30 years ago this month, Free Willy premiered in the UK. The film is about a captive orca named Willy whose plight is recognised by a young boy. It has strong anti-captivity vibes and exposes some of the negatives of keeping cetaceans in tanks. At the end of the film, Willy is returned to the ocean to his family.
The story of Willy touched people’s hearts all over the world and inspired a movement to free the whale who portrayed him in the film – Keiko. Keiko was an Icelandic orca who had been captured from the wild in 1979. He was kept in a tiny tank at Reino Aventura in Mexico City, where he lost weight and developed skin lesions.
Viewers of the film were outraged to find that the whale portraying Willy remained in a tank, and a public outcry followed. Two years after its premiere, Keiko was moved to a different facility in Oregon, where he regained his strength and health. After a further two years, he was moved to a sea pen in Iceland, and then eventually released into the open sea.
Five years after his return to the ocean, after swimming all the way from Iceland to Norway, Keiko passed away from pneumonia. However, he had had five years of freedom and had returned to health. Had he remained in a tiny concrete bathtub, he surely would have died much sooner.
30 years on from the release of Free Willy, and Keiko is the only orca who has been rehabilitated and released. Thousands of dolphins remain in captivity around the world. Campaigns abound and sea sanctuaries are being constructed in order to retire captive animals to more natural surroundings. Keiko proved it is possible to return a captive orca to the ocean, and we should be giving other captive cetaceans the same opportunity whenever possible. Their freedom was taken from them, and our moral obligation is to give it back.
