Cetacean captivity

Cetacean captivity turns living whales into public attractions, asking audiences to admire performances and displays while concealing the confinement that makes them possible. In Philip Hoare’s account, the promise that captive animals will delight visitors, or even outlive their wild counterparts, repeatedly collides with unsuitable tanks, stressful transport, illness, and early death. The changing response—from childhood excitement at Ramu’s show to adult pity before a Beluga whale behind glass—makes captivity both a physical condition and a test of how people look at other animals.

The performing whale

Ramu was captured off the coast of North America in 1970 for Windsor Safari Park in the author's childhood visit. At four and a half years old, he was already sixteen feet long and weighed a ton; he was growing about a foot each year and ate between eighty and one hundred pounds of herring daily. His transfer was organized as a logistical operation: a Boeing 707 carried him to the United Kingdom in a specially made crate that could be sprayed constantly with water, and a lorry and crane brought him to the dolphin training pool. After a short period, he began training.

Hoare remembers the scale and theatricality of the encounter more clearly than Ramu’s entrance. The pool’s turquoise water suggested an artificial version of the ocean, far removed from the waters where he had been caught. Ramu’s black-and-white markings and powerful body made him compelling to watch, but the show depended on his responding to a trainer’s demands. When he leapt and landed in the pool, splashing the audience, the crowd’s delight sharpened the contrast between the animal’s strength and the limits of the enclosure. His dorsal fin, described as flopping over his back, became a visible counterpoint to the performance’s apparent triumph.

The park’s brochure presented captivity as beneficial, suggesting that its performers could survive longer in the pool than at sea. Ramu’s circumstances exposed the fragility of that reassurance. Within two years he had outgrown his tank, and in 1976 he was sold to SeaWorld in San Diego and renamed Winston. He sired four offspring there, then died of heart failure ten years later. His life was one among more than two hundred Killer whales that died in captivity during the final quarter of the twentieth century. The brochure’s promise of longevity thus sits beside an individual history shaped by confinement, transfer, and death.

Beluga whales on display

The history of captive Beluga whales makes clear that the problems were not confined to modern performance parks. In 1861, Phineas T. Barnum imported two Beluga whales, twenty-three and eighteen feet long, to Barnum’s American Museum. Their basement tank was fifty-eight feet long and twenty-five feet wide, but less than seven feet deep and filled with fresh water. Even Barnum expected their careers to be brief. The New York Tribune nevertheless treated the animals as a sensational attraction and imagined the museum expanding its collection of unusual creatures. The public promise of wonder and the owner’s expectation of short survival existed side by side.

A later Beluga whale’s journey to the Royal Aquarium was similarly organized around display. Caught off Labrador, the nine-foot-six-inch female was carried by sloop to Montreal, transported by train to New York, and kept for seven months at the aquarium on Coney Island. She was then placed aboard the steamship Oder for the Atlantic crossing, in a wooden box lined with seaweed. At Southampton, she was transferred to an open railway truck and taken to the Royal Aquarium, where her new tank measured forty-four feet by twenty feet and was six feet deep. The audience was admitted after she had been given three hours without visitors.

The reports surrounding her arrival and death recorded how little the spectacle could guarantee the animal’s welfare. The Times questioned whether she could live long in fresh water and noted that noise from workmen sometimes kept her below the surface. The female Beluga whale swam repeatedly around the tank, collided with its end, and died. Her body was then exhibited to the public, cast, and examined by naturalists and physicians. They found that she had a full stomach but congested lungs; the account attributes her illness to the open-deck crossing and the repeated wetting, which caused rapid evaporation between applications. The episode extended captivity beyond the tank: even death became part of the public display and scientific use of the animal.

Spectacle, knowledge, and justification

The Royal Aquarium’s visitors encountered the whale as entertainment, but the death also prompted a dispute about human authority over animals. Bishop Claughton objected that people had no right to remove a creature from its proper element. William Flower, who had attended the examination, argued that the process served scientific and general knowledge. His institution benefited from receiving the whale’s internal organs for study, a material interest that complicates the claim that exhibition and dissection served knowledge alone. The disagreement exposes competing ways of assigning value: the whale as a living creature in its own environment, as a public attraction, and as a scientific specimen.

Barnum’s Beluga whales met similar ends. They died within days under inappropriate conditions and were replaced by further specimens until a fire destroyed the museum in 1865. During the fire, attempts to rescue the last Beluga whale failed; a fireman eventually broke the tank, but the animal died in the blaze. The account’s restrained description of this episode offers no redemptive outcome. A collection that had made living animals into attractions ended with another captive animal unable to escape the conditions of its display.

From childhood fascination to pity

Hoare’s later encounter with a Beluga whale at Coney Island repeats the old arrangement in a modern setting: a visitor on one side of thick glass, a whale in a tank on the other. He describes the animal as out of place and understands that it ought to be swimming in Arctic waters. The Beluga whale is known as the canary of the sea, yet in the aquarium it seemed silent and confined. Hoare waited for a response from the animal, then turned away when none came. The scene shifts attention from the visitor’s access to the whale toward the limits of what a captive display can offer either of them.

That response contrasts with Hoare’s childhood visit to see Ramu. At home, he painted the Killer whale in his journal, preserving the spectacle as an image; then his attention moved to other subjects and he forgot about whales. In adulthood, the encounter with the Beluga whale carries a different recognition: fascination does not undo the animal’s removal from its habitat. Across the performances, tanks, journeys, and public exhibitions, captivity makes whales accessible to human spectators by restricting their lives. The resulting tension is not resolved by the promise of entertainment or scientific benefit; it remains visible in the distance between a whale’s ocean habitat and the enclosure built for people to watch it.