This story about a veteran Sea World trainer being drowned by a Kille...er, wait a minute, for all my leftist friends, ALLEDGED Killer Whale following a training session in front of a now slightly disturbed audience reminds me of how irritated I always got when someone ran his ship aground and then submitted a report that tried to lessen the reality: "touched bottom", or "made contact with an unidentified submerged object" [as one Admiral who read that commented: "AKA Planet EARTH") or other such nonsense. Fortunately, groundings were not too frequent and of those who did ground, only a handful failed to take full responsibility for it.
Anyway, Sea World officials initially tried to substitute an entirely different (and false) version of the incident to counter the reports of audience members who were interviewed by the press that the trainer was pulled in from her platform and thrashed about by the AKW until she died. To their quite minimal credit, they finally did concede that the audience reports were correct. BUT, in one last feeble attempt to make everything okay again, they claim that the cause of this abberation in Orca behavior (really? check out video below--warning: cute-furry-animal-gets-eaten alert) was, are you ready for this?--
BECAUSE THE TRAINER HAD A PONY TAIL.
I might have bought it had it been a mullet, but seriously, I am not making this up. And thank God they've warned all of us who might try to ride our ponies along the shoreline where Orcas feed. I am not an expert on Orcas, to be certain, but I can tell when someone's been washing a hog and this is that.
"Though it's the third time Tillikum has been involved in a human's death, there are reportedly no plans to take the massive animal out of the show." Yeah, sign me up for that detail! Run Forrest RUN!
ReplyDeleteI've got a friend who used to blow in his Chesapeake's ear to get him to drop a dummy or bird. He acted surprised when the dog had enough and bit a chunk out of his cheek. My response was, "yep, saw that comin'"
Yeah, they really can't take him out of the show. EO and Orca Union rules prohibit it.
ReplyDeleteBTW, your friend might have gotten away with doing that to a lab. But a Chessie...heh.
A Facebook post from one of the smartest guys I know:
ReplyDelete"Why does SeaWorld dress the killer whale trainers in suits that make 'em look like seals?"