once the fish was gone, they had no use left for their trainers.

When animals die on average twenty years earlier than in the wild you have a good indication that something is very wrong. Wild females may live upto 90 years in the wild, males at average at about 50 probably, all orcas that have died at SeaWorld in the past 10 years were under 25 years of age.

Do they know what they are doing? Well what are they doing? They are doing unnatural behaviours for fish, what else would it be for them really? Marine parks often stress that the animals enjoy the show and look forward to it. Well to some extent that might be true, there is very little enrichment in their enclosures otherwise and a show gives them something else to do, however doing the same show over and over and over again day after day, is hardly stimulating either. There is an interesting anecdote observed by Alexandra Morton who worked both with captive and wild orcas and while she was working with Orky and Corky she noticed that they did a little morning routine, no jumping or elaborate backflips, just synchronised swimming, however once they perfected a routine and where in perfect synchrony they never did it again but started on a new one. Yet in parks like SeaWorld they are made to do the same shows over and over and over again.

People often say you cannot force such a huge animal to do anything but what happens if they don't? While starving the animals is no longer approved, looking at how much fish they do get during the shows, they are missing out on quite a bit of food. Furthermore, animals that do that are often disciplined by being ignored when they ask for interactions, and for such a social animal being ignored is a big punishment. As they live in artificially constructed pods (SeaWorld decides where the animals go when) there may be little stability within the pod itself and a while ago it was even a common tactic to keep animals together that did not get along to well in order to focus the aniamal's attention on the trainer rather than pod mates.

This sort of husbandry let to the Kandu incident where Kandu repeatedly rammed Corky fracturing her own lower jaw and rupturing her artery leading to her death. Corky was apparently trying to interfer as Kandu was behaving inappropriately and aggressively towards her own calf. In the wild, 'aunties' often teach less experienced mothers to take care of their young but due to the stress and confinement and possibly the fact that Corky and Kandu came from separate wild orca populations (British Columbia and Iceland) this escalated.

For more reports of orca aggression:

Orcas killing each other in the wild is completely unheard of to my knowledge, yet it happened in captivity due to confinement and stress.

Mother calf relationships are also often disturbed or altered, and there was cases of mothers seemingly trying to kill their calves. In one such case the calf was retarded both mentally and physically and died soon after, however, unfortunately, the older daughter of this female observed this behaviour and exerted it onto her own calf once she had one, most likely as she thought this was the appropriate way to behave, as previously mentioned, unexperienced aunties are usually helped by more experienced mothers in the wild but something went very wrong here as well.

Consider the environment in captivity and the environment in the open ocean, even resident orcas may travel up to 100 miles in a single day, diving deep and long, experiencing ever changing sounds, topographies, stimulis, organisms every day, in the case of residents travelling with their family which they never leave even as adults. Then consider captivity, concrete tanks that reflect their echolocation back at them, barren safe for some artificial rocks (which they chew on wearing down their teeth and ingesting harmful material), the same sounds, the same sights day in day out with a person asking them to perform unnatural behaviours ever so often for dead fish ( cetaceans notable have to be trained to eat dead fish, they usually reject it when wild caught and have to be force fed), living on very constricted space with orcas from different areas of the world, speaking different dialects and showing different, maybe confusing behaviour patterns. Mothers and calves that would stay together for an entire life in resident pods are separated on a regular basis and often their is no stable matriarch to discipline/show them how to behave when they are thrown together in groups consisting of animals that are merely teenagers.

There is an interesting quote by Alexandra Morton on the barreness of orca tanks, consider that orcas are highly acoustic animals and may often locate their prey by passive listening, sound is very important to them:

“Water itself began to sound different to me. In full flood Blackney Passage roared like an avalanche. Pebble beaches chattered, shrimp feeding on kelps crackled like frying bacon. Rock cod issued adorable, low serious grunts. Rain hissed, Herring burbled. Streams gurgled, I soon realised the vast amount of information a whale could pick up just by listening…with their exquisite sensitivity to sound, all that Orky and Corky could hear was the constant draining and recycling of their water."

Do I think Shamu is happy? No, definitely not.

For more info on cetacean captivity see:

is Shamu a type of whale or a whale's name?

"Shamu" is the show name of the orcas that perform at sea world. The trainers give different names to the orcas, only referring to them as Shamu when they're performing. The orca that attacked a trainer a couple days ago was named Tilikum. His name is the Chinook word for "friend." They used the Chinook language because he was captured around the lands that the Chinook tribe used to inhabit.

Strictly speaking, killer whales aren't actually whales. They're actually the world's largest species of dolphin (family Delphinidae). They look more like whales, by biologists have classified them as a species of oceanic dolphin based on their internal biology.

Has anyone ever actually seen SHAMU on the sham cam?

Shamu cam shows what the whales in the pool are doing. They all have their own names. Shamu died in 1971, and therefore isn't being filmed on the cam.