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I don't know about you, but you know what I think would feel great today?
An animal story. And not one of the stories where the animals are some metaphor for human beings and we see ourselves through their actions and learn some important lessons.
No, no, no, no. I'm talking about an old -fashioned animal story where you hear about some amazing creature in some surprising situation and that creature then does things that have such personality and seems so specifically them, you know, it just gets to you.
I'm pleased to say we have a story like that for you today.
And the creature is not a dog or a cat or a bunny or a horse or any of the lovable creatures you usually find in this kind of story.
It's an orca, a killer whale that we humans captured from the wild, took from his mother and trained to be completely tame and live alongside us.
This killer whale was so tame that at night when his trainers went home and it was all alone, he would watch TV from inside his tank.
He liked old Andy Griffith reruns and action movies, and that continued for years until one day we got the idea that maybe this killer whale didn't need to continue as a giant domesticated pet.
Maybe it would be possible for him to lead a very different life in the wild again.
Today's story comes from our coworkers at Serial.
They, of course, have done so many remarkable series that have changed everybody's expectations of what you can do in a podcast.
I have been sitting in on read throughs of drafts of episodes of this new series for a year now.
I'm one of the people who gives editing notes.
And whenever we do one of these listening sessions, I have to say it's always one of the best parts of my week.
I really love this story.
One of my favorite things they've ever done.
This new series is called The Good Whale, six episodes long, including, I'm not kidding, a musical episode.
Maybe I'll tell you about that later.
They launched the first two episodes this week.
And we're going to play you Episode One of their show right now.
And then after the break, we have another story not from Serial, but a story that we made about animals and what we expect of them.
From WBE Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Out of Glass.
Danielle Alarcon, the novelist and journalist and host of Radio Ambulante is host to this new show for Serial.
And with that, I will turn things over to Danielle.
Here's Episode One of their show.
Our story begins in the early 90s with an orca named Keiko.
He's just entering his teenage years, living at an amusement park in Mexico City called Reino Aventura, or Adventure Kingdom.
He's not from there, but for the last seven years, a tank in this polluted, landlocked megacity more than 7 ,000 feet above sea level has been his home.
Before that, it was a marine park in Canada, where he was bullied by the other orcas.
Before that, it was a tank in a big concrete building in Iceland, where he was kept for about three years, unable to see the sky.
And even before that, it was in North Atlantic, where he was captured and separated from his mom and the rest of his whale pod, probably when he was around too.
I don't think I really understood how traumatic this could have been until I learned that male killer whales are essentially mama's boys.
And not just when they're young, but basically their entire lives.
Even as adults, they might swim by their mother's side, they depend on her.
A mother orca might catch a fish, bite it in two, and give half to her son.
This kind of closeness is documented in male orcas well into their 20s or 30s.
And Keiko was deprived of the chance to have that.
At age two, Keiko would probably still have been swimming in his mother's slipstream, still mastering the language of his pod.
He wouldn't have yet learned how to hunt on his own.
Despite weighing more than a thousand pounds, in developmental terms, Keiko would have been just a baby, ripped from his mother, from everything he'd ever known, and from a life that may have been largely spent by her side.
So of course it's hard to talk about a pool in the Mexican amusement park as a substitute for any of that.
But what I can say is that the people who work there, they truly, sincerely love Keiko.
They are, for all intents and purposes, his pod.
Well, obviously, my purpose in life at that time, it was Keiko and Keiko only.
That's Renata Fernandez, who worked with Keiko at Reno Aventura.
Before having kids, he was my kid.
He was my baby. He was, I mean, I had boyfriends back then, but they were not that important as Keiko.
I had to break up with two boyfriends because I spent most of my time with him.
I mean, it was, I worked there for seven years and it was the best seven years of my life.
Renata started at Reno Aventura when she was 20 years old.
She chopped frozen fish, mopped the pool deck, and eventually worked her way up to be one of Keiko's trainers.
Working with a killer whale had long been a dream of hers.
And even now, when she talks about Keiko, she sounds the way a mother might when reminiscing about her kid's childhood.
She remembers all of Keiko's favorite games, his favorite toys, his favorite Playmate.
His best friend was a dolphin named Richie, and they would just play nonstop.
And between shows, he would just have Richie on top of him, just kind of like giving him a ride.
If Keiko had his moods or played favorites, well, Renata says that was just part of who he was.
Keiko would choose who to play with.
