The Good Whale - Ep. 4
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I have this whole mini library of orca books now, stuff I read for this story. And in one of them, I came across a line from a field biologist named Alexandra Morton. She's explaining why, as a shy and awkward teenager, she found wild animals so compelling. She writes, Animals always knew what to do and where they belonged.

When I read that line in Morton's book, it resonated because I felt like it explained something crucial about Keiko's story. Maybe the key to solving this puzzle of what to do with Keiko is embedded inside that idea. If you believe what Morton is saying, then the way forward with Keiko is simple. Just let him be. If he's placed in the right environment and given enough time, he'll tap into that part of himself that knows what to do. He'll figure out who he is. Animals always do.

If you don't believe it, or if you believe by holding Keiko captive for two decades we transformed him into an exception to this rule, well then the calculus changes dramatically. The only conclusion you can come to is that Keiko needs us, humans, for a while certainly, but maybe forever, to watch over him, teach him. We broke him, so we bought him, and this care is what we owe him. We have to help him, as best we can, respond to those bewildering questions he can't seem to answer on his own.

What do I do? Where do I belong? And in the summer of 2001, Keiko's third in Iceland, that's precisely where the project was. At a kind of crossroads. Do we believe Keiko has, somewhere deep inside, the ability to figure it all out? Or do we believe we must protect Keiko from everything he doesn't know? From Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is The Good Whale. I'm Daniel Alarcon. Okay, it's the summer after that first disastrous introduction to wild whales.

The former SeaWorld behaviorists like Mark Simmons have left, but the Keiko project continues. Jeff, Tracy, Jen, and a handful of other trainers, many of whom had joined all the way back in Oregon, they're still there, and that initial botched introduction hasn't slowed them down.

They're taking Keiko out into the open ocean to be around wild whales as often as possible. Drop, go neutral, drop the hydrophones, happen to be the same place. And he's definitely showing an interest, he's approaching from the rear of them. Jeff Foster led a number of these excursions, and each time it happened, each time Keiko encountered wild killer whales, Jeff felt hopeful that this might be the moment when finally something clicked for Keiko.

or perhaps even better for the wild orcas, that they would see Keiko, hear him, and recognize that this stranger was one of them. They tried a number of things to try to help the process along. They tried introducing Keiko to wild whales when they weren't feeding, so they wouldn't see him as competition.

They cultivated a relationship with a young orca who they hoped might befriend Keiko, become a kind of emissary between Keiko and the wild whales. But that particular orca left the area before the plan could be realized. Still, Jeff says, they pressed on. We were always, this could be it. And, you know, we were always really excited about that. You know, we had probably close to 100 people

He bolted. Nothing seemed to work. If Keiko was wondering if this was where he belonged, he always seemed to arrive at the same answer.

Nope. I'd just like to leave it just at that. No sense forcing this down his throat today. Well, yeah, it's nice because we can also present him like this, okay? We did it. It's over. We're moving on. And we had an animal that was, you know, he was really strong and robust from, you know, from his time in Iceland. But he was caught between two worlds. He was caught between the human world and the wild. And it seemed increasingly clear he wasn't going to choose the wild world on his own.

So Keiko's humans chose for him. His trainers started leaving Keiko out in the open ocean overnight. Just a night or two at a time, at least at first. But crucially, without food. We picked this particular spot because not only is it protected, but there are a lot of wild whales within a mile of this area foraging. The thinking was this would motivate Keiko to hunt for himself. See, he hadn't yet demonstrated this ability, at least not enough to sustain himself.

After all, for most of his life, Keiko had been hand-fed over 100 pounds of fish a day. And what Jeff had seen when he tried to hunt for his own food just wasn't very reassuring. Like this one time, Jeff gave Keiko a signal to go get a live fish. So Keiko, always the good boy, off he went. 10, 15 minutes he was gone.

