To me, the death of a trainer at SeaWorld by the acts of a captive killer whale highlight the problem with using animals purely for human entertainment.  It is wrong, both morally and practically, to imprison a animal meant to cruise the seas in a cement tank solely to make money on displaying that animal. When the animal is a dolphin (yes, despite the name Killer Whales are dolphins) and therefore highly intelligent it is even worse. It is torture, pure and simple. And there is no sufficient justification for such abuse.

Susan Orlean agrees:

I hate to say this, but I loved seeing Shamu perform at SeaWorld last Christmas. Seeing an orca rise up out of a pool in balletic rhythm with a trainer, feeling the seismic thuds as he hit the water, and watching him power his way through the water was stirring and astonishing. Afterward I felt awful. There is probably some valuable research that goes on at water parks, and perhaps audiences who come away as stirred and astonished as I was will be inspired to join a whale group or take up an environmental cause. But none of that balances out the bigger issue, which is that whales don’t belong in captivity, and certainly not in amusement parks.

Further, the practice of training killer whales for pure entertainment is also dangerous for the trainers. Read this chapter from The Peforming Orca: Why the Show Must Stop, part of the background material for a program on PBS called A Whale of a Business. Excerpt:

Since the first orcas were kept captive in the 1960s, there have been numerous “accidents” with trainers, most of which were covered up. Those that have come to light were mostly revealed by disenchanted trainers or members of the public who witnessed the accidents during a show. Marine park public affairs directors always played down such incidents, calling them bizarre accidents, and in some cases denied they had occurred. In recent years, with the proliferation of cheap video cameras, a number of incidents have been recorded. They range from bitings and collisions to near drownings when whales have held trainers underwater. Many of these dangerous incidents happened when the trainers were riding whales around the pool. Some former trainers such as Graeme Ellis believe that orcas, in general, do not like to be ridden. “They may tolerate it when they’re young or new to captivity,” says Ellis, “but later, it can lead to problems.” Yet most marine parks still feature trainers riding orcas during the shows. Only Sealand and the Vancouver Public Aquarium in Canada, Miami Seaquarium in the USA, Marineland in France and Taiji in Japan no longer allow trainers to ride the whales. In recent years, fewer trainer accidents are known to have occurred at these establishments compared to parks that feature in-the-water work. Yet, there have been some injuries and the most serious incident of all occurred at Sealand.

Update: Alexander Cockburn writes that using Orcas for entertainment purposes is a form of slavery.

Call him, just for now, Spartacus. He was two years when the slavers captured him in 1982 and hauled him off to the little town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the far Canadian west. And there he met his fellow slaves, Nootka and Haida. Day after day in slave school they learned their tricks. Day after day, they did their act for the paying customers. And then, on February 20, 1991, in the tank operated by Sealand of the Pacific, the three struck back at their captors.

Okay, not Spartacus, but an orca whale – Tillikum, the one who drowned 40-year old Dawn Brancheau this week in the Shamu tank at SeaWorld, Orlando, after grabbing her by her pony-tail.

Tillikum was caught off Iceland. Nootka and Haida, both female, were seized in the Pacific. In fact Nootka was the third orca by that name to be bought by Sealand. The first two died within a year of their capture. At that time enslaved orcas had a life expectancy in captivity of anywhere from one to four years. These days they do a bit better. In wild waters, orcas live to be anywhere from 30 to 60.