At the age of thirty-six, having spent more than thirty of those years in captivity, Tilikum has died, and now, inevitably, the doors of his glass prison will open — his detention is over.

Who was Tilikum

Tilikum was a male orca (Orcinus orca) nearly seven metres long and weighing over five tonnes, taken from his pod off the coast of Iceland at the tender age of two. The animal died at the early age of 36 (orcas can in fact live beyond seventy, and there are records of a wild orca that lived past one hundred), at SeaWorld in Orlando, where for 23 years he had been "performing" in humiliating shows for the entertainment of audiences. The cause of death has not yet been confirmed, but Tilikum had been suffering for months from a serious drug-resistant bacterial lung infection.

The "killer" orca

Tilikum's story is the same as that of thousands of cetaceans confined in aquariums and water parks around the world — torn from their families as calves, locked in cramped tanks, driven to madness by captivity and dead before their time. Tilikum, however, became famous for killing three people: trainer Keltie Byrne, at the first park where he was held, Sealand of the Pacific, in 1991; Daniel P. Dukes, a young man who had sneaked into SeaWorld illegally at night, in 1999; and his trainer Dawn Brancheau in 2010, whom Tilikum, in a burst of aggression, dragged into the tank, tearing off her arm and causing her death by drowning and multiple injuries.

Blackfish

These tragedies helped to change public perception of marine mammals in captivity — intelligent creatures with complex social lives (in the wild they live in pods of up to forty individuals) that in nature range across vast territories. In this respect, an important turning point was Blackfish, the 2013 documentary that tells the story of Tilikum himself, exposing the mistreatment of orcas in water parks and showing the harrowing scenes of young orcas being captured in the wild, in front of their mothers screaming in desperation.

Tilikum: victim, not perpetrator

Orcas are animals of remarkable intelligence, the true extent of which remains unknown to us (they have larger brains than ours, and some researchers believe they possess an emotional depth absent in humans), and they are among the foremost examples of joint intentionality in the animal kingdom (consider how a group of four or five orcas will swim in perfect unison towards an isolated ice floe on which a seal has taken refuge, in order to create a wave and knock the pinniped into the water). Confining these animals, condemning them to a life of boredom and unnatural behaviour, with limited and decontextualised interactions with their own kind, and forcing animals captured from different groups to live in the same tank, means condemning them to madness and death. It was precisely because of the highly stressful conditions in which he spent his entire life that Tilikum became, against his will, a killer. There are, by contrast, no known cases of wild orcas seriously injuring human beings.

Tilikum's sad, collapsed dorsal fin

Tilikum's enormous dorsal fin was a symbol of his agony: rather than standing upright to cleave the water, as it does in males living in the ocean, it was collapsed. This phenomenon affects all orcas living in captivity, while it is extremely rare in wild ones (and occurs only in those with physical impairments); it is thought to be caused by the lack of water pressure, the absence of current, or the reduced depth of the water — factors that would prevent the fin from remaining straight.

No more cetaceans in captivity

Despite public pressure and the efforts of animal rights organisations to have Tilikum transferred to a marine sanctuary, SeaWorld's leadership always refused, and the animal died a prisoner, perhaps cradling the memory of freedom and the icy waters of Iceland. Tilikum's sad life and death were not in vain, however: they opened many people's eyes, showing them the horror concealed behind the shows these cetaceans are forced to perform in. Water parks have had no choice but to adapt (following the release of Blackfish, SeaWorld's share price collapsed, falling from 39 to 18 dollars), and SeaWorld in San Diego announced that from 2017 it intends to phase out shows involving orcas, while last September California passed a law called the Orca Protection and Safety Act, which bans the breeding of orcas and their use in performances at water parks. Tilikum's tragic existence has thus made a decisive contribution to bringing an end to the enslavement of his species, and has forced ours to confront its own conscience.