The tragedy of a life stolen, but we still have a chance to do the right thing

I was saddened to hear the news of Kiska’s passing this week, but also a little relieved. Her life has been one marked with misery for many years – the last 12 of them completely alone. Her kind is highly intelligent and social, and for a being of this nature, the despair imposed by her situation must at times have felt unbearable. She was widely known as “the world’s loneliest orca”, and with good reason. She has not known the company of another marine mammal for over a decade.

Alone. A tiny featureless concrete tank, usually with poor water quality. An utter lack of stimulation. No space. No company. No freedom. Yet somehow, here in Canada, none of this ever rose to the level of animal cruelty. Our laws prohibit causing an animal to suffer. That includes emotional distress, which Kiska has clearly been experiencing for many years. How is it that we failed her so badly, right up until the end?

Kiska’s life was hers to live, by right, with her family in the waters near Iceland where she was born. We had no moral basis to defend the act of taking it from her. To condemn her to 47 years of imprisonment and forced service as an ‘entertainer’ and breeding stock.

Since the passage of a bill ending cetacean captivity in Canada in 2019, it has been my fondest hope that we would someday be able to give her back at least a small piece of what has been stolen from her. By being retired to a sanctuary she might have had a few years of peace. With the Whale Sanctuary Project hoping to open just such a facility in Port Hilford, N.S in the near future, Kiska would have been an excellent candidate to be moved there. Sadly, this was not to be.

She died without any reason to hope that something better might have been on the horizon for her.

We will never again be tortured with images of Kiska slamming her body and head against the walls of her tank, or floating lethargically and without purpose. Her suffering, thankfully, is at an end. We’re also grateful that no orca will ever again be held captive in Canada. No others will have to experience this. She will be the last.

But we still have work to do. We need to understand why the people tasked with preventing animal cruelty repeatedly chose to do nothing. Especially when her species is among those most capable of experiencing distress due to isolation and lack of stimulation. Why was Marineland never prosecuted? How did we so completely drop the ball on such on obvious animal welfare priority?

It’s too late to save Kiska now. Too late to see her moved to a sanctuary, or to live the last few years in the company of others of her kind. But it is not too late that she be given some kind of justice for what we let happen. We owe her at least that.

For The Orca’s Voice,
Dakota, Canadian Cetacean Alliance