The Good Whale - Ep. 3

Summary

The Good Whale - Episode 3: Keiko’s Journey Back to the Wild

Serial Productions & The New York Times present Episode 3 of "The Good Whale," a compelling narrative that traces the tumultuous journey of Keiko, the famous orca from the "Free Willy" movies, and the dedicated team striving to return him to his natural habitat. This detailed summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and pivotal moments from the episode, enriched with notable quotes and timestamps for deeper context.

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1. Introduction: From Monster to Messiah

The episode opens by reflecting on humanity’s shifting perception of orcas. Initially feared as "sea monsters," orcas were later recognized for their intelligence and complex social structures. This transformation sets the stage for Keiko’s story, highlighting the broader implications of keeping such magnificent creatures in captivity.

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2. The Accidental Capture of the First Live Orca (00:33 - 02:25)

In 1964, an unplanned expedition from Vancouver led to the capture of the first live orca, inadvertently shaping public and scientific perspectives on these creatures. The ordeal took nearly two months, culminating in Keiko’s 55-day captivity before he experienced his first meal in a tank. His eventual death after 90 days underscored the harsh realities of captivity, sparking future debates on animal welfare.

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3. Jeff Foster’s Early Life and Involvement (02:25 - 04:03)

Jeff Foster, whose childhood was deeply intertwined with animals due to his father’s role as a zoo veterinarian, developed a profound connection with orcas early on. By age fifteen, Jeff was already involved with marine aquariums, participating in the very activities that would later contribute to Keiko’s capture.

Jeff Foster (02:25): "I kind of grew up with animals all my life."

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4. The Shift in Perception and Role of Captive Work (04:03 - 05:09)

Over two decades, Jeff participated in capturing up to 20 orcas. As scientific understanding of orcas evolved, recognizing their sophisticated communication and social bonds, Jeff’s perspective began to shift. This internal conflict laid the groundwork for his eventual role in Keiko’s rescue.

Jeff Foster (04:28): "When you bring these animals onto the deck, they're confused and they're nervous... it's pretty powerful."

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5. Keiko’s Rescue and Rehabilitation Efforts (05:22 - 16:53)

In 2020, Serial Productions joined forces with The New York Times to bring Keiko back to freedom. The episode delves into the meticulous planning involved in rehabilitating Keiko in Oregon and his subsequent relocation to Iceland. The emphasis was on preparing Keiko for life in the wild, a task fraught with challenges given his limited experience outside captivity.

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6. Building the Ideal Environment in Iceland (16:53 - 23:07)

Upon arrival in the Westman Islands, a robust sea pen was constructed to mimic the natural ocean environment. This section details the infrastructure, including live monitoring systems and specialized equipment, designed to support Keiko’s transition. Despite initial optimism, the unpredictable Icelandic weather posed significant obstacles, leading to equipment damage and increasing the complexity of Keiko’s rehabilitation.

Jen Schorr (13:17): "Everybody said, look how protected this bay is."

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7. Behavioral Modification and Training (23:07 - 28:27)

Mark Simmons and his team implemented rigorous behavioral modification techniques to encourage Keiko’s independence and reduce his reliance on human interaction. This involved strict protocols to limit contact with non-behavioral staff and the introduction of specific training routines aimed at fostering natural hunting and social behaviors.

Lanny Cornell (20:06): "SeaWorld sort of pioneered the scientific approach... I was pretty confident."

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8. The Attempted Release and Catastrophic Failure (28:27 - 38:36)

In February 2000, after significant progress, the team decided to transition Keiko into open water, hoping to integrate him with wild orcas. The release was meticulously planned but ultimately disastrous. Miscommunications and unexpected behaviors led to chaotic encounters between Keiko and wild pods, resulting in Keiko becoming disoriented and traumatized.

Jeff Foster (35:00): "He swam through the gate and out of the pen... But he didn't do too much exploring."

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9. Aftermath and Reflections (38:36 - 41:19)

The failed release left Keiko in a deteriorated state, highlighting the complexities and ethical dilemmas of rewilding captive orcas. Team members expressed deep frustration and sorrow over the outcome, questioning the efficacy and morality of their efforts.

Lanny Cornell (38:36): "I was furious because I could see what we had done to him."

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10. Conclusion and Future Implications (41:19 - End)

The episode concludes by pondering the future of Keiko and the broader implications for orca rehabilitation. It underscores the delicate balance between human intervention and animal autonomy, leaving listeners to contemplate the lessons learned from Keiko’s tragic rewilding attempt.

Jeff Foster (41:06): "How much, when it's too much, how much will this whale suffer?"

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Key Takeaways:

• Complexity of Rewilding: Keiko’s story illustrates the profound challenges in transitioning captive orcas back to the wild, emphasizing the need for comprehensive understanding and preparedness.

• Ethical Considerations: The episode raises critical questions about human responsibility in animal rehabilitation and the ethical boundaries of intervention.

• Emotional Impact on Humans: The emotional toll on the dedicated team members underscores the deep bonds formed between humans and captive animals, highlighting the personal stakes involved in such endeavors.