I mean, we had this very young girl.
She was 16 or 17, and she would come into the water and it was like a magnet for Keiko.
He would love her, love to be with her.
And why? Nobody knows.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's like chemistry.
In the off season, when there were no weekday shows at Reno Aventura, Renata and the other trainers swam and played with Keiko for hours.
Most of the people who worked with Keiko were young, none older than 30, and they made Keiko the center of their lives.
They fed him by hand, gave him belly rubs all the time.
They even set up a special hose just for him.
He loved to be sprayed.
And as far as anyone could tell, Keiko genuinely seemed to like it.
We had this little boat and there was a rope tied to the front, like a long rope, but we would put it in the water and like three girls would get, you know, hop in it and he would pull us all over the pool and then he would pull it down just to make us fall from the boat.
And that was over and over.
And obviously we would laugh and get on top of that little boat again.
He would, you know, give us a ride again.
So, I mean, he would have a blast.
There's nothing about that last sentence of Renata that could be fact checked, not a word.
We don't know if Keiko was having a blast.
We can't know. Maybe he was dragging the trainers around because he was bored or because he loved these friendly people who fed him every day.
Maybe what his humans interpreted as Keiko having fun was really just habit or even defeat.
Like why not let the people ride?
They seem to like it.
We can't really know what animals are thinking, so we do our best with the information we have, making educated guesses about the inner lives of the creatures we love.
And that's what the story is really about.
An imperfect attempt to understand what might be best for an animal who can't speak for himself.
The intention to make things right for him, to make things better.
Everything I'm going to tell you is set in motion by these good intentions.
And by everything, I mean an unprecedented global campaign, a high profile, high stakes science experiment and a debate about what exactly we humans owe the natural world.
At the center of it all is Keiko, who would become, almost by accident, a symbol for all whales, for the health of the oceans, for the very concept of wildness, but who was also an individual orca with a name and specific history and trauma and character.
A character with fears and limitations that no human could ever hope to interpret with any certainty.
Not that they wouldn't try.
In fact, lots of well intentioned people would claim they knew exactly what was best for this whale.
And they would be arguing and fighting over those interpretations for years.
It wasn't just Renata and the other trainers who loved Keiko or even just the people in Mexico City who went to see Keiko at Reno Ventura.
It seems like pretty much every kid in Mexico knew him.
He was beloved, a kind of national mascot.
He was he was like the pet Mexico's pet.
One person I spoke to compared him to a Mexican Mickey Mouse.
And in fact, a lot of people assume that Keiko was Mexican, like actually from Mexico.
They never considered that he could have come from anywhere else.
He was just theirs.
We talked to lots of people who grew up in Mexico City in the 80s and 90s and they said again and again that Keiko had an aura about him, that seeing him at Reno Ventura was like hanging out with your 7 ,000 pound best friend.
The killer whale you told your secrets to, what was happening at school, who your crush was, it was that kind of relationship.
If you watch television in Mexico in the late 80s or early 90s, chances were that sooner or later you'd see Keiko.
He was in Reno, Ventura commercials.
Of course, there were pop songs dedicated to him.
He even started in a telenovela as himself.
And then there were the shows when visitors got to see their beloved pet up close.
Reno Ventura doesn't exist anymore.
Not under that name anyway.
It's since been acquired by Six Flags.
But back in its heyday in the early 90s, Keiko was the star attraction.
And these shows, they were legendary.
At the peak of his fame, there might have been 200 people lining up a couple of hours before the gates opened.
A pair of clowns marched around playing trumpets entertaining Keiko's fans as they filed in.
On weekends, there were three shows a day, more than 3000 seats consistently packed.
I had Renata walk me through one of the routines.
First, it was the sea lions, then the dolphins, including Richie.
And then we would open the pen and Keiko would come out jumping.
So the people would just go crazy.
So that was the show.
And after that, all the trainers would come out, go greet people and take pictures with people.
There were so many people clamoring to see Keiko up close that his veterinarian told me they set up a kind of receiving line.
He even compared the crowds to the believers who wait in line to see the Virgin of Guadalupe.
That reverential, that devoted.
So that's Keiko, occasional TV star, quasi saint, telepathic confidant and best friend to countless Mexican children.
And this was his life, constant attention from his trainers, games with his favorite dolphin buddies, performances for thousands of adoring fans.
But it was all about to change.
