WATCH: Moby Doll was the second killer whale ever captured, and the first one put on public display. Monica Martinez has the story.
The tale of southern resident killer whale Moby Doll is a sad one.
The Vancouver Aquarium captured him in 1964. The initial plan was to kill him and use the carcass as a model for a life size sculpture, but that plan failed.
“So they set up a harpoon gun off the coast of Saturna Island to kill this whale. The harpoon missed and accidentally hooked it. They took the whale back into Vancouver and put it on dry dock,” said author Mark Leiren-Young who wrote a book about the orca called the Killer Whale Who Changed the World.
Moby Doll became the second orca ever captured and the first to be put on public display. But after 87 days in captivity, Moby Doll died, and what we learned in that time, forever changed our understanding of whales.
“Everything we know about killer whales comes from this 87 days that whale was alive there,” he said.
Leiren-Young said back then we didn’t know what orcas ate, or that there were two species of killer whales- transients and southern residents.
It was the first chance biologists got to study the whale brain, and their language, but what blew the author’s mind was how killer whales were perceived.
“The big shock was that if you saw a killer whale in 1969 you were in fear for your life, you were afraid this thing was going to kill you.”
Moby Doll’s death spawned a conservation movement, with Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd taking up the cause to save the whales.
Cinematographer Rayne Benu, who is working on a film of the same topic with Leiren-Young, said the whale transformed our relationship with animals and the sea.
“I feel like if Moby had been a human being, he would be like Ghandi in the sense we would have already honoured his legacy because he gave us this great gift,” Benu said.
A gift, they want people to remember – Moby Doll: the Killer Whale Who Changed the World.
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