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Notable Quotes:

• Jeff Foster (04:28): "When you bring these animals onto the deck, they're confused and they're nervous... it's pretty powerful."
• Lanny Cornell (38:36): "I was furious because I could see what we had done to him."
• Jen Schorr (13:17): "Everybody said, look how protected this bay is."

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This episode of "The Good Whale" masterfully intertwines personal narratives with broader environmental and ethical themes, offering listeners a poignant exploration of Keiko’s quest for freedom and the intricate dynamics of animal rehabilitation.

Transcript

[Daniel Alarcon]

New York Times games make me feel like I'm amazing. Wordle makes me feel things that I.

[Jeff Foster]

Don'T feel from anyone else.

[Jen Schorr]

I absolutely love Spelling bee.

[Daniel Alarcon]

The Times crossword puzzle is a companion that I've had longer than anyone outside of my immediate family.

[Mark Simmons]

When I can finish a hard puzzle without pins, I feel like the smartest person in the world.

[Daniel Alarcon]

When I have to look up a.

[Lanny Cornell]

Clue to help me, I'm learning something new.

[Daniel Alarcon]

It gives me joy every single day.

[Jen Schorr]

Join us and play all New York.

[Mark Simmons]

Times [e-mail] Games.

[Daniel Alarcon]

In the beginning, we thought of them as monsters. Sea monsters out of some saltwater nightmare. We called them orcas, or killer whales, emissaries from the kingdom of the dead. The first live orca ever captured and shown to the public was actually caught by accident. This was 1964, and an expedition left Vancouver with a simple, sadistic errand. Kill an orca and bring back its carcass so an artist might sculpt a life size replica for the local aquarium. The media were captivated by the story of these brave hunters who left town and were expected to return within a week. But that's not how it happened. In fact, nearly two months passed before they finally managed to harpoon a killer whale who inconvenienced them all by failing to die. So they dragged it, wounded but still Alive, for about 20 hours, back to Vancouver. The animal was put on display in a shipyard where it received thousands of visitors. So many, the aquarium curator began to suspect it might be worth more alive than dead. An aquarium in California offered $20,000 for the animal, but they refused to sell. 55 days after its capture, the orca ate for the first time in captivity. This was a big enough deal that it made it into the local paper. And then a month later, after nearly 90 days in captivity, it was dead. The whale's death was likely related to exhaustion. The water where it was kept was less salty and therefore less buoyant than the ocean it was accustomed to. What now seems self evidently cruel or barbaric back then simply was. And no one seems to have thought much of it. Jeff Foster was just a kid when this happened, growing up not so far away across the border in Seattle. And this first orca capture would come to shape his life in profound ways. Though he might not come right out and admit it.

[Jeff Foster]

I don't really like talking about myself very much, so it's always a little bit awkward, but yeah. So I kind of grew up with animals all my life.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Jeff's dad was A full time zoo veterinarian, which had its privileges and made for a unique childhood. His dad might come home some nights with an animal that needed special care. A baby lion or leopard, an otter or a monkey. Jeff loved it. At 12, he was catching rattlesnakes for fun. By the time he was a teenager, he had a job at the Seattle Marine Aquarium. Fifteen years old, at sea on fishing boats, doing exactly the kind of work that would set the Keiko story in motion, that is, capturing killer whales for display at marine parks. The whole world, it seems, had learned precisely the wrong lesson from the abrupt death of that first captive orca. Now, marine parks across the world wanted one of their own, and it was Jeff's job to get them. It was dangerous work. In the beginning, they'd use firecrackers to herd the whales into shallow areas. Later, they'd pay fishing boats to leave some of their haul floating in the water. When the orcas showed up to feed, Jeff and his team would trap them in nets. It was the young ones they'd go after, under 5 years old or so, but still huge. Once their target was trapped, Jeff would.

[Jeff Foster]

Jump in and then my job is to get in the water and try to get them out of the nets and put them on stretchers and load them onto the boat.

[Daniel Alarcon]

You could die, or the orca could die, or you could both die. But Jeff was good at the work and liked it.

[Jeff Foster]

You know, it's a huge adventure. It's extremely exciting. It was really something, getting to be involved with something like this. It was a massive scale and working with one of the top predators in the world.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Jeff estimates that over two decades, first in Puget Sound and then eventually in Iceland, he helped capture as many as 20 killer whales. But over time, as the scientific community and in turn the public began to understand that orcas were intelligent social creatures with strong family bonds, that they had their own sophisticated language with different dialects. Jeff's feelings shifted too. Was there a moment where you were like, oh, this is too much, I can't do this?

[Jeff Foster]

Yeah, it kind of kept building. You know, when you bring these animals onto the deck, they're, you know, they're small, they're younger animals and, but they're, but they're confused and they're, you know, nervous and they make a vocalization that sounds like a, almost like a crying baby. It's, it's, it's pretty powerful.

[Daniel Alarcon]

It's not like a crying baby. Actually, it is a crying baby. And the bond between a male orca and its mother is Particularly strong. In fact, in some orca populations, male orcas will live most of their lives with their mothers, protected by her, fed by her, even swimming in her slipstream as an adult. Taking a calf from its mother is nothing less than a kidnapping.

[Jeff Foster]

You know, the more I did it and the longer I did it, the more we knew about these animals that it, you know, that cry, you know, it sticks with you, you know, you always remember it.