In 1992, Redo Ventura was set to close for some much needed renovations, which meant Keiko had some free time, six months with no shows and no crowds.
So when a production company proposed to film a movie with Keiko, the park's director, Oscar Porter thought, what the hell?
Why not? It wasn't much money, but it might keep Keiko entertained.
Once he said yes to the movie, Porter didn't give it much more thought.
He was busy overseeing all the details of the park's upgrades, the installation of new rides, new contracts with vendors, more than 600 employees.
He told me he didn't even read the script.
But that script is why we're telling this story.
While you probably already know who Keiko is, even if it's by a different name, the studio behind this proposal was the American movie powerhouse, Warner Brothers.
And Keiko was about to get the name you might know him by, Willie, Free Willie.
If you're my age, mid 40s, you've probably seen the movie.
But if not, or it's been a minute, here's a quick refresher.
Lauren Schuler Donner, one of the producers told me the movie could be boiled down to this, Bad Kid, Bad Whale.
The Bad Kid is a moody 12 year old named Jesse.
You're like a feeding kid, aren't you?
I guess. The Bad Whale is Willie, captured and separated from his pod, stuck in a small pool in a ramshackle aquarium.
The park staff find him stubborn, hard to train.
He has three black spots on the underside of his jaw.
His dorsal fin droops to one side, a killer whale's version of an emo haircut.
Jesse decides he has to save Willie's life, get him back to the ocean, back to his family, and somehow, against all kinds of obstacles, he does.
Come on, Willie. I know I can do it, boy.
I know you can jump this wall.
Come on, I believe in you, Willie.
You can do it. You can be free.
Come on. The movie poster is what most people remember.
It's the image that was absorbed into the culture, a still from the film's climax.
Willie in mid flight against an orange sunset, jumping over a breakwater.
The ocean beckons. The boy stands just below Willie beneath an arc of sea spray, a triumphant arm pointing to the sky.
The tagline reads, how far would you go for a friend?
When it came to who would play Willie, it wasn't like Warner brothers had a ton of killer whales to choose from.
A producer on the film told us her team approached a few different Marine parks, but people weren't excited about the message of the movie and wanted changes to the script.
Finally, they landed on Reynold Ventura.
Who signed off, as we mentioned, without even reading it.
And Keiko, it turns out was perfect for the part.
See, for the film to work, the producers needed something very specific, a kind of sad looking whale living in less than ideal conditions.
They needed a whale kids would feel sorry for a whale children would want to save.
And the fact is, while Keiko might've been happy, he wasn't actually that healthy.
He was a couple thousand pounds underweight, not because he was underfed, but probably because the warm water affected his appetite.
He had a skin rash, too, something called papillomavirus, which looked bad, even though the veterinarian at Reynold Ventura said it wasn't that serious.
But most striking of all was his tank.
It was small, disturbingly small.
One of the film's producers joked it was smaller than some swimming pools in Beverly Hills.
The water he swam in wasn't even seawater, just fresh water with salt added.
Bernata says they checked the salt levels frequently and they weren't under any illusions that Keiko's living conditions were ideal.
She told me Reynold Ventura looked into building a larger pool, but just couldn't make it work financially.
So strip away for a moment almost everything I've told you.
Forget the love in the games and the trainers and the fans and see instead what the camera sees.
Keiko, a smaller than average killer whale with a droopy dorsal fin swimming alone in a tiny shallow pool.
He was exactly what the movie required.
Free Willy was released on July 16th, 1993, and the reviews were positive, at least until journalists started asking what was up with the star of the movie.
And news reports about Keiko's subpar living conditions and health began spreading.
The movie Free Willy has a great ending, but real life didn't treat the real star of the box office hit the way it treated Willy in the movie.
Not at all. News tonight that will surely upset all those children who saw the movie Free Willy this summer.
The whale that starred in the movie is sick and they die unless his living conditions are improved.
Soon enough, Keiko had gone from Mexico's beloved pet to Mexico's dying orca and kids around the world were not happy.
I'm writing this letter to ask you to consider helping the killer whale Keiko in Mexico.
We would like everybody to donate a dollar and we'd get lots of money so we can try to help save this whale.
Here this whale that people have made millions off of and now he's just sitting in this tank dying.
I don't think Keiko deserves to die.
In Mexico, Reno Ventura and the staff were suddenly having to defend themselves in ways they hadn't before.
Trying to convince crusading celebrities and animal rights activists that they did indeed care about Keiko's well -being.
