'The Truth About Blackfish'

By the end of 2013, Willie Nelson, Heart, and Bare Naked Ladies were withdrawing from music events organized by SeaWorld and Joan Jett and others were asking SeaWorld to stop blasting their music during its “Shamu” whale shows.

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Gabriela Cowperthwaite was a mom who took her twin sons to SeaWorld before the death of a killer whale trainer prompted her to make her 2013 documentary “Blackfish.” She never expected it to help persuade the U.S. theme park operator to stop breeding killer whales and end its signature “Shamu” whale entertainment shows.

“Huge respect to @blackfishmovie for putting orca captivity at @SeaWorld on the agenda,” Greenpeace UK Oceans said on Twitter.

"I know probably a couple that would argue for it, but they would argue it from a research perspective," she explained. "I don't know if they would argue it from the perspective that it's educational, for example, to the general public. They would argue [that] to have beluga, dolphin, bottle nose dolphin, killer whale, etc., in captivity gives us an opportunity to study, I don't know, respiration or metabolism or pregnancy stuff or stuff like that. But it would be interesting to see if they were specifically asked about educating the public what their stance would be on that. They're able to parse it out, whereas to me, it doesn't matter what we learn from captive killer whales, it's not the same animal. "You can study respiration rates in captive killer whales and it's going to be very different form what you see in wild killer whales. Even gestation, pregnancy stuff, is ultimately probably very different. How long they can hold their breath. You can't test a captive killer whale and say well killer whales can only hold their breath for this many minutes. Because that killer whale in captivity hasn't had to hold its breath for X amount of time. We aren't going to know anything about metabolism or food consumption, I don't think because the killer whales in captivity are being fed a very, very artificial diet and all the vitamins and everything that the captives have to have just to stay alive, you're not going to have that here. The only argument I've been able to make in my own mind is that [captivity] served a purpose at a time but we're past that now. Now we know that we don't have to fear that in the wild and we can stop shooting at them. Okay, so some killer whales had to die in captivity to get the general public to understand that, now we know that, now the time is done. We should be evolving past this."

The film is not all straightforward condemnation – it highlights the irony at the heart of the anti-captivity movement.

Giles, a research biologist who has studied orcas for about 20 years.

Giles hadn't seen Blackfish when I spoke to her this week, and told me that she was just responding to my questions "with her gut."

SeaWorld Assertion 2: "The assertion that killer whales in the wild live more than twice as long as those living at SeaWorld. While research suggests that some wild killer whales can live as long as 60 or 70 years, their average lifespan is nowhere near that. Nor is it true that killer whales in captivity live only 25 to 35 years. Because we’ve been studying killer whales at places like SeaWorld for only 40 years or so, we don’t know what their lifespans might be—though we do know that SeaWorld currently has one killer whale in her late 40s and a number of others in their late 30s." Advertisement Film Response: "In the wild, average lifespan is 30 for males, 50 for females. Their estimated maximum life span is 60-70 years for males and 80-90 years for females. In captivity, most orcas die in their teens and 20s and only a handful have made it past 35.The annual mortality or death rate for orcas is 2.5 times higher in captivity than it is in the wild. These are not controversial data. In the film, we depict what seems to be a deliberate attempt by SeaWorld to misrepresent these well documented data to their visitors." Giles adds: "Based on photographs we have a whale out here that is supposedly 102 years old. Even if she's not 102 years old, easily she's into her 80s, probably more like 90s. There is no reason to doubt the photo. We had a male die a couple of years ago, who was in his 60s."

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Moreover, the assertion isn't even true all of the time for one-year-old calves; SeaWorld has a long track record of separating mothers and calves at birth, and even more often when they become older than a year.

But in order to make this claim, SeaWorld has to rig its statistics by including only SeaWorld orcas in its database, and then only deaths that have occurred in the past 15 years. Considering that it, and many other marine parks, have held many more orcas over the nearly fifty years they have been in business, that's a pretty skewed database.

At some point, it will have to figure all this out. But by then, it may well be too late for it to pull out of its self-inflicted death spiral.

It's telling enough that when Blackfish's filmmakers challenged SeaWorld to a public debate, they simply refused.

too busy teaching orcas to breach in triplicate and rolling in the revenue stream that creates.

In fact, SeaWorld spends well under than 1 percent of its annual revenues on conservation efforts.

There has been some recent research at SeaWorld that actually helps advance our knowledge of killer whales. For instance, researchers there have established recently that dialects in killer whales are in fact learned behaviors. There has also been some recent impressive work on the energy orcas expend in the process of swimming. One could argue that this research is long overdue, but at least SeaWorld is now undertaking research that could actually help conserve orcas in the wild -- something that was not true for many years.

Where has Sea World been in all this? Nowhere. They have not funded orca-population studies or censuses, let alone communications and ship-noise studies that are needed. We did see them briefly during the Springer episode, when SeaWorld lent local scientists the use of a diagnostic lab and an overseeing veterinarian to test a sample of Springer's blood before she was transported north and successfully reunited with her familial pod. For that, they now claim credit for the entire project.

Rather than address the real issues underlying the matter, it chooses to attack the people involved and touting their business credentials; their chief argument seems to be that they are better people -- even while they lie through their teeth to us at every turn, whether it's telling people that captive orcas live as long as wild whiles, or claiming to be really all about conserving orcas in the wild.

Yet anyone who has seen the film knows that this is simply and baldly false. Not only does the documentary provide two clear examples of SeaWorld employees and spokesmen blaming Brancheau for her own death, the speculation by trainers about the events leading up to her death were a far cry from these blatant examples of victim-blaming.

This is well-established scientific fact, and the fact that SeaWorld says Blackfish "offers no scientific basis for this statement" and that "SeaWorld is aware of none" demonstrates its only abysmal understanding of the animals in its care.

the more people who see Blackfish the more likely it is to accelerate.

And when it finally did go public with its response to the film, it did so in a completely non-transparent way -- undertaking a closed-shop public-relations campaign predicated around websites, videos, and ads. And the primary subject of that campaign has not been an effort to rebut the factual issues raised by the film, but an attack on the people involved in the film and an attempt to impugn their motives. A smear campaign.

It's never easy, coming in from the outside of an emotional debate over a popular public entertainment -- the kind that performing killer whales provide -- to adequately judge that's debate's real merits, such as the one over orca captivity that has been inspired

The documentary's producers and backers, while handling a deeply emotional subject with grace and reserve, have hewn to the facts -- as did their film.

There are no scientists who study wild orcas who believe that captive lifespans are even close to equivalent, and indeed the real data demonstrates conclusively that this is the case.

SeaWorld condemns itself simply by going this route, rather than addressing the content what these trainers had to say to the cameras.

These are not the words of science, and indeed, there is not a shred of scientific support for them.

So, which is it: Are they scientists, or only activists? In fact, every single one of the people that the site lists as "animal rights activists posing as scientists" is, yes, a scientist.

Its stock has been in decline.

Which is why, at a deep level, SeaWorld is losing.