How Ken Balcomb got involved in bringing Lolita home.
WPLG Ch. 10 News, March 14, 2018
By Howard Garrett
In early June of 1993, just after I started driving across the US on my way to San Juan Island to rejoin Ken and take part in the ongoing photo-identification research, I noticed a movie marquee that said "Sneak Preview - Free Willy!" I sat in a front row, from which the glorious moving images of Southern Resident orcas filled the screen and took my breath away. These were whales I had encountered numerous times ten years previously when I assisted the research. I was deeply touched to see them magnified even larger than real life.
But Free Willy was just a movie, and I didn't expect much talk about it at the Center for Whale Research, but I was wrong. A few days earlier Ken had been asked by the producers of Free Willy to help find a better home for Keiko, the Icelandic orca who was the central character in the film. It was clear to all concerned, including the owners of the park in Mexico City where he was confined, that he was dying there.
So from early June to the end of August Ken researched every conceivable aspect of returning Keiko to his natural habitat. Ken had been conducting field studies on orcas for almost 20 years already, and was considered a world authority on their natural history and inherent capabilities, but he also talked to every person he could find who had any experience with orcas, whether they were on the capture teams or trainers or handlers at marine parks or had studied them elsewhere.
On August 31, 1993, Ken and a group of animal welfare advocates, along with some Mexican government officials, went to Reino Aventura in Mexico to meet Keiko and discuss the possibilities with the management. Much to everyone's amazement, Ken was given authority to take Keiko to a seapen in a location yet to be determined, to rehabilitate him and eventually return him to Iceland, hopefully in the care of his mother's family there. Keiko's dire plight and Ken's bold solution were told to the world in a graphic article in Life Magazine that was picked up by every other major media. That media flurry drew the interest of a newly minted Seattle billionaire, who ultimately carried out Ken's proposal, with the exception of locating his mother, thus removing that essential element in Keiko's reintroduction, and dooming him to a lonely life in the North Atlantic.
That fatal flaw in Keiko's return to Iceland happened because Ken was removed from the planning process almost immediately after he reached that momentous agreement with the management of Reino Aventura, and the new planners lacked an appreciation for the indelible bond between orca sons and their mothers that Ken had observed for two decades.
In the summer of 1994 the sequel to Free Willy was in production on San Juan Island, and the Governor of Washington was there on a listening tour at the same time. Ken managed to arrange a few minutes to talk to him, but not about Keiko. Ken proposed that Lolita, the last surviving captive Southern Resident orca, be returned to her native habitat around the San Juan Islands. A feature story in the October 23, 1994 Seattle Times described Ken's mindset and resolve to bring Lolita home. The Governor was intrigued, and so on March 9, 1995 Governor Lowry, Secretary of State Ralph Munro, and Ken, formally announced the launch of the campaign to return Lolita to her home and family in Washington.
Ken was pre-occupied with the ongoing demographic survey of So. Resident orcas, so in the summer of 1995 I volunteered to start a non-profit organization to carry out the campaign. Ken stayed actively involved whenever there was an opportunity to tell Lolita's story, starting with a KOMO-TV hour long special "Lolita - Spirit in the Water, Dateline NBC, the documentary Lolita - Slave to Entertainment, and numerous other media outlets. Before 1994 very few people even knew that an orca captured in Washington was doing circus tricks in Miami, but within a few years the world became aware, and that awareness has only grown since then.
In March 2022 I interviewed Ken on the bank of the Elwha River, and I asked him if he had any idea how Toki had survived over fifty years in captivity. He said (paraphrasing here) the natural lifespan of females we know now is way longer than we ever expected, 80 to 100 is definitely achievable. Thank goodness she had a very caring veterinarian in Jesse White, and he made sure she had a good diet. She probably got a lot of drugs. But she had to deal psychologically with a ridiculously little tank.
[When she comes home] I think at first there'll be a couple of days when she looks around, like where am I? But she'll have her people around her to say, it's ok, it's ok. And then she'll check it out, and then she'll feel like, this is pretty cool, it's a lot better. I don't want to put a value judgment in her head but she'll know she's got a lot more space. She doesn't have to worry about bumping into walls, she's got natural things around, things she'll probably remember from her so-called childhood or very early period. They don't forget stuff. I don't doubt that she'll have a remembrance of what it was like, and I don't doubt that she'll have a feeling of freedom. She'll feel like this is really, really nice. It's not like there's nothing to do, there'll be plenty for her to do. She just won't get as much applause, but that wasn't the driver anyway, it was food. She'll still probably do routines for exercise.
At some point she won't need to do the routines she did in the show, she can have her own routines. There could be something on the bottom that moves its little hands around when she turns it over. A crab. That could be pretty fascinating. And now a fish swims by, and another one, and they're not fillets, they actually come in Costco size? She'll love it. It'll be stimulating. I don't have any doubts about that, and I don't have any doubts that she could be moved safely. It's been done over and over and over.
She's kinda won the lottery in terms of being with the right people, and she's more than paid for her retirement. They should let her, if she wants to, go out and listen to her family, and go out and be with them. That's getting a little hopeful but I think she'll do it. And whether or not she has any living relatives, or her mother, is irrelevant, she has the language and she has the grammar school part. I think she'll do ok. She'll be cared for anyway. It's not like we're doing any grand experiment and risking her life.
I think it would be wonderful to see, very heartwarming.