[Daniel Alarcon]

And so in 1990, after two decades catching wild whales, he stopped. Eight years later, Jeff found himself back in Iceland. Only instead of capturing orcas, this time he would be helping one go free. And here's where Jeff's story intersects with ours. He was part of the team that would be helping get Keiko back to the ocean he'd been ripped from when he was just a calf. Now in Iceland, Keiko's humans, Jeff among them, were going to try to make amends, try to fix something that had been broken, something they had broken. To achieve their audacious goal. They had to try, no matter the odds, to prepare Keiko for freedom, to train him to be wild again. From Serial productions in the New York Times, this is the good whale. I'm Daniel Alarcon. What I like about the New York Times app is how much variety it gives me. I start my day with a cup of coffee and wordle and connections, which is all in the New York Times app. It's well organized. It's multimedia. I can also save my articles easily in this area. I can add politics or Paul Krugman or Jamelle Bouie. I like him.

[Jen Schorr]

I like that. The cooking tab on top is really easily accessible.

[Daniel Alarcon]

So if I'm on my way home and I'm just thinking, oh, what am I going to make for dinner? I'll just quickly go on to cooking.

[Tracy Carmuzzo]

And say, oh, I've got this in my pantry.

[Daniel Alarcon]

The photos are just phenomenal. I have my saved articles, my entire history, which is actually very interesting. I'm just scrolling through the home tab. There's already so much stuff.

[Jeff Foster]

I'm like, oh, interesting.

[Jen Schorr]

I spent a lot of time too, on Wirecutter.

[Daniel Alarcon]

I like that it's just right there. I loved how much content it exposed me to things that I never would.

[Lanny Cornell]

Have thought to turn to a news.

[Daniel Alarcon]

App for the New York Times app, all the times, all in one place. Download it [e-mail] app It's September 10, 1998, Keiko's arrival in Iceland. It took the Free Willy Keiko foundation months of negotiations with the Icelandic Government to get Keiko back to his home waters. And now the day was finally here. It has everything we've come to expect with these milestones in Keiko's journey. The eyes of the world, nothing less. Aside from Bjork, Keiko was probably Iceland's biggest celebrity. And some kids got the day off so they could follow his arrival on television. He may is the largest of the Westman Islands and the only one with any residents, though there aren't many, fewer than 5,000. And here in this remote volcanic archipelago was where Keiko would be living on the day of his arrival. The little island is overwhelmed by crowds, the kind that gathered anytime Keiko traveled. Locals and tourists lining the streets and over a hundred foreign journalists who come to cover the story. Many of them stand clumped on a green hillside at the airport as a giant military cargo plane approaches the not very long island Runway. Inside the plane is a 45,000 pound piece of cargo Keiko floating in a fiberglass cradle. The landing was a near disaster. Fierce crosswinds buffeted the plane as it pulled in. It touched down with a jolt so violent that the landing gear buckled in a cloud of smoke inside the cargo hold. Water spilled over the top of Keiko's container. Jeff says they heard big loud pop.

[Jeff Foster]

And we stopped really quickly.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Jeff and another trainer named Brian and Keiko's veterinarian, Lanny Cornell, all went to check on Keiko while everyone else waited to get off the plane.

[Jeff Foster]

And I jumped into the cradle with Keiko and he just stopped. He was just frozen. And Brian was saying, breathe dude, breathe dude. And Dr. Cornell was saying, I think he's dead. I think he's dead. I'm in the water with him. And I was poking next to his eye and he wouldn't blink. And I was pushing on his blowhole and trying to get it open and he just wouldn't move. I mean he was just, he was like frozen.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Keiko wouldn't breathe. One minute, three minutes, five. The team feared the worst. Seven minutes.

[Jeff Foster]

It seemed like forever, but it was probably maybe 10 minutes. And then he started and breathing, you know, and catching his breath.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Alive. His breathing lessons back in Oregon had paid off apparently. Now Keiko had made it to Iceland into the biggest body of water he'd been in since he was a calf.

[Jeff Foster]

And so we got him out of the stretcher and you know, we opened the stretcher up and he swam out for the first time and he dove down and went underwater. We didn't see him for a minute or two. And then he popped up, came over, and I rubbed him down. Thank you. Thank you.

[Tom Sanders]

He's doing so well, you know.

[Jeff Foster]

