Ep. 03: Penn Cove
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Ep. 03: Penn Cove
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The story of the capture of wild orcas for human entertainment | For thousands of years, the Southern Resident killer whales lived in the inland waters of the Pacific Northwest, following salmon runs through the Salish Sea in tight-knit family pods that passed knowledge, dialect, and culture from one generation to the next.
Then, in August 1970, a commercial whale-catching operation drove more than 80 of them into Penn Cove on Washington's Puget Sound. Seven calves were taken and sold to aquariums around the world. Five whales died. The bodies were weighted and sunk in an effort to hide them from the public. Three months later, they washed ashore anyway.
What followed was a decades-long reckoning: landmark federal legislation, the end of live orca captures in Washington waters, and a cultural shift so drastic that SeaWorld—the company that built its brand on the back of captive orcas—announced in 2016 that it would phase out its theatrical killer whale shows. But the Southern Residents themselves have never recovered the numbers they had before the hunters arrived. One of the seven calves taken that day—named Tokitae—spent 53 years in a tank in Miami before coming home as ashes.