When Life magazine published an article describing Keiko's tank as a cesspool, Reno Ventura's director Oscar Porter sent a letter claiming the magazine had gotten it all wrong.
That Keiko's water was quote clean and clear.
Back in Hollywood, Warner Brothers was getting hammered to bags and bags of mail from kids arrived at the offices all demanding the same thing.
Free Willy or rather free Keiko.
And so if the studio wanted to avoid a PR nightmare and not break the hearts of millions of children, then it was clear.
Someone had to save it in real life.
Daniel Arrocon. That's after the break when our program continues.
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Through Line is a podcast where we tell stories about a place shrouded in mystery.
The past. And to really understand it, we take you there.
Something happened to our collective psyche after the atom bomb.
Listen to hear us reopen stories from the past and find clues to the present on Through Line, the history podcast from NPR.
It's American life.
We pick up the story of Keiko where we left off.
Here's Danielle Alarcon.
For centuries, we humans hunted and killed whales as if their numbers were infinite.
And over time, we got better and better at it.
More efficient, more ruthless, extracting more value from each kill.
We harvested their blubber, their organs, their baleen, their meat, and it was all transformed into everyday commercial products from makeup to heating oil.
More than 700 ,000 whales were killed in the 1960s.
Whaling was a huge global industry with profits to match.
The killing of orcas was a little different since they didn't have much to offer us commercially speaking.
But humans being humans, we killed them anyway.
For fear, for sport, for bloodlust, fishermen trawling for herring or salmon saw them as competitors so they would shoot them on site.
The U .S. Navy would use orkapods for target practice.
All told, it's estimated that some three million individual whales were killed by humans in the 20th century.
By the early 1970s, scientists understood that whales were far more scarce than we'd all previously thought and began warning that the steep declines they were seeing in wild populations might be irreversible.
In response, the Save the Whales movement was born with the goal of ending commercial whaling worldwide, a bold quixotic idea to convince the countries that still practiced whaling to simply stop.
I'm telling you all this because in a way, everything that happens to Keiko a couple of decades later is a result of it, of this idea that these creatures were worth protecting.
And it's also when this next significant person in Keiko's life enters the story, a guy by the name of Dave Phillips.
I was pretty young then.
I was like two years out of college.
It was the late 70s.
The Save the Whales campaign was just starting to pick up steam and Dave wanted in.
So he packed up his life, drove his turquoise Volkswagen Rabbit out to California and soon joined the movement to do his part.
I was green. There are other people there that were a lot more experienced than I was.
I was more likely to be out there with hiking boots and long hair and just getting dirty.
So, yeah, he was kind of a hippie, but he was a hippie with a degree in biology who found he was too impatient to spend his adult life in a lab studying the minutiae of wildlife.
Without doing anything to save it, given the scale of the environmental crisis he saw.
Science moved too slowly for him.
The central message for the Save the Whales campaign was simple.
Whales are not commodities, they're living beings.
This message was everywhere.
There were bumper stickers and t -shirts emblazoned with the word Save the Whales.
The slogan itself becoming so ubiquitous, it was almost cliche, played as a punchline.
There were Save the Whales marches and rallies across the world and Dave was there for all of it.
Most importantly, he was there in 1982, a pivotal moment in his career when the International Whaling Commission caved to the pressure and voted to impose a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling.
They'd done it. They'd saved the whales from what many felt was their almost certain extinction.
So Dave learned two things.
One, to succeed your message had to be everywhere.
If your slogan becomes a joke, so be it.
At least people are hearing the message.
And two, whales are magic.
It's that simple. They're just one of those species that people fall in love with.
A decade later in the 90s, Dave's still in the environmental movement, still advocating for wild whales and attending meetings.
And it's at one of these meetings in Glasgow when he gets a call.
He's out to dinner with a few colleagues when somebody comes up to the table and says, Is Mr.
Phillips here? We have a call for you.
Mr. Donner is calling and I'm like, oh my goodness, it's just Dick Donner calling from Hollywood.
Like what is an end and there's Dick and he's like all in a flutter.
I haven't introduced you to Dick Donner yet, but I did mention his wife, Lauren Schuler Donner.
Together, they were a legit Hollywood power couple, producing or directing blockbusters like The Goonies and Superman.
Dick has since passed away, but Lauren told me that they both were self -proclaimed animal lunatics.
David actually worked with the couple before.