And when he came back, he came back with this little fish that was maybe an inch and a half long in his lips. He barely could hold it in his lips. It was slipping back and forth. And that's what he brought back to us. And so, so we would push him, we'd push him to a point, you know, we'd go out there and not feed him. And we watch him, you know, very active initially and, and becoming less and less active and swimming, you know, spending more time on the surface and, and knowing that he was, he was compromised at that point. A sluggish, undernourished whale at sea.

If the goal was to push Keiko to his limit, it was also pushing Jeff to his. We always tried to do the best thing for him, but we were getting a lot of pressure from certain, you know, certain directions to leave him out there as long as we could. And, you know, you can't do that. You know, you just can't. You know, you can't. You know, I didn't sign on board to watch this animal starve to death.

After a series of unsuccessful reintegration attempts, Jeff Foster gave an interview to a paper back in the States. His assessment was bleak. It is possible, he told the reporter, that Keiko never will be free. Meanwhile, far from Iceland, the project's main funder, billionaire Craig McCaw, was starting to get antsy. Keiko's rescue operation and rehabilitation had been running primarily on his dime for years, since Mexico, to the tune of several million dollars.

Always with the hope that success, meaning released to the wild, was just around the corner. But as you just heard, it wasn't.

And if McCaw's patience was beginning to run out, perhaps more importantly, his money was too. By the end of 2001, the dot-com crash was hitting tech bigwigs like McCaw hard, really hard. Soon, one of his billion-dollar companies would file for bankruptcy, and McCaw would begin to clean house, putting his $100 million yacht and an island he owned off the coast of Vancouver up for sale.

Plus, he was recently divorced from his wife, Wendy, a committed environmentalist who'd been a champion of the Keiko Project from the beginning. And so, by the start of the following summer, in 2002, Craig McCaw had pulled away from the Keiko Project and Dave Phillips went looking for new funds. It was the Humane Society of the United States that eventually stepped up. They would provide the funding to continue the project and become a partner in its leadership.

But this new funder was not a billionaire with money to burn. It was a non-profit, meaning things on the ground in Iceland were about to change. The generous one-month-on, one-month-off work schedule, for example, that was over. Now all you got was the standard two weeks vacation. The pay was slashed too, and housing was no longer included in the deal. To Jeff, there were ulterior motives in the changes. He told us he saw them as primarily a way to push the old staff out, get some new blood in that would do exactly what the leadership wanted.

And he may have been on to something. Ultimately, Jeff and most of his colleagues did leave the Keiko Project. And to some of the leadership, that change was a good thing. A very good thing. It was like, we tried it your way, goodbye. Now we're going to try it our way.

Naomi Rose was a marine mammal scientist working with the Humane Society. She'd had an advisory role on the project from the beginning, but now, in the summer of 2002, her organization was taking on a bigger role. Though Naomi had spent relatively little time in Iceland, just a handful of visits, the way she saw it, something had to change. She believed the trainers who'd left had been fundamentally, almost ideologically, unwilling to do what was necessary to make Keiko free.

For starters, she felt they were too risk-averse. They did not like leaving him out overnight. It made them very nervous. I mean, it was very frustrating for me. Jeff Foster disputes this characterization, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he says Naomi wasn't out there with Keiko day after day, didn't know his limitations like they did. If Jeff doubted Naomi's Keiko experience, well, she had her doubts about Jeff, too.

Naomi was a scientist, but she was also a longtime animal rights activist who was suspicious of anyone who'd come from the captivity industry. And that was true of a lot of Keiko's former trainers. She felt like if that was their background, how committed could they really be to release? As Naomi explained to my producer, Katie Mingle, the former trainer's whole approach was anathema to her. It required humans to teach Keiko how to be wild, which as she saw it, made no sense at all.

Us training him to be a wild killer whale is a little ludicrous, right? I mean, how can you teach them to be a wild orca? Don't know how.

