Keiko apparently did not socialize well with other orcas after being released and transported to Iceland.  But the captive orca in Argentina, Kshamenk, is said to be a transient orca, not a resident orca, and so is believed to be much more likely to enter into good relationships with strange orcas.

It is hard to know what to expect, in the case of Lolita.  Nevertheless, it is harder to refute Raul Julia-Levy's basic argument, that liberation from captivity will surely be a good thing for her.

Notice the connexion between Raul's love for his little dog, and his concern for Lolita.  It often happens that way, that our companion animals sharpen our interest in all animals, including wildlife.

Best wishes to Lolita, and to all of you!

What is the "Southern Resident orca community"?

Thank you for this article about Lolita.  I am grateful, too, for all the celebrities who are involved in the effort to free Lolita.  It really helps a lot when famous people speak out about animal and environmental issues.  We, the ordinary people, can and do try to educate our friends and neigbors about such things, but we are often outshouted by the voices of denial, who try to make fools of us.  When celebrities point out the importance of animal rights or environmental protection matters, there is a better chance that people will listen, and it gives the rest of us hope that these causes will become more widely accepted and heeded.

Thanks, L25kin, for the fascinating links to orcanetwork.org!  I shall be reading up on orcas of the Pacific Northwest with great interest.

I am not sure that the Keiko Foundation is quite justified to say that resident orcas are the MOST socially complex of all non-human animals -- there are other cetaceans, and elephants too, for example, who exhibit remarkably close and long-lasting familial/social relationships.  But I have no doubt that orcas are definitely up there.  And I think you and Raul are certainly justified to feel confident, that Lolita would be recognized by her pod, and be successfully and happily reunited with them.

By the way, there was a curious story, a couple of years ago, about a new-born orca, in a pod that was in the body of water that separates Vancouver Island from the mainland, of whom it was alleged that he was the reincarnation (?) of a recently deceased Kwakiutl leader.  For a while, I recall, some of the tribesmen were paddling out to the orcas to greet the baby and spend time with him.  But then, the story got dropped from the media.  Is there any news about that orca?

That is so sad!

Michael Parfit sounds like a very wise and sensitive person.  He must have been devastated.

The documentary that is referred to in that article in the Victoria paper, "Saving Luna," does not seem to be generally available yet in this country.  But there is another movie, "Luna: Spirit of the Whale," starring Adam Beach and Jason Priestley, which I have put in my Netflix cue.

There are so many "normal" people who raise their voices in protest of wrongs just like this every single day. I take offense to Julia-Levy's question, "Why do we have to wait for celebrities to raise their voices first?" Of course, I'm equally as frustrated and it's a valid question, but it's not us normal people who are to blame...we try so hard! The decision makers who can make situations like Lolita's better don't listen to the normal folks. If Julia-Levy is so frustrated about the celebrity issue and wants more normal citizens to get involved, why doesn't he bring some of us "normal" people on board with his campaign? Give us a bigger platform to raise our voices too.

I wonder whether the impetus behind this activism on Lolita's part is due to Lolita's specific circumstances or a negative reaction to keeping animals in captivity in general. While I believe that large animals shouldn't be kept in captivity unless for some reason they cannot make it in the wild (grave injury, birth defect, etc.), climate change, loss of suitable habitat, over-hunting, and the massive extinction event occurring now is going to put us at an impasse.  Captive-breeding and release programs have had success for some animals (not all).  Anyway, the point is the human race has put some animals in the position where captivity is required to sustain the population. Hopefully some of these celebrities can lend their popularity to promoting habitat-protection and conservation efforts.

Right, krlk27, that was a silly way of putting it, on Raul's part.  We the people, we the "normal" folk, we the proletariat, we the rank-and-file, speak out all the time on all sorts of pressing issues -- or at least some of us do -- ; but the problem is, we do not often get listened to.

Thanks for your interesting perspective, CCDAngelo.  The captivity and the confinement of animals are always delicate ethical issues.  Although I am a promoter of animal rights, I part company with those animal-rightsists who think captivity and confinement are always evil.  In many cases, always depending on the circumstances, animals may be benefited by confinement.

Captive breeding programs are tricky: definitely an area where environmentalist ethics and animal-rights ethics can collide.  But not necessarily.  So far as I can tell, the cheetahs at the National Zoo in DC are doing OK.

And it certainly was justified to collect as many Central American treefrogs as possible, in the past couple of years, to save them, and their entire species, from being killed by the chytrid fungus, for example in the Amphibian Ark program.

With large, sensitive, intelligent animals such as orcas and elephants, we always have to ask if they have enough space, if their environment is satisfactory, and if they are lonely.  Elephants need much more space than most zoos provide; and young ones and females need companionship, preferably that of their female relatives.  The recent movement to liberate them from zoos and circuses and send them to spacious refuges, where they can be with other elephants, is to be welcomed, even if those conditions are not totally natural.

The orcas in aquariums are like that, and if anything even more so.  When we keep an aquarium, we are indeed supposed to care for the animals whom we put into it, but even more basically, we have to care for and maintain that small body of water which we have collected.  Our first duty is always to keep that water clean and healthful.  That sometimes is a yucky task; and when we consider the situation of marine mammals confined in aquariums, the yuckiness factor enters in.  So Lolita and other orcas should definitely be released.  So probably should intelligent marine carnivores such as sea lions and polar bears too.

(Berlin's famous Knut, well loved here in Grist, is perhaps OK where he is, so long as they give him space and keep him entertained; he certainly should not have been put to death, as some animal-rightsists oddly called for; but neither can he be sent to the Arctic.)

By the way, on whether "Jesus was a tree-hugger": I commend you on the theme of your blog, and I wish you every success.  But as a heterodox progressive trinitarian universalist anti-biblicist Catholic Christian, I doubt that assertion; and, more important, in general I think the historical Jesus is very boring.  He seems to have shared many of the unscientific and unquestioned prejudices of his contemporary Jews, and so I am not sure that we have much to learn from him.  He is NOT an authority for us.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ itself, on the other hand, which includes the Gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, is much greater and more beautiful than anything that the historical Jesus, as a limited man of his time and place, ever said or did.  He becomes much more interesting as an opponent and critic of contemporary Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions; but even then, we need the Church and the Holy Spirit to evaluate what exactly his opposition meant.