They asked him to consult on a few lines of pro dolphin dialogue in the buddy cop movie Lethal Weapon 2.
Hey, what's that you eating, Dad?
All right. My tuna fish sandwich.
Tuna? Daddy, you can't eat tuna.
I can't eat what? Oh, that killed Flipper.
We're boycotting tuna, honey, because they kill the dolphins and get caught in the nets.
Only albacore. It was small, barely a scene, but Dick felt good about it.
And now he had something bigger in mind, Free Willy, a movie he and Lauren were putting together, and Dick wanted Dave's help.
And he's like, you know, this movie is going to be big.
He's like, it's going to be a great movie.
And I'm doing this because I want to make a difference for whales and I want to know, are you in?
The whaling ban Dave had fought for all those years ago protected whales from commercial slaughter, but some species were still captured or killed on a smaller scale.
The way Dave saw it, Dick and Lauren were offering him an opportunity to finish the job he'd started all those years ago, a chance to save the rest of the whales.
Dave and the producers started with something simple, an 800 number that would pop up on the screen at the end of the movie credits.
The idea was the people would call, leave their address, and Dave's organization, Earth Island Institute, would send them a packet of information about the plight of whales across the world, how they could help.
The kit was like steps you can take, like go watch whales in the wild instead of going to watch them in captivity and put pressure on the International Whaling Commission to stop killing whales.
Nothing too elaborate.
You called the number, you got a kit.
But fast forward a year and once the movie was released and word got out that the star of Free Willy was sick and still living in a tiny pool in Mexico, well, calling an 800 number and getting a kit just didn't feel like enough.
Dave remembers Dick phoning them up again and saying, We're being crucified down here.
You've got to help us.
Now, Dick was proposing something far more ambitious, something that honestly sounded a little nuts.
He said, you've got to get involved in saving Keiko.
Rescuing Keiko from his life in captivity and releasing him back into the ocean, like in the movie, did you immediately say, like, this is something I can do, or were you like, this man is crazy?
I was like, I was just dizzying because I'm starting to think, wait, how does this even work?
What fans of the movie wanted was to see their favorite celebrity orca back in the ocean, but that wasn't so simple.
First off, nothing quite this ambitious had ever been attempted.
True. Other captive marine mammals had been released to the wild, but they hadn't been in captivity nearly as long as Keiko.
So saving Keiko would require an extraordinary effort.
Dick Donner wanted Dave to do it, but this wasn't exactly Dave's specialty.
His whole career had been focused on big, huge problems, protecting the ocean and saving wild whales, plural.
What Dick was proposing in response to the public outcry around the movie was much narrower in scope, saving the whale, singular.
Dave remembers telling Dick Donner, essentially, thanks, but I'm not the right guy for this job.
But it seems Dick wouldn't take no for an answer.
He was like, nobody else can do this.
You have to do this.
You've got to do this.
The kids are depending on it.
Everybody is depending on it.
You've got to do this.
Will you try? And, you know, there was something about this that resonated.
Think of it this way.
If you're Dave or an environmentalist of his generation, crazy doesn't necessarily mean impossible.
Just a few years before in 1990, an estimated 200 million people took part in Earth Day celebrations, the most ever by far.
This is the decade of the Earth Summit in Rio, the Kyoto Protocol.
Big coordinated global actions to combat climate change and environmental damage.
In 1985, scientists announced they discovered a hole in the ozone layer.
And by the 90s, an international treaty was in place to ban some of the chemicals thought to have created it.
And it seemed to work.
The ozone layer began to heal itself.
Even I remember, and I was just a kid, those years were my childhood, a time I remember as fundamentally optimistic.
We learned about separating our trash in school.
Reduce, reuse, recycle, imprinted on the brain.
We learned about the Amazon and the dangers of climate change, which still felt so far away.
We didn't despair because we thought we could still work together to save the planet.
That if people just knew what was happening, we'd do the right thing and that the right thing would be clear to all of us.
That's the moment we're in, the moment Dave's in.
And so sure, saving Keiko sounds a bit nutty.
But maybe if you've seen what he's seen, that sort of thing doesn't scare you.
So Dave said, okay, I'll check it out.
I'll fly down to Mexico City and meet Keiko.
He was, if not hopeful, intrigued, until he got there and realized this is a terrible idea.
By the time Dave visited, Keiko was a teenager and had been living in Mexico City for about eight and a half years.
Dave could see right away.