He would be trained, but not by us, by the other whales, by the wild whales. That's what the industry guys think they know what's best for these animals. Think about that. Think about the arrogance of that mindset. I know what's best for this species that is so socially complex and intelligent that I can't even imagine what it's like for them 500 feet below the ocean surface. So the idea that we know what's best for them

is ridiculous. But isn't this project in a way like you guys saying, like, we know what's best for you and it's to be wild? No, that's what the industry is. So you've been talking to industry folks, I can tell, because that's what they were accusing us of. We were giving him options. If we were just arrogantly saying we know what's best for him, we would have left him. We would just let him swim off into the subset.

You guys weren't saying, like, we know what's best and it's to be with other wild killer whales. We were saying that's where he started. Let's try to return him to that because then nobody has to take care of Keiko. Keiko will take care of Keiko. But what if Keiko didn't want to take care of Keiko or didn't have the ability to? Was that choice really available to him? In any case, to execute the new plan, they had to bring on an almost entirely new team.

And given the economic reality of a project that had lost its primary benefactor, it was a much smaller team. Keeping Keiko in this particular location in Iceland was way too expensive. So 2002 was looking like it could be a make-or-break year. If Keiko didn't manage to swim off into the sunset, then this stage of the Keiko experiment might be over. And the world's most famous whale would likely have to find a new, less expensive, and less remote place to live.

As far as their original plan went, they'd done the rescue part. They'd done the rehab. If they couldn't release Keiko soon, they might have to settle for some kind of retirement. So they had to try something new. We'll be right back. It's summer 2002. New staff, new tactics. First, the staff. There were significantly fewer people working with Keiko now. Down, in fact, to just a few core team members.

And these folks, they weren't just new to the project. One of them had never worked with whales before. She was an Icelander named Thorberg Valdis Kristensdóttir. But I'm known as Toppa, which is easier. It sure is. Toppa was working at a small zoo in Reykjavik when she got the job. I got a phone call from a friend of mine. And there he was asking me, would you like to work on the Keiko project? And I was just, what?

She'd be doing a lot of the less glamorous work. Food prep, feeding Keiko when he was in the bay, that sort of thing. The guy in charge of tracking Keiko and studying the wild whales in the area was a Mexican biologist named Fernando Ugarte. This wasn't his first time meeting Keiko, though. Fernando happened to have been in Mexico on vacation for Keiko's last public show at the small, shallow pool at Reino Aventura. And the whale was looking so miserable, like he was...

You could see that his fallen dorsal fin and he looked thin. It was a really sad sight. Now he would be working with the same whale, only at sea, which is a kind of miracle if you think about it. And then there was Colin Baird, Canadian, the only one with experience training killer whales, though not all of it pleasant. He'd worked with Tilikum, the infamous orca from the documentary Blackfish, who'd been involved in the deaths of three people, including a young trainer Colin knew.

Soon after this, Colin decided he was done with captivity. I think that was the final straw, if you will. You know, I already had thoughts of, this just wasn't right. But Colin still loved working with orcas. So when the Keiko job opened up, he saw it as an opportunity to get back to doing something he loved, but in an environment he could defend. And now, here in Iceland, he had become the de facto leader of the new team.

This final push to try to release Keiko into the wild was going to have a completely different vibe from the previous ones. If the main critique of the old trainers was that they had Keiko on too short a leash, the new philosophy was to do the opposite. They thought Keiko's best shot at success would be to give him more chances to do the kind of learning he'd largely missed out on as a calf, watching and imitating what other whales were doing.

In fact, this is how scientists think orcas learn almost everything useful for survival in the sea. How to communicate, how to play, how to hunt. This last point in particular would be key if Keiko were to survive in the wild. Because killer whales in that part of the Atlantic hunt in a very specific and collaborative way. Not the sort of thing an orca can do on its own. But if he joined a pod, then at least he could eat their scraps.

