From The Guardian …
The brush of a trainer’s ponytail against the nose of a killer whale appears to have been what sparked the whale’s attack. Within seconds, in view of spectators, the giant creature had grabbed her hair, pulled her under water and drowned her.
The two had known each other for 16 years, ever since Dawn Brancheau began working as a trainer with killer whales at SeaWorld Orlando. The whale, Tilikum, or Tilly as all the trainers call him, had been brought from a park in Canada a couple of years previously.
Brancheau and Tilikum had just finished what was described by fellow trainers as a “very good session”. She had been petting him and hugging him from the side of his tank and he had been performing spins for her.
“We thought they were playing,” said Wayne Gillespie, who was with his children in the audience. “Next thing she was in the water with it. We noticed it thrashing more than normal and there was water everywhere. Someone said to us: ‘You might want to turn your kids around’.”
Another visitor to the centre, Victoria Biniak, was watching through a glass window underwater when Tilikum “just took off really fast, came back around, bobbed up in the water and grabbed her. He was thrashing her around pretty good“.
“He’s going to be a part of our family for a long time to come,” Chuck Tompkins, head of animal training for SeaWorld Parks, told CNN.
In a blog posting, the park said: “We have every intention of continuing to interact with this animal, though the procedures for working with him will change.”
Tilikum was captured at the age of about two in the waters of Iceland and has been in captivity for almost 30 years.
In 1991, along with two female orcas, he was involved in the death of a trainer, Keltie Byrne, who fell into their pool at Sealand of the Pacific, in Canada. Eight years later – by which time Tilikum had been moved to Orlando – a man was found dead in the animal’s tank having broken into the park after hours. SeaWorld said the man died of hypothermia, but others pointed to a bite mark on his body.
Partly out of recognition of Tilikum’s huge size – at 12 tonnes he is the largest orca in captivity – and partly out of knowledge of the past, the park’s 28 trainers were never allowed to swim with him.
“The spaces are inadequate, the psychological damage is deep. These are highly social, long-distance acoustic animals who are harmed by living in concrete pens,”