This captive whale was nowhere near ready to live in the ocean.
A wild orca could swim over 100 miles a day.
Keiko was basically the aquatic equivalent of a couch potato.
First time I ever went to Mexico to see Keiko, I was completely freaked out.
I was just, I was sitting up in the bleachers looking down at this whale in this tiny pool in Mexico City.
And he didn't look good.
He swam in very small circles and he could make it across his pool in just a matter of seconds.
It was a very, very poor facility.
I almost started crying really to tell you the truth.
I was just hit by it saying this is just, this just, this just can't work.
I asked Dave to tick through the reasons Keiko was not an ideal candidate to rewild and there were many.
Before they could even think of releasing him back into the ocean.
Keiko needed to get rid of his papilloma virus, but also get stronger, healthier, put on weight.
And there was no way he could do that in his current tank at Reyna Aventura.
And where are we supposed to bring him?
We, we're not bringing him into like, we couldn't bring him into the captive facility.
I'm thinking where are we going to go?
We're not going to take him to some place where he's having to perform or be in a captive environment by where they're making money off of these whales.
We couldn't do that.
So we're going to have to build a place and that's just at step one.
The bill for that alone would probably be millions of dollars and then they'd have to spend years and millions more teaching him the most basic ocean survival skills and pray that some of those lessons took.
Keiko had lived in the care of humans and without his family since he was around two missing out on years of life in a pod, years of company and hunting and language and what I can only think of as camaraderie.
The kind of social environment that makes a killer whale a killer whale.
He had millions of human fans, but not a single orca friend.
There were so many things he'd never learned.
Not only did Keiko not know how to hunt for food, he didn't know how to eat live fish.
Think about that. If you put a live fish in his mouth, this killer whale wouldn't eat it.
And language, Keiko had stopped making most of the sounds in a wild whales repertoire years before.
Pods have different dialects and it was unlikely Keiko even remembered the dialect he spoke before his capture.
This was crucially important to his survival.
Orca's very rarely live alone in the open ocean, so if he was to make it out there, Dave knew Keiko would have to be integrated into a pod, his original pod, preferably.
But if you didn't speak their language, that was going to be difficult.
And then there was a small detail that no one knew for certain which pod that might be or where to find them somewhere in the North Atlantic near Iceland, presumably.
How are we going to get him back to Iceland?
So Wailing Nation, are you kidding me?
Well, we're going to go over to Iceland and convince them that we want to bring back this whale because we because the world wants to save him.
Did you do like a back of the envelope sort of like, what's this going to cost thing?
Like on the plane back?
Yeah, exactly. Before, even while I was down there and and on the way back, I was like, I lined it out, I was way over ten million dollars.
And I was like, at that point, I pretty much just stashed back in my pack saying, I don't know about this.
It's just I don't you know, we're not used to things with six figures behind it.
I could see about like 10 impossible steps here.
So 10 impossible steps at least.
But let's be real for Dave, it was also one giant opportunity up until this point.
David had been thinking about Keiko, the way everyone in the world was thinking about Keiko as one individual killer whale in need of saving.
But what if he allowed himself to see it differently?
He'd experienced firsthand the hold that whales had over people that anti -wailing marches across the world.
He'd seen the power that media campaigns could wield with the Save the Whales movement.
This could be something much bigger.
What if Keiko, the individual, could become Keiko, the symbol?
What if you could use Keiko to tell a story about the ocean itself?
You're talking about trying to protect all the oceans and that those are the big issues.
Those are the big, huge, unsolvable problems, global warming, etc.
But they're so diffuse.
People can't see acidification rising in the oceans.
They can't see the coral reefs dying out most of the time.
They're not seeing it.
There's nothing, it's too broad to say the oceans are dying.
There are no grab points.
There are no things to manifest what's at risk.
But whales are one of the things that is just so otherworldly, so majestic, just incredibly amazingly intelligent, social, powerful.
And that means something.
It hits people in a different way than talking about the threats to the ocean ecosystems.
And then that's what got me over my own view that this is only one whale.
It's like, yeah, he's one whale, but he's going to be the most famous or could be the most famous whale in the world.
And Dave knew you could do a lot with that kind of star power, with that kind of attention.
So he set aside his doubts and decided that yes, as absurd as it sounded, he was all in.
Once Dave committed to getting Keiko out of Mexico, the next step was logistics.
And what I'm about to say is pretty obvious, but it's worth saying anyway.
