Confined to unnatural social groups for the convenience of their owners, bored and restless, forced to perform tricks for food that trainers withheld as punishment, they occasionally slipped, he writes, “into the dark side.” “They gave me so much in my life and my career.” But the whales’ physical and emotional well-being, he grew to believe, was incompatible with captivity. “I owe those whales,” he says in an interview. It was a risk he ran with his eyes open, and one that, in the end, he seems to feel was almost worth it. Hargrove, who quit SeaWorld in 2012, suffered numerous broken bones and nearly destroyed his sinuses. And, equally, the nearly mystical experience of bonding with an intelligence eerily similar to our own, yet ultimately unfathomable-and uncontrollable. Hargrove’s book elaborates on some of the documentary’s claims but also testifies to the thrill of standing athwart four tons of muscle rushing through the water at 30 miles an hour. Hargrove was one of the first voices heard in Blackfish, the 2013 documentary that raised questions about SeaWorld’s practices it was released three years after the death of a SeaWorld trainer named Dawn Brancheau, who was attacked by an orca during a performance. As a precaution, John Hargrove writes in a new book, Beneath the Surface, the lanyard had a breakaway ring-and thus served as a “kind of rosary, a subtle reminder of how suddenly the hour of death may come upon you when working with orcas.” The whistle, intended to get the attention of the 8,000-pound animals swimming around in the tank, saved his life on occasion, but it easily could have cost him his life if a whale had grabbed it to pull him into the water.
He’s a whistle-blower who carried an actual whistle, which he wore around his neck during his 12 years as a trainer of killer whales at SeaWorld theme parks.
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