Free Tokitae! With this premise, the owners of the Miami Seaquarium, where the world’s oldest orca lives in captivity, have announced that they will release it and return it to its former home after a “formal and binding agreement” with a group called Amigos de Lolita, strongly celebrated by animal rights advocates and indigenous leaders.
More than five decades after being captured in the waters of the Pacific Northwest, the orca Tokitae has a plan to return home, after a press release came to light that the joint effort is “on the job” and that “relocation is expected to be possible in the next 18 to 24 months.”
Tokitae is the oldest orca in captivity. Now retired, she spent decades performing at the Miami Seaquarium, where she called herself Lolita. She lived in the smallest orca enclosure in North America, in a pool of water that infected her skin and where she ate fish that was sometimes rotten and caused intestinal problems.
After many years of protest from environmental groups and also indigenous people from the Lummi nation and animal rights organizations, they have called for the release of the whale from the Seaquarium, and some have organized protests in front of the facilities.
Thanks to a “generous contribution” from Jim Irsay, owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, the financial problems surrounding Tokitae’s future have been saved: “I know he wants to reach open waters,” Irsay said at a conference press Thursday in Miami. “I do not care what anyone else says. He has lived a long time to have this opportunity, â€he sentenced those who doubted the ambitious operation to free her.
Tokitae’s ordeal began in the calm waters of Penn Cove on Whidbey Island – a sleepy island off the coast of Washington state – five decades ago. Men with long sticks and guns corralled a group of resident orcas, separating mothers from their calves. At least a dozen of those whales were killed during capture, and more than 50 were retained for captive display.
One of those pups was four-year-old Tokitae. At her home, the native Lummi call her Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut, which means that she is a member of the Sk’aliCh’elh, the resident family of orcas that live in the Salish Sea. The tribe, which considers the orcas part of their family, has never stopped fighting for her release.
There are still questions about the health of ‘Toki’, as she is affectionately called, and her ability to travel across the country to a sea pen. Their new home would be built with the help of the nonprofit Whale Sanctuary Project, which is also creating the world’s first whale sanctuary off the coast of Nova Scotia, modeled after the big cat housing areas, great apes or elephants after being in captivity.
Tokitae’s family of orcas are still alive, including the 90-year-old whale believed to be their mother. Experts are concerned that if it were to meet its relatives, even in a controlled marine enclosure, Tokitae could spread infections it contracted in captivity to other southern resident orcas, an already endangered group that numbers only 74. .
The first transfer this Thursday is very important, according to the founder of the non-profit organization Orca Network, Howard Garrett: “That is what will make it end up happening. This will greatly influence the media, the skeptics and the detractorsâ€, comments Garrett, very optimistic with the possibility that Tokitae ends up being free.