Moving an orca is not easy.
One of the first things Dave did was create a whole new organization, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation.
The US Humane Society chipped in $1 million.
Dave secured a couple million more from a billionaire cell phone magnet.
Warner Brothers also agreed to put in $2 million, which sounds like a lot until you consider they made $150 million on Free Willy.
And by this point, the sequel, Free Willy 2, was already in production.
Still, with that money, Dave was able to convince a small marine park in Oregon to let the foundation build them a new, much bigger pool just for Keiko.
And so now, all Dave needed was the whale, which you might assume would be the hard part, given that Keiko was the main attraction at Reno Aventura.
But it turned out that Oscar Porter, the director of Reno Aventura, wasn't opposed to the idea of giving him up.
He had a whole park to run, and managing his most famous attraction had become an all -consuming headache.
There were journalists and activists to deal with, Mexican television stars and singers calling to arrange private swims with Keiko.
Porter told me he was spending three hours a day dealing with Keiko -related nonsense.
Which is a lot, sure, but most worrying of all was what some of the outside veterinarians were saying, that Keiko might die soon.
Porter really didn't want that to happen at Reno Aventura.
So, over the course of several months, Dave and Oscar Porter made a deal.
Reno Aventura agreed to donate Keiko to Dave's foundation for free.
Today, we are proud to announce that we have reached agreement on a formal plan, a workable plan.
In February 1995, it was announced to the world that Keiko would be leaving Reno Aventura for his new, temporary home at an aquarium on the Oregon coast in an enormous new tank with cold seawater.
Dave laid out a vision for Keiko's future, invoking the plot to free Willy 2, which would hit theaters a few months later.
And in that film, Willy is reunited with a mate and has a child and lives happily.
This is our goal. We would love to see the situation in which Keiko could have a mate and could be able to eventually be released to the wild.
Thank you. Rescue, rehab, release.
That was Dave's ultimate plan, even if the last part seemed improbable at best.
For Keiko's trainer Renata and many of the staff that worked closely with Keiko, the decision to let him leave was heartbreaking, even if they knew it was the right one.
Giving him up was a kind of noble, even maternal sacrifice.
That's how Renata saw it, which of course didn't make it hurt any less.
Goodbyes are like that, especially when you can't explain what the future holds.
You feel guilty, like you're betraying a friend.
And across Mexico, a lot of people were feeling this way.
They wanted him to stay.
They wished he could stay, but letting him go was a sacrifice they were willing to make because they loved him and they wanted what was best for him.
Which is why it was so offensive to Renata and many others I talked to to hear how the story was being told in the US, that Keiko was being saved from a terrible life in Mexico.
Do you feel like there was an element of like, ah, Mexico, you know how things are down there?
Of course. Yeah. Oh, of course.
She's like, yeah, we have to always, you know, help the little brother because that's everything wrong.
I'm not saying... I don't want to say that this is the best place for an animal, obviously.
But, but I'm trying to say that when he was there, he had got a lot of attention.
I mean, he got all the attention we would all the time play and, and, you know, and he would love that.
Absolutely love that.
We did the best we could.
We hired the best people.
We, we wanted the best for Keiko and we donated Keiko without receiving nothing.
Not one cent in return.
A few days before Keiko was scheduled to leave Mexico, the Reno Ventura staff threw him one last party, a kind of final spring break bash.
Everyone was invited, current trainers, former staff, all of Keiko's friends, his extended human pod.
So we were like 30 people in this place and in the Delphinier and we made a big luncheon and we all got into the water and we all played with Keiko.
And there was a lot of crying and I mean, it was, it was fun and Keiko was so happy and he would play with all of them.
Wait a second. So you're telling me that like 30 people got in the pool with Keiko at the same time to play?
Yes. Yeah. I mean, you would never get this in SeaWorld or Marine Elan or any other aquarium in the world.
If you tell this to a veterinarian from these, you know, huge aquariums, they would tell you that.
I mean, that's not a good idea because he would, I mean, the animal gets stressed.
Or I mean, I don't know what would they say, but, but he was so happy.
He was so happy. On January 6th, 1996, it was time for Keiko to go.
They decided to move him in the middle of the night for a few reasons to avoid the heat and the traffic, but also the crowds that were sure to want to say their goodbyes.
Moving any object as big as a killer whale is an engineering problem.
But when that object is a living thing, there's an added complication.
