NORWAY (24 Jan 2003) -- It was one of those magical movie moments - a homeless boy bonds with a 5-ton orca in the film Free Willy and helps the killer whale escape from unscrupulous keepers and return to the wild. That tidy ending was Hollywood fiction. The reality has been a costly and, some say, misguided science project. The emotional tug of the movie sparked an even more intense real-life drama. When audiences, including millions of children, learned that the animal that played Willy ? an orca named Keiko ? was confined to a shallow pool in Mexico, they started a campaign to free him. And that, say some experts, was taking Hollywood too far. "This animal most probably will not be able to survive on its own if it's not being taken care of by humans," said Leif Nottestad, an expert on orcas at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway. He says the rescue team simply disregarded the laws of nature. Back in 1979, when Keiko was about 2 years old, he was trapped off the coast of Iceland and sold to a marine amusement park in Mexico City for $350,000. Because they're so smart, orcas are easily trained, and audiences loved Keiko's droopy dorsal fin. Back to the Sea As the public began to campaign for Keiko's release, the movie studio hired Dave Phillips, a marine mammal activist, to monitor Keiko's rehabilitation and spearhead the effort to return the whale to the wild. No one had ever undertaken such a project, but Phillips said he knew he had to give it a shot. When Phillips saw Keiko in his pool in Mexico, the orca was underweight and suffering from papilloma virus. Keiko was moved to a specially built tank in Oregon where he swam in sea water for the first time since infancy. Within a year and a half, he'd gained 2,000 pounds and his skin virus had disappeared. Phillips and his colleagues knew how unprepared Keiko was for life in the wild. He didn't even know how to catch a live fish. Still, the Free Willy/Keiko Foundation carried on and hired an Air Force cargo plane to take the whale to yet another custom-made location in Iceland. It cost some $200,000 a month to maintain Keiko in his million-dollar pen and to reintroduce him to the waters where he was born. Keiko was outfitted with transmitters to track his movements, and then lured into the open ocean. Phillips and his team hoped Keiko would reconnect with his own species. He did, but after each encounter Keiko returned to the safety of his pen ? until last July. That's when Keiko swam away with a wild pod, leading Phillips to believe the project had finally succeeded. "We were saying this may be the real thing, this may be the real deal," Phillips said. "Is he really making the decision to choose whales over people?" For five weeks, Keiko was free, finally swimming like a wild orca in the open ocean. It seemed that nearly a decade of retraining and relocation had paid off. But on Sept. 1, Keiko showed up off the coast of Norway. That was very bad news for the project and the team that was tracking him, because Norway is a whaling nation. Wowing the Crowds Again As it turned out, Keiko wasn't in danger. Over the next month, Keiko enchanted the tiny Norwegian village of Halsa, whose residents realized the whale hanging around their coast was none other than the Free Willy star. It became a media circus, as thousands of people showed up to see ? and feed ? their favorite whale. | | Phillips and his crew had been trying to minimize Keiko's contact with humans, so this was a setback. It was an outright rejection of six years of rehabilitation, as if Keiko had never left the amusement park. The $20 million project had failed. Keiko was a tourist attraction again, and, it seemed, would always be a movie whale, not a wild one. Critics said Phillips' project was about bleeding-heart animal lovers going too far. Phillips countered: "It's not about emotionalism or bleeding hearts … It's about doing the right thing, it's about changing an ethic. … Now, if that is wrong, if that is bleeding hearts, then I'm guilty." Another, Perhaps Permanent, Home? Once again, they had to move Keiko. The whale's new home is a protected bay in Norway where he can be managed and monitored around the clock by his keepers, not the public. But the new rules and the new location haven't eliminated the original problems. Keiko was trained to rely on humans. He still remembers his old tricks just like the ones he used to perform in captivity. And, of course, he must be fed. Without fail, he is given 150 pounds of frozen herring a day. That costs thousands of dollars a month, and it's not how wild orcas live. So were the project's expectations driven more by emotions than science? Phillips maintains the project has proceeded scientifically and that Keiko can and will ultimately make it back to the wild. But Norway's Nottestad isn't quite so sure that Keiko will make it in the open sea. "I don't think that Keiko will be accepted, because he will be so different from the others." Phillips notes Keiko did not starve on his 1,200-mile swim from Iceland to Norway last summer. And he's still clinging to his original dream: Later this month, or next, pods of wild orcas are expected to swim right into Keiko's back yard. The $20 million question is, will he choose to join his own kind for good? Or will he remain semi-wild, ultimately dependent on the good will of the species that first captured him? If Keiko chooses to stay with humans, Phillips won't consider the multimillion-dollar project a failure. "We'll go as far as he can go," Phillips said. "And if he can't go any further, we're very comfortable in taking care of him for the rest of his life." SOURCE - ABC |