And he just kind of came over to me like a security blanket, you know. I told him, yeah, this is all right. You're home now.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Home is a tricky concept, of course, but let's consider where he is first. Well, there's his sea pen, a massive enclosure about two thirds the size of a football field. Think of it as a permeable tank with thick nylon netting instead of walls. Floating in the middle of the bay and anchored to the seafloor. It had been built from nearly 200,000 pounds of metal, plastic, aluminum, and rubber, and was designed to withstand waves and storms. All told, it was 60% larger than Keiko's pool in Oregon, which, if you'll recall, was itself much larger than his home in Mexico City. But beyond the size of it, most importantly, crucially, the pen is in the ocean, like the actual ocean, with all the sights and sounds and tastes and stimulation that implies. Keiko could feel the waves and the currents and the tides, feel his body being pulled effortlessly this way and that, something he hadn't experienced since he was a calf. And he was no longer subjected to the echoes of a walled tank. He could distinguish individual sounds of different species of ocean life, could tell which direction a specific animal might be coming from. For a species that echolocates, this might be like suddenly seeing normally after a lifetime of having a flashlight shown in your eyes. Herring and minke whales and pilot whales populate the waters off the Westman Islands. And they were close. That very first afternoon, a pilot whale swam into Keiko's cove, as if stopping by to see who was new in town. Even vocalizing with Keiko, it was an auspicious sign, or at least that's how it was interpreted by the staff. And for a whale who'd been living on his own in a tank for most of his life, just hearing another marine mammal so close by must have been striking, maybe even revelatory. So set aside for just a moment the finger wagging about not projecting human emotions onto animals, forget that. Instead, let's imagine the interior life of this magnificent creature with a brain several times larger than our own, as he confronts the weird, intoxicating newness of his environment, the turmoil it must have caused him, the surprise, the curiosity. Nothing as binary as happiness or sadness, I'd guess. Maybe just awe. Maybe just an unsettling awareness that the world was far bigger than he'd ever understood it to be. So that's his immediate environ his pen. Then there was the broader setting. Keiko's new home was in the windy Westman Islands. And despite the scare of the rough landing, once he was in the water, he. It seemed like an inspired choice.

[Jen Schorr]

Everybody said, look how protected this bay is.

[Mark Simmons]

It has.

[Jen Schorr]

It was perfectly calm, still day, and it has 600 foot cliffs on three sides of it.

[Daniel Alarcon]

This is Jen Schorr. She worked with Jeff as animal care staff in Oregon. A trainer, basically, and was part of the foundation team that moved with Keiko to Iceland.

[Jen Schorr]

Little did we realize every wind comes in the bay and turns into a vortex, basically. Using the 600 foot cliffs on three.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Sides, Jen and the rest of the staff learned the hard truth about the weather a couple of weeks after Keiko's arrival, when a storm came through featuring insanely high winds destroying an expensive piece of Keiko's medical equipment. Pretty soon it was clear there would be far more of those windy days than the calm ones. There's video of someone trying to feed Keiko during one of these windstorms. It's like those weather channel shots where they send an anchor to stand outside in a hurricane. Only in this case, the staff aren't just standing still. They're trying to scoop fish out of a trunk with a net while the wind blows the rain and the sea spray horizontally. For a certain kind of adventurous young person, working with Keiko was nothing less than a dream job. The pay was good, and for every month they were in Iceland, they had a month off to travel. The project had the equipment and infrastructure, too. Jet skis, boats of various sizes, even a little office built onto the Beipen, which the staff called the research shack. It was pretty deluxe, complete with electricity, running water, and an Internet connection. From here, they could monitor Cagle's behavior, his swimming speed, the depths of his dives. From a bank of 19 screens showing live video feeds of underwater cameras placed all around the pen. And there was a hydrophone as well, recording the sound beneath the surface, his vocalizations. No cost was spared. Billionaire Craig McCaw, who was footing a huge part of the bill for this experiment, happened to have an extra helicopter parked on his $100 million yacht. So he lent it, along with a pilot, to the Keiko project. This way, they could more easily keep tabs on the wild killer whale pods that came through the area. The more they learned, the more likely they were to find Keiko's family. And finding them, most people on the project agreed, would greatly increase the likelihood of a successful return to the wild for Keiko. After all, lone killer whales in the wild are a really rare occurrence. Without the help of a pod, whether his own or an adopted one, Keiko would have little chance of survival. So that's the state of things. In the fall of 1998, Keiko back in his home waters with a human support team befitting a global celebrity. Money and people and equipment all deployed to give him the opportunity to meet wild whales. Keiko had been rescued from Mexico, rehabbed in Oregon, and now in Iceland. It was all about release, which meant even more rigorous training toward the ultimate becoming wild. But before they could get closer to the release part of the plan, they had to get Keiko comfortable just being in open water. Jen Shore and some of the other trainers suspected that if they lifted the gates of Keiko's pen and invited him to explore the wider ocean, he'd politely decline the invitation. This was the immediate problem they needed to solve. How to get a whale who is uninterested in freedom to be more interested in it.

[Jen Schorr]

You can't really make a killer whale do anything. I mean, I think the original view was just kind of, we're gonna see how this goes and how he does, and we'll be guided by that.

[Daniel Alarcon]

But about six months later, in the spring of 1999, Keiko was still in his sea pen, swimming circles in his little gated subdivision of the ocean, not much closer to being wild than he had been in Oregon. The project needed a larger team to work with Keiko around the clock and one with a specific skill set. Jeff suggested bringing on a small team of animal behaviorists, which included a guy named Mark Simmons. It wasn't, at least on the face of it, a natural fit. In fact, the person most surprised by it might have been Mark himself.

[Lanny Cornell]

You know, the Keiko project within the professional zoological field was just ridiculous. It was a joke because it was.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Unrealistic and expensive because it was seen as closer to activism than to science. The project market assumed was too radical in its mission to have anything to do with someone of his background.

[Lanny Cornell]

You know, this was the quintessential animal rights contingent that was, you know, set on freeing every whale. SeaWorld had to be clear.

