kums story Sarah Greene ENG 1

The Story Of Tilikum
How would you like to be stuck in a bath tub for 25 years? Don’t you think you would go a little pyscho too? Well here’s the story of Tilikum, the killer whale. Tilikum was captured near Iceland in November of 1983 and he was two years old and about 13 feet long, here is where the trouble starts when he was taken away from his family and loved ones. Then he was transferred to the rundown Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia, Canada, and forced to call his barren 100-foot-by-50-foot pool, just 35 feet deep, his sad new “home.” While living here Food was withheld from him as a training technique, and he regularly endured painful attacks by two dominant female orcas, Haida and Nootka. He was forced to perform every hour on the hour, eight times a day, seven days a week. The constant stress and exhaustion gave him stomach ulcers. If that wasn’t enough he was then put into a tiny round metal-sided module with two other orcas for more than 14 hours until the park reopened the next morning. This is just enough to make a killer whale go insane. Tilikum was capture when he was two years old and for all of the things he’s been put through already for his age is not going to make him grow up as a regular Orca, I mean, no orcas that are held captivity are going to live a normal life. But being the fact that Tilikum is a larger whale, being held in captivity would be taken as a larger impact on him psychological and physically. So, since they would take away his food and get attacked by the two other orcas as training techniques, Tilikum became stress, frustration, and confinement. Which was stirring up an attack to happen sooner or later. On February 21, 1991, Sealand trainer Keltie Byrne fell into the pool containing all three orcas. She was pulled to the bottom of the enclosure by