And maybe that was the best Keiko could hope for. Learn to track the cool kids through the ocean, hoping they might allow him to pick up the leftovers of their hunt. To foster these kinds of interactions, where Keiko could imitate and learn from his own kind, the team's new regimen boiled down to this. More whale time, less human time. A lot less human time. The previous summer, they'd tried leaving Keiko out on his own for up to 10 days at a time, with no food. Now they wanted to try to go even longer.

And just like the previous summer, if Keiko wanted to eat, he'd have to find his own dinner. There were still boats around, keeping tabs on him, but it was all from a distance. To Fernando, it felt almost like they were abandoning Keiko. Especially in the beginning, he knew there were people in the boat. He could see us, he knew boats, so he came into the boat and tried to pop his head up and look at us. And then we just ignored him. We went and went below decks.

Fernando and Colin would hide below decks, out of sight. They even had a term for these times when Keiko spotted them, getting busted. He would just pop his head against the hull of the sailing boat and start screaming, like making a very loud call. Then it felt like children crying. And we would have to just wait for it to pass and for him to give up, trying to get our attention.

On one of the first days out, Fernando says, Keiko swam straight toward them, staying beside the boat for the next 57 hours, seemingly looking for his humans, often with his head almost touching the hull, before finally giving up and swimming away. It's hard to know, or rather impossible to know, what Keiko made of all of this, but it certainly seems like a yearning for his caretakers.

Like a dog whining for attention or some gesture of affection. Like, hey guys, I'm right here. Call it stubbornness, call it desperation. But 57 hours spent begging for attention has to mean something. And Keiko's trainers weren't always consistent, which probably made it even more confusing for Keiko. I mean, they weren't robots.

Colin admitted he jumped in the water once with Keiko and even broke protocol to try to overcome Keiko's reluctance to engage with wild whales. He told me he climbed on Keiko's back once, grabbing his dorsal fin and riding him straight into a pod like a jet ski.

Mark Simmons, the behaviorist from our last episode, told us this kind of random, intermittent reinforcement may have actually been fairly detrimental to Keiko's progress. The kind of reward that probably seemed harmless, but may have kept Keiko wanting more and more, addicted to humans.

Despite the occasional breach of protocol, Keiko was getting more whale time. And now he was in a place where there were no discernible limits. For Topa, that was the entire point of this whole high-stakes, high-profile experiment. To get him into the sea, where he might have the chance to be with his own kind. So even if in the meantime he was isolated and alone, it was worth it. I just believed it's so much better for him to be free out in the ocean and there is so much going on.

that in the end he wouldn't be that lonely. So I never allowed myself to go in that, oh my God, he's going to be so lonely that I'm going to keep him in my arms forever. And she might have been right. Killer whales are all over Icelandic waters in the summer, and sometimes they gather in these great big orca parties, which some scientists call a whale soup party.

This is pretty much what it sounds like. A swirling, frantic, mosh pit of whales from lots of different pods, mingling, playing, in a way that looks and sounds, frankly, chaotic. And groupings here are very fluid. An individual orca might arrive at the soup with one group of friends, but leave with another, and it's no big deal. In a way, this flexibility was perfect for an oddball like Keiko. Because maybe, if he was lucky, one of those groups might even make space for him.

There was this one time which really blew my mind. It was a sunny day and the ocean was kind of so calm. And we had like two pots of killer whales. It was a lot of killer whales around us.

And they were just coming up all over the place, just you could hear poof, poof, poof everywhere. And Keiko was there just on the side, just, whoa, there's something happening there. And if you put the hydrophone down in the water, we just had to pull it up again because it was so many noises and they were just talking so much together.

There's video of one of these days where Keiko is out near the whale soup. It's almost as if he's watching, sort of on the edge of proceedings, and you can see the waters churning with killer whales. Orca fins pop up from the water in groups of two or three. The crew had a hydrophone, an underwater mic, and they could listen to the cacophony of whale chatter through a loudspeaker on the boat. I like this tape so much. I just do. It could even be my favorite in the whole series, though of course I have no idea what it means.