[Daniel Alarcon]

The Free Willie Keiko foundation was, for now, only set on freeing one whale. Keiko, though they did hope he might serve as a test case for others. Mark, though, came from a different perspective. He was 30 years old and had spent a decade working at SeaWorld in Orlando in what most people call the captive industry. Mark bristles at that term Calls it instead the professional zoological field. And for him, it's an important distinction. Mark thinks places like SeaWorld are helping preserve species that might otherwise be at risk of extinction in the wild. Now he was being brought on to help Keiko get ready for freedom. A totally implausible idea as far as Mark was concerned. There was so much about living in the ocean that this whale had never had the opportunity to learn the language of his pod, how to hunt, for starters. It wasn't even accurate to call this project a rewilding.

[Lanny Cornell]

This was not an animal that had anything to recall. This was an animal that had never effectively been in the wild. And so he'd been in the care of man. And I knew that to prepare him for the wild, he had to forget everything he knew. He had to show avoidance of humans. He had to learn many new skills, and most importantly, he had to integrate with wild whales, something none of us had any control over.

[Daniel Alarcon]

But there must have been something about it that excited you.

[Lanny Cornell]

Oh, yeah.

[Daniel Alarcon]

I mean, you did it.

[Lanny Cornell]

Well, I mean, I. You know, back then, SeaWorld was really, I often call it sort of the Harvard of the marine zoological environment, especially when it came to animal training. SeaWorld sort of pioneered the scientific approach, the methodical approach to behavioral modification. And I learned through that. So, you know, I was pretty confident. I was also at that age where, you know, right at 30, where you've got some experience, but you're also young enough to be really bold. And of course, you're either a give me the ball coach kind of person or not, and I wanted the ball.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Mark got to work right away. He and his colleague Robin Friday had come to Iceland armed with a plan outlining the training methods and protocols to be followed for Keiko's possible reintroduction. They built their proposal based on an approach which will be familiar to any college psych major. Behavioral modification. Some of the same principles, incidentally, that they would have used at SeaWorld to teach an orca new behaviors, or, in Keiko's case, reshape previously learned behaviors. Meaning you use conditioning and rewards like food and attention to reinforce certain actions and reduce others.

[Lanny Cornell]

Things like being sedentary or watching a boat. Not good, right? Soliciting for attention from a marine ops guy that was working on the bay pen. You know, that's not good either. You can't have him released to the wild and swimming up to any old boat and going, hey, what's going on, guys? The things you want to reduce, you make sure not to inadvertently reinforce those by coming out at the wrong time by a boat driving up, by making sounds with food buckets, because that's a precursor to reinforcement. There's a million things on the flip side of that. We have beavers we want to see. We want to see more swimming. We want to see more independence. We might want to see him going after a seagull. We might want to see him chasing a seal. That happened into the bay. You can directly influence those by reinforcing them.

[Daniel Alarcon]

But it wasn't just Keiko who had to change his behavior. Certain behaviors among the staff had to be eliminated, too. To prepare Keiko for the wild, Mark wanted to cut down how much human contact Keiko received. So he laid down some ground rules. For starters, the only people allowed to interact with Keiko would be the behavioral team. Everyone else had to keep their distance. That meant the researchers and the operations staff were not allowed at the cpen. No more random visits from members of the foundation board, either. No more swimming with the whale just for funsies or handing out belly rubs whenever Keiko wanted. None of that. For Jen, who had been with Keiko since Oregon and had dropped everything to follow him to Iceland, this new way of doing things required an adjustment. It was difficult, to say the least.

[Jen Schorr]

After Mark and Robin got there, we weren't allowed to really touch him anymore. I mean, he would come over to wherever you were working with him from and solicit scratches, and, you know, we're like, sorry, can't do that anymore. And it was just frustrating.

[Lanny Cornell]

That was really hard to do to him, because I will tell you, you'd have to be a sociopath not to be emotionally impacted by that. It was hard. And from Keiko's standpoint, he didn't understand any of this. We couldn't speak English. We couldn't show him the permit and have him read what was going on. All he'd ever known was his human foster family and had been very loving and great. And he was into it, man. And what we were doing made no sense.

[Daniel Alarcon]

But did that give you pause? I mean, like, you know, it sounds like what you're saying is almost an argument for, like, not doing this.

[Lanny Cornell]

Yeah. It gave me pause.

[Daniel Alarcon]

And yet you. You were part of it. I mean, you did it, and you. And you were following the program that you and Robin that I created.

[Lanny Cornell]

Right. But we also believed there was a measure of possibility that maybe he would beat the odds.

[Daniel Alarcon]

When you watch video from this time, what's clear is just how hard Mark is pushing Keiko. There's nothing playful about this Routine, nothing relaxed. I mean, if life in Mexico was spring break and Oregon was a workout with a personal trainer, then Iceland. Well, Iceland was boot camp.

[Charles Vinick]

Okay, we're getting ready to do a full routine exercise. There's seven behaviors in there. It's starts with a fast one to the right, and we'll go through the behaviors that we've done already and the criteria, and we're going to stick to that. Now, in the last few days, we've been pushing him to do three to four consecutively correct and two criteria behaviors on the first SD. That's been about his threshold.

