Jason Colby: On the Capture of Toki/Tokitae/Lolita/Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut and How Penn Cove Almost Ended the Southern Resident Orcas

Skaana with Mark Leiren-Young | Oceans, Eco-Ethics & The Environment

Jason Colby (author of Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator) talks with Skaana host Mark Leiren-Young about the capture of Toki/Tokitae/Lolita/Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut and how Penn Cove almost ended the southern resident orcas and was the beginning of the end of the capture era. “It’s worth remembering that the argument at the time, if there could have been a debate at the time, it was really between whale catching and whale shooting, not whale catching and whale watching.”

Shownotes:

0:00 The voice of Toki.

4:08 Jason Colby on writing the book – or at least a very long chapter of his book – on Penn Cove.

6:05 “They eventually capture virtually all of these orcas behind nets. They estimate at the time around 90 individuals… The estimates vary but almost certainly the entire population of the Southern residents.”

7:43 “It’s worth remembering that the argument at the time, if there could have been a debate at the time, it was really between whale catching and whale shooting, not whale catching and whale watching.”

8:50 “Once they rounded them up, 90 to 100 animals, if Ted Griffin and his company would have wanted to and would have had the market to sell all 90 of them they could have done that. If they had wanted to shoot them all in the nets, they could have done that. There may have been a firearms violation, but there would be no sort of conservation law violation.”

10:30 “This must have been horrifically traumatic for these pods to be torn apart.”

11:20 How activists trying to free the orcas accidentally kill four baby orcas.

12:20 Hiding the bodies… “Whether it was illegal or not, it looks like a murder scene.”

14:20 Is Toki really L Pod or did she learn how to speak L Pod from Hugo in Miami?

20:04 “It was a generational loss.”

21:20 “If Griffin had done what the fisherman who was helping him demanded – which is to sell all of them all – you could have seen the entire population of Southern residents extinguished before we had even identified them scientifically as a population.”

23:00 How to help orcas today and the problems humans are creating for orcas today.

26:04 Toki talks.

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Jason Colby from Mark Leiren-Young’s award-winning documentary The Hundred Year-Old Whale

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• Orca: How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean’s Greatest Predator

• Biography: https://www.uvic.ca/humanities/history/people/faculty/profiles/colbyjason.php
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  Photo from the Penn Cove capture: Comment: Remembering Tokitae: The last southern resident orca in captivity

Books for sale and Classes from Team Skaana

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• Audio books by Mark Leiren-Young (Killer Whale Who Changed the World, Orcas Everywhere & Never Shoot a Stampede Queen) on Audible.com https://www.audible.com/search?searchNarrator=Mark+Leiren-Young
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