With sperm whales, researchers now know their clicks function something like an alphabet. For orcas, we know each family has its own repertoire of calls that only they make. But whether what you're hearing is language in the way humans think of language? Well, we just don't know. We don't know what it could have meant to Keiko, if it was disorienting or vaguely familiar, or exciting, intimidating, or simply noise. But just listen. It's so much chatter.

That July, there were lots of occasions like this. Lots of encounters. According to Fernando, Keiko was usually somewhere on the periphery, but always facing the direction of the other whales. In the videos, there are so many whales you can't always tell where he is exactly, but sometimes you can hear him. Do you hear it? Keiko just sounds different.

One scientist who had heard Keiko's vocalizations described them as not fully developed. To me they sound almost childlike, noticeably so. If not to the untrained ear, then certainly to the wild orcas at that day's soup. Then again, amid all this noise, maybe no one was listening to the weirdo hanging out at the edge of the party. Like I said, all pods have their own distinct dialect, so it's unlikely that Keiko could actually understand what the other orcas were saying.

But there is one universal sound all orca pods seem to share. Scientists call it V4. And get this, they think it may be laughter. So it's not a stretch, for me at least, to think of Keiko, who was deprived of his orca brethren for close to two decades, at the edge of this soup, suddenly able to hear the conversations, maybe even laughter, of his whale peers and feeling an emotion he cannot name.

Everyone's having so much fun, Keiko. So what are you going to do?

As July unfolds, Keiko spends nearly all his time out in the ocean, away from the Bay Penn. And while Keiko is often near wild whales, he's not among them. We've got Fernando's field notes from that time, and the progress Keiko's making, it's slow. In his notes, Fernando seems concerned. At one point, he describes Keiko as, quote, looking miserable. But at some moments, I was wondering how much. When is too much? How much will this whale suffer?

before we think it's time to bring him back to human control. They hadn't been feeding Keiko regularly, but if he was hungry, Colin says there was always tons of leftover herring after the wild whales ate their fill. There was so much herring in the water that Keiko wouldn't even have to have hunted. He would have just have to swam up and started feeding on these things. But when they do a couple of stomach samples, Fernando says they find... Nothing. Just slime and water. No fish.

Still, they keep on. From Fernando's field notes. July 19th. Keiko is near but not within the feeding wild whales. July 24th. More of the same. Keiko floating a thousand meters from the closest group. On July 27th, Keiko seems to be closing the gap. Fernando records him as 30 meters from the other whales. But it's not enough. Even if he was closer to whales, he still wasn't really interacting with them. And Fernando is starting to doubt it will ever happen for Keiko.

He notes in his journal on July 29th that Keiko doesn't dive when they dive. Instead, just sort of floats on the surface. But when he's on his own, that's when he dives. But then, the very next day, on July 30th, something big happens. Fernando was on a boat about 70 meters away, and a member of his team caught the moment on film. What's that, Keiko? That's Keiko in the middle. In the middle of the line, that door is right there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was the usual whale soup situation, but instead of hovering on the edge of it, Keiko was suddenly right in the middle of the action, diving among the feeding whales, possibly even feeding himself. This was exciting, even if the overall picture was a little muddled.

If you wanted to be optimistic, Keiko had learned, or was beginning to learn, where he belonged. I mean, look at him, partying at the whale soup. On the flip side, his empty stomach samples from earlier that month were a clear reminder that he still didn't have it all figured out. So, let's call it what it was. Keiko wasn't wild. He was wild adjacent. On August 2nd, just two days after Keiko's first real interaction with wild whales, or at least the first one Fernando knew about, the weather turned.

They were all used to brutal rain in the area and the strong Icelandic winds had been an issue from the very beginning. But they were mostly using a sailboat now because it was silent, which meant they could watch Keiko without really alerting him. In any case, being out on the ocean in a sailboat in one of those storms just wasn't safe. Before the storm got worse and the boat had to head back, they'd seen Keiko swimming near a pod. So what should they do about him? There was just a lot of discussions. Okay, should we...