[Daniel Alarcon]

By February 2000, a year and a half after Keiko's arrival in Iceland and 10 months after Mark had first come, there was progress. Keiko was more independent and active, in better shape than he'd ever been. He was paying less attention to boats, was doing more exercise than ever, spending nearly two thirds of his free time swimming. The progress was dramatic and clear enough for Mark and the other trainers to decide, yeah, he's ready to leave his pen. Keiko had already had a chance to leave his pen about six months earlier when a storm broke it open. But he hadn't taken it. Like a good boy, he'd stayed put. This time, his trainers hoped, would be different. They were determined to coax him out. They'd even had time to prepare, building a net across the mouth of the bay, essentially making the entirety of the COVID Keiko's very own protected space, exponentially larger than any pen he'd ever known. And as usual, the media was on hand to speculate breathlessly about what he might do.

[Lanny Cornell]

When we see Keiko out into greater expanse now, it's kind of like seeing a freed prisoner. We don't know what he's going.

[Daniel Alarcon]

That's the thing. I don't think anybody really knows what this whale is going to do. And that's a great analogy. It is like being in prison. When humans are let out of prison, some are comfortable in that prison. Want to go back to it? In this case, Keiko had to be lured out by his trainers. One inside the pen and one standing on a platform just outside it, slapping the water. It took a while, but finally Keiko did what they were asking.

[Jeff Foster]

He.

[Daniel Alarcon]

He swam through the gate and out of the pen. Once there, and with the entire bay at his disposal, Keiko, well, he didn't do too much exploring. He swam briefly out into the COVID did a dive, and then headed back into his pen. So nothing like the whale he played in Free Willy. His reaction to this Quasi Freedom was more like McFly or the Dude. It was Keiko, just hanging out, wondering, like, what the hell am I supposed to do with all this water? But over time, with reinforcement, Keiko became more interested in leaving the pen and learned to appreciate life in the bay. Pretty soon, he was spending eight hours a day outside the pen of his own accord, swimming around, exploring. When he did, his trainers would reward him, using a slingshot to send herring flying all over the bay. They even had contests among themselves to see who could shoot it the farthest. Sometimes seagulls would get there first. And this, thought Mark, was a good thing. If Keiko was going to make it in the ocean, he'd have to learn to deal with a little competition. Once Keiko was used to the bay, his trainers, they pulled off something pretty remarkable. They trained Keiko to ignore all boats except one, named Draupner. This particular boat would be his guide, his walk boat. It had a platform on one side where the trainers could stand to feed Keiko and give him instructions. The goal was to get Keiko to follow the Draupnir out of the bay and into the ocean.

[Lanny Cornell]

I mean, when we took him outside the bay, it was a gorgeous day.

[Daniel Alarcon]

This is Mark Simmons again. He still remembers the first time they took Keiko way out into the open ocean for a walk.

[Lanny Cornell]

And the. The current around the island is such that right outside the mouth of the bay is where it's the choppiest. So the swells were bigger than the dropner, you know, and we'd go up one swell down another, and he immediately started riding down the swells with his flukes kind of tipped up like a. Like a sail. And just. And the water was just gin clear. And it was amazing. I mean, my. My heart was in my throat. Everybody was just like, oh, my God, look at him, you know, it was so much fun. He was like a little kid.

[Daniel Alarcon]

He likes it.

[Lanny Cornell]

He's surfing like a dolphin.

[Daniel Alarcon]

The walks became an essential part of Keiko's regimen. He might swim 11 nautical miles a day in the open ocean alongside the Draupner. He was diving more, eating the live fish he was fed, including fish that had not been stunned. The underweight weakling that had arrived in Oregon was no more. This was Keiko, unrecognizable even to Mark.

[Lanny Cornell]

There was a point at which my wife came up to visit, and she was still a trainer at SeaWorld, so she had been working with the whales there. She came out on the walk boat, and I'll never forget she really thought he had the disposition and demeanor of a wild killer whale. And to me, that was groundbreaking. I didn't see that much change. I knew he'd changed, but maybe not that much change. And here's this big marshmallow angel of an animal, and my wife's telling me he looks like a wild whale. And to me, that was a great success. That was affirmation. I think it was the first time that I thought, holy crap, we might actually pull this off.

[Daniel Alarcon]

They might. They actually might. That's after the break. All the behavior modification, the boat walks, the training. It was all leading up to one very important day in June of 2000, when Keiko would be reintroduced to wild killer whales. The last orcas Keiko had met had been in Canada at Marineland, when he was just four or five years old, and it hadn't gone well. Keiko was frightened and bullied by these older, bigger killer whales and had arrived in Mexico traumatized by the experience. That was his history. And in the years since he'd been habituated to humans, and with the brief exception of his dolphin friends at Reno Aventura, only humans. In Mark's mind, this history was all the more reason to go slow. They were thinking that Keiko's first introduction to wild whales would be more of a baby step than a grand reunion.

[Lanny Cornell]

We wanted this to be a passive experiment where Keiko was within sight or hearing range of the wild whales. We expected it to be very, very benign, a very boring introduction.

[Daniel Alarcon]

They had planned and discussed and negotiated this introduction with each other for weeks in meticulous detail.

