At 14 hrs, I thought I would like finish this title in a couple of days, but the truth is that took me a couple of weeks. Some chapters brought me to tears and I had to stop and give the audiobook a long rest for a few days before I could pick it up again. Mr. Colby lays out in sometimes harsh and unrelenting detail the terrible accidents, often through carelessness and just plain greed, that have caused the deaths of Orcas in the scramble to capture them for display and show purposes. And it’s beyond frustrating to listen to the sheer ignorance displayed by capture teams and oceanarium owners which points to the fact that they shouldn’t have been keeping these whales in the first place.

Narrator Paul Heisch reads the facts of what happened in a very matter-of-fact way, which strangely enough, makes some of those facts hit that much harder. Beyond the accidents like cables on slings breaking while in the air and loose nets entangling the whales, there’s the sheer incompetence of oceanarium owners repeatedly making the same mistakes because NOTHING was understood about orcas at the time.

And yet, it’s only BECAUSE they were on display that anyone took an interest, that anyone started studying them and watching their mating habits and their feeding habits and learning anything about them. We only started studying them, caring about them, and conserving their numbers once those marine parks started showing the animals.

It’s important to read/listen to this book, even when it gets hard to, and to realize how fundamentally the captivity of killer whales is WHY we came to love them in the first place. Some of the men who hunted them for capture are haunted by it; some of them only seemed to ever care about the money, right up to the end. But only through their efforts of bringing the whales to be viewed by the general public did they turn the ocean’s apex predator into mankind’s friend.

Without the capture and display industry, would we give a damn about killer whales in the first place? Without captive orcas on display, would they have ever outgrown the title of being killers? Would anyone have fallen in love with them enough to start studying their social habits, their vocalizations, and how to tell them apart from one another? It’s possible, of course, but a lot less likely.

For better or worse, the display of captive orcas kick-started conservation efforts, gave birth to organizations like Greenpeace, and implemented a *nearly* world-wide moratorium on whaling. Rather than furthering scientific knowledge by killing and dissecting orcas, we moved slowly into watching the creatures living in their natural habitat. We know as much as we do now because we loved seeing those captive orcas, but we couldn’t stand seeing them being kept captive.

It’s not an easy book to get through, but it’s an important one to read/listen to.