Blackfish Documentary Analysis

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Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the documentary Blackfish explores the corporate greed behind orca attractions, and how this greed leads to inhumane treatment of orcas and safety hazards for their trainers. The film opens with a 911 call to report the death of Dawn Brancheau, a senior orca trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, by Tillikum, a male whale. After a set of interviews from former SeaWorld employees, the audience learns about the history of Tillikum the whale. He is inhumanely captured off the coast of Iceland in the early 1980s, and brought to a park called Sealand in Victoria, Canada to entertain guests. He is kept in a small metal box, barely big enough to fit him inside, for majority of his life. Former employees of Sealand described …show more content…

Two eye witnesses to the 1991 incident describe her begging for her life as Tillikum pulled her under the water. She was not able to grab onto the life preserves being thrown out to her and she eventually drowned. Though Sealand closes after the incident, it is covered up and Tillikum is sold to SeaWorld Orlando. SeaWorld has a history of blurring facts about the orca’s lives at the facility. The employees will frequently tell visitors that the orcas live longer in captivity and that they live amazing lives, neither of which are true. In reality, they torture and bully each other, by biting and dragging their flesh, due to living in such close proximity to each other. In the wild they have thousands of miles to escape, but at SeaWorld they just have a small pool. This leaves scars all over their bodies, and also puts them in constant distress. Tillikum is bullied more than the others, so despite the fact that orcas are social animals, he was constantly kept in isolation, which furthered his …show more content…

This phenomenon is such an emotional trigger that it is featured twice in the documentary. In the beginning, the former orca hunter describes capturing the baby orcas in the wild; the orcas were smart enough to try to hide their babies, but the fishermen had superior technology and found them. After capturing the baby orcas, he describes the mothers still staying, desperately trying to get their babies back and screaming in grief. The fisherman said this was the worst thing he had ever done. SeaWorld is also guilty of separating mothers from their young. Several former trainers described the intense depression of a mother orca after her daughter was cruelly stolen from her and brought to another park. Cowperthwaite knew this would be a trigger because losing a child is also a human parent’s worst

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