[Lanny Cornell]

We would take him out into the path of the wild whales, you know, far in advance of the wild whales a mile or more, and we would go neutral and be silent in the water. We would pull up the platform, letting Keiko know, leave the boat, you know, that he's not going to get attention from us. And we would go silent and we would just let happen what was going to happen. Whether he would see them, hear them, whether they would be curious, whether they would come by or swim away. We didn't know. But that was it. That was it.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Tom Sanders, another trainer on the project, remembers it similarly.

[Tom Sanders]

You know what I mean? We wanted them to just kind of see him for who he was, let them communicate, possibly echo, locate through the water, whatever. We weren't sure what was going to happen, to be honest. We just kind of wanted to try to give him every chance he could to make it work for him.

[Daniel Alarcon]

In other words, they'd follow Keiko's lead and keep it nice and easy and quiet. The big day finally arrives. Everyone's got their assignments. Mark's on the walk boat, standing on a platform where he can keep tabs on Keiko, who's swimming alongside Jeff Foster. He's up in a helicopter, tasked with watching from above. And then there's Tom. His boat leaves early that morning, hoping to find a suitable pod of wild whales for Keiko to meet. He's not the only one on this boat.

[Tom Sanders]

The driver was a guy. He was a local man. His name was Siti. And then Dr. Lanny Cornell, the vet.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Lanny Cornell, Keiko's veterinarian, one of the people calling the shots that day. Eventually, Lanny and Tom spot some wild whales.

[Tom Sanders]

When we got close, we could see the pod. We had binoculars and things like that. We could see. The wild pod did have young with it, only a few months old, if I had a guess that we're still yellowish in color, which signals that they're younger and then size. They were small. We knew it wasn't ideal that they had kid whales with them, basically because we just knew that they'd be more protective and not necessarily wanting some big male bull to show up in their Ms.

[Daniel Alarcon]

But if anyone had any hesitations about Keiko meeting this pod with calves, Tom says they weren't discussed on his boat.

[Tom Sanders]

It's like, well, how many chances of this are we going to even get, you know? So let's just stick with the plan. Turn the motors off, chill out and just float.

[Daniel Alarcon]

But that's not what happened.

[Tom Sanders]

I told City, our boat driver, to go ahead and kill our engine. And Lanny immediately was like, no, get closer. And I was like, what are you talking about? That was the whole point, was, do not get close to this wild podcast with a running boat. So, Stinty, I feel really bad to this day for that guy because he's got me basically saying, turn the engine off as we planned. But then he's got this guy that's like, has clout telling him to not do it, that we have to get closer because this is for research and important, you know, we have to document this whole thing.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Lanny was Keiko's lead bet, but he didn't live in Iceland with the rest of the team. He just flew in from California occasionally. Because of this, some people felt Lanny didn't actually know Keiko, at least not as well as they did. Lanny didn't want to talk to us for this story, so I can't say how well he felt. He understood Keiko, but as the lead vet, he had a lot of power on the Keiko project. And according to Tom and several others we talked to, for Lenny, this day wasn't just an introduction to wild whales, it was a farewell to Keiko.

[Tom Sanders]

From what I remember, he kind of was like, talking like it was happening that day, like the release. He was going to swim off into the sunset with his swamp that day.

[Daniel Alarcon]

To be fair, it wasn't only Lanny who held out hope for this. To some extent, the entire project was built around a shared desire for this very outcome. Here's Charles Vinick, who managed the project at the time.

[I]

You know, I think the assumption going in was that this would not be a long and extended period. This would be something that when Keiko had the opportunity to meet wild whales, he would join them readily or join a pod readily, and they would accept him readily.

[Daniel Alarcon]

I imagine that everyone that day wanted to believe this was at least possible. I mean, how tempting must it have been to just find out, like, let's just see what happens if we get a little closer.

[Tom Sanders]

So we got closer and closer and we got to where we were basically in the pod at this point.

[Daniel Alarcon]

The next thing Tom knows, the wild whales have disappeared underwater and he's not sure which direction they've gone in. At the same time, back on the walk boat, the one Keiko is near with Mark watching, they believe the wild whales are actually moving away from them. So they move a bit closer and all of a sudden it's chaos. The wild whales and Keiko were way too close to each other, thrashing and splashing in the water. Here's Mark again.

[Lanny Cornell]

We don't know where the wild whales are. Keiko sunk explosively, letting go of a lot of air. If you've ever seen a whale do this, they'll just blow all their air and go down and it's enough to rock a good sized boat. And so there was bubbles coming from everywhere.

[Tracy Carmuzzo]

It was an absolute clusterfuck of epic proportions.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Tracy Carmuzzo was one of the trainers on the walk boat with Mark.

[Tracy Carmuzzo]

And all of a sudden this boat was here and this boat was here and the whales were there and it was just this. And who knows what happened underwater.

[Daniel Alarcon]

From the helicopter, Jeff could see what had happened. Keiko had split.

[Jeff Foster]

I could just about see how big his eyes were when he started porpoising across the water and trying to get.

[Tracy Carmuzzo]

Out of there, it just was a disaster. And when Keiko went one direction and the whales went the other and he just was Gone?