Colt K go in or should we leave him out there? What to do? They decided to leave him out and take the sailboat back to shore with a plan to monitor him from back on land. But Topa says the extreme weather made even that difficult. It was so windy and it was so tough to go down to the coast with the radio transmitter just to try to get the signal. And then Saturday we got the signal and

Keiko was on the move. The signal from the radio transmitter got even weaker. And eventually, they lost it entirely.

Keiko had a satellite transmitter too, but this one only gave them a few positions a day. They took the sailboat and later a small plane out to these locations. But when they did, they discovered Keiko was long gone. He wasn't staying still. He was heading somewhere, swimming east. But where exactly? Topa and Fernando couldn't say for sure. At that time, I honestly thought that Keiko was lost, that he had lost the whales he was following and that he was alone in the open ocean, not

not knowing where to go. I was nervous. I was just, whoa, will we ever see Keiko again? What is happening here? Is he going out and coming back or how will this end?

Across the globe in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dave Phillips was asking himself the same questions. Dave, you'll remember, was the environmentalist who in some way set this whole story in motion, orchestrating Keiko's move from Mexico to Oregon. He was still deeply involved in Keiko's care. With his whale on the move, he was staying up late into the night to track Keiko's pings on the satellite, the digital map of his progress as he swam east at an average of 44 miles a day.

You know, we were looking at, we were like, wow, this really looks intentional. It looks really strong. It looks really like he's going somewhere with a purpose. I was like, you know what? This is pretty unbelievable that this is happening. And I'm really actually found myself being very excited. It was intrepid. It was bold. And I was just like, go, Keiko, go. This was it. Actual Free Willy.

In Dave's mind, there was so much riding on Keiko's journey now. When he first signed on to the project, he saw Keiko as a symbol for the seas, a chance to tell a story about what we owed the oceans and the animals that lived there. But now, now he saw Keiko a little differently. Now the story had become about us, about the potential for our own redemption. I mean, I'm very confident, extremely confident that in a short number of years,

We will look back and say, I can't believe we ever let orcas be kept in captivity. What were people thinking? And they'll actually think about, I actually think they'll think about Keiko in that vein. They're going to say, and Keiko will be one of the milestones in this transition, this huge arc of public attitudes that is moved from exploitation and dominion to protection and reverence.

Of course, that message only gets through if the Free Keiko project is a success. But it's risky, because if the project fails, it's sending the opposite message. Back in California, Dave saw reasons to be optimistic. We know from the information that we collected that he was not like zigzagging or stalled. If he was actually stopped and just floating and not making any progress and just lost, we would know that.

And we could do something. We also know that he was diving deep. The only reason for him to be diving deep was to feed. So we had ways of knowing, was he in danger? And he wasn't.

There came a point where Dave and his team considered trying to intercept Keiko and bring him back to the Bay Penn. I remember very clearly that there was a discussion about the fact that an intersection point, that there might be a plan, there might be a way to get a boat there. And that was like a real kind of key decision point. And Lanny with his vet and me were like, no, we're not going to do that.

Some would be saying, you know, just to get him and bring him back. But I think that the prevailing sense was he seems like he's maintaining a good course. He's traveling a reasonable distance for a orca whale, healthy orca whale. He's diving and we should just follow his trajectory and see where he goes. And that was the final decision. Well, not the final decision.

That, as a matter of fact, would be Keiko's. Next time on The Good Whale, something a little different. A surprise. You'll see. Don't forget to sign up for our newsletter to see photos of the Good Whale himself. This week we've got pictures of Keiko gallivanting in the ocean while his humans watch from a distance. Go to nytimes.com slash serial newsletter.

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 La Chica 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.

Special thanks to...

The Good Whale is from Serial Productions and The New York Times. For a limited time, you can listen to all episodes of The Good Whale 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've got to be a New York Times subscriber. Learn more about the New York Times audio subscription at nytimes.com slash podcasts.