[Daniel Alarcon]

Gone, yes. They had a tracker on him. Unfortunately, it only worked if Keiko was close enough to pick up a signal and he was way out of range. Just like that, the world's most famous whale was gone. So what now? It depended on how you interpreted what had just happened. Maybe the boats corralled Keiko and the whales too close to each other, and Keiko responded to a chaotic situation, swimming away out of fear. Or maybe you believe that by swimming away, Keiko had made his choice. Wildness, which would be a thrilling prospect. Of course, Project manager Charles Vinick told me Lanny Cornell was so convinced of this, he even called some of the board members to share the news.

[I]

Called board members and said things to anyone really well. And Keiko was on his own. And this is, you know, we should declare victory, and this is where we are. I don't think his words were declare victory, but his words were that, you know, Keiko has gone. But I think it felt premature to almost everyone.

[Tracy Carmuzzo]

No, he's not. He's not with Wales.

[Daniel Alarcon]

This is Tracy again.

[Tracy Carmuzzo]

He's not frol again. He's not blowing rainbows and going off. You know, it's. I was like, no, he's traumatized.

[Daniel Alarcon]

And so a search party, including a boat and a helicopter, goes off to find Keiko. Mark and a few others spend hours looking. The radio transmitter on Keiko's dorsal fin pings when you get close enough. And eventually their antenna picks up a signal. When he surfaces, they see that Keiko is alone. Not with wild whales, just alone and in terrible shape.

[Lanny Cornell]

His eyes were just bugged out of his head. I have never, never before and never since seen a killer whale's eyes that big. And he didn't look like. He just did not look like himself. He looked. It's impossible to know the cognitive state of an animal. They can't talk to you. But if I didn't know better, I would say he was just so wigged out.

[Daniel Alarcon]

He was incoherent, which is a kind of wildness. Sure. Just not the kind anyone had hoped for. And probably not the kind of wildness that would help Keiko much at all.

[Lanny Cornell]

I was furious. I was furious because I could see what we had done to him. And I knew that we. That it was predictable. We had done. We, as a group, had done precisely what every protocol we had outlined set out to avoid. We had made it an absolutely traumatic learning event. And, you know, memory. Memory gets recorded in the nervous system, so we couldn't have done a better job at upending the entire reintroduction protocol and process that we had spent 10 months building up to.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Mark and his crew try to get Keiko to follow the boat back to the Bay pen. But every time they move, he falls behind. By this point, it's nighttime, or at least that summer half light that passes for night in Iceland. Keiko, seemingly exhausted from swimming so far so fast, can't keep up no matter how slow they go, no matter how many breaks they give him. So finally they give up for the night.

[Lanny Cornell]

We all just kind of found a place on the boat and we were going to catch some shut eye and give Keiko a chance to rest. And we could hear his breathing, his blows near the boat. And I don't remember how long we stayed like that. As long as we felt comfortable, I think for a few hours maybe.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Eventually, they start up again and slowly make it back to the bay pen to rest. For Mark, Robin and Tom, that was essentially that the end of their association with the project. They saw Keiko's traumatized by the botched introduction. He'd been pushed too far, too fast. And to stay would have meant being okay with more encounters, no matter the cost to Keiko. And so within a few weeks, they were on flights back to the US but there was another way to look at all this. Being too protective would do Keiko no favors. He was never going to make it unless he was pushed. And those who chose to stay in Iceland were going to have to be okay with pushing him. That's on the next episode of the Good Whale. On him.

[Jeff Foster]

Whales are right on him.

[Tom Sanders]

Us training him to be a wild.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Killer whale is a little ludicrous.

[Tom Sanders]

He would be trained, but not by us, by the other whales.

[Daniel Alarcon]

But at some moments, I was wondering.

[Jeff Foster]

How much, when it's too much, how much will this whale suffer? I didn't sign on board to watch this animal starve to death.

[Daniel Alarcon]

Sign up for our newsletter where this week you can see photos of Keiko's Bay Pen and its stunningly dramatic location in ICELAND. Go to nytimes.com serialnewsletter the Good Whale is written by me, Daniel Alarcon, and reported by me and Katie Mingle. The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Shipp. Jen Guerra is our editor. Additional editing from Julie Snyder and Ira Glass. Sound design, music, supervision and mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for the Good Whale comes from Lachica and Osman. Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn and additional music from Matt McGinley. Research and fact checking by Jane Ackerman with help from Ben Phelan. Tracking direction by Elna Baker. Susan Wesling is our standards editor. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Simone Prokus. Carlos Lopez Estrada is a contributing editor on the series. The supervising producer for Serial Productions is Inde Chubu. Mac Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Liz Davis Moore is the senior operations manager. Special thanks this week to Ana Marcibol Clausen, Katherine Henley, Michael Parks, Robin Baird, Howard Garrett, Craig McCaw, Kelly Reed, Jim Horton and Greg Shore. The Good Whale is from Serial Productions and the New York Times.

[Mark Simmons]

For a limited time, you can listen to all episodes of the Goodwill right here, right now. But it won't be free forever. So if you want full access to this show and to all serial shows, you gotta be a New York Times subscriber. Learn more about the New York Times audio [e-mail] podcasts.