Getting Keiko out of Reyna Vintura and onto a plane would depend in no small measure on the cooperation of Keiko himself.
And that required training for months.
They'd worked on it with him.
First he'd swim into a small, shallow pool and then into a custom made sling, swimming in and out of it.
Weeks spent just getting comfortable with this process.
He had to be comfortable because once he was in that sling, he'd stay wrapped in it for at least 14 hours.
The challenge would be to keep him calm.
He had to trust his humans, not fight or flail.
Trust. The night of the move, it's noisy and chaotic.
I've seen the videos and it's just manic.
It doesn't look like an aquarium or even an amusement park.
It looks like a construction site.
All this movement and whirring of motors and beeps and shouting and lights.
Renata stayed close to Keiko, touching him close to his eyes so he could see her.
But when it was time for him to swim into the shallow pool where the sling awaited him, he refused and there was nothing they could do to persuade him.
Finally, a dozen people in wetsuits encircled him with a net and pulled him into place.
In the shallow pool, Renata and the other trainer dried him off before applying moisturizer all over his body.
Actually the same stuff you might put on a baby to protect from diaper rash.
You need his skin to be protected.
So we were rubbing thick cream all over his body and we would be talking to him the whole time.
But I was thinking about him and how nervous he was getting.
He started crying a little bit because he was nervous and everybody was so nervous.
You can transfer that to Keiko obviously.
So there are moments where you're just hoping that he just relaxes.
Once Keiko was in the sling, it was attached to a crane that lifted him out of the pool and placed him in a shipping container filled with 3 ,000 pounds of freshwater ice.
The container sat on the back of a tractor trailer, ready for the hour or so drive across the city to the airport.
Once there, it would be loaded onto a giant cargo plane.
David convinced UPS to deliver Keiko to Oregon for free.
When the caravan finally left, there were crowds more than they'd expected.
Ordinary people who loved this killer whale.
Whole families, children who dragged their parents out in the middle of the night to say goodbye, all gathered just outside the gates of the Reyno Aventura parking lot.
So many that police had to move them just so the caravan could pass.
And they soon discovered it wasn't just at the gates that the crowds had gathered, it was everywhere.
I've talked to a lot of people who were there that night, lining the streets, desperate to say their farewells.
One person told me the only thing he could compare it to was the time the Pope visited Mexico City.
The route to the airport was supposed to be secret, but that's not how it worked out.
Reporters kept the city abreast of the caravan's progress.
There were thousands of people lining the streets, boys in their pajamas carrying handwritten signs and girls in pigtails carrying Mexican flags, teens shouting and calling Keiko's name.
You have to wonder if the whale could hear them chanting, He should stay, he should stay.
Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay!
Then somewhere along the slow, ponderous route to the airport, there was a mariachi band playing an old song about a loved one's goodbye, Las Colondrinos.
Where can the tired swallow go?
say the lyrics, tossed by the wind with nowhere to hide.
Remember my homeland, beloved pilgrim, and cry.
Cars and mopeds follow the procession, drivers waving, honking their horns.
Honestly, it's a little bit mad, the emotion on people's faces, the palpable sense of loss.
Dave says some people had to be peeled off Keiko's container as they tried to climb it.
The procession just creeps along as best they can through the impossibly crowded late night streets, a city, a country saying goodbye to its beloved whale.
Keiko, he's a young man, Keiko is the king of the north.
We would see all these people on the street with signs and just want to cry, just to remember about it.
And people waving and crying and screaming like goodbye.
It was so, so emotional.
I was sad and happy at the same time because we're all doing this because we hope he's going to be he's going to be OK.
But but it was for Mexicans to say goodbye to the only orca that they would ever have.
The UPS plane carrying Keiko to his new home leaves at around five in the morning, more than three hours behind schedule just before a beautiful Mexican sunrise.
Only Keiko's veterinarians fly with him.
Renata and Dave fly alongside in another aircraft close enough to see Keiko's plane from their window.
Keiko no longer belonged to Renata much less to Mexico.
He belonged to the story being told about him.
The uncertain real life sequel to the movie that had made him a star, only more far fetched and with no happy ending assured.
It's it's kind of funny because it was part of of the movie narrative.
They were like, how far would you go for a whale?
He went as far as, you know, getting him, raising up his arm and saying some magical words and having and having Willy jump over the breakwater into freedom.
I mean, simplistic.
Yes. But that's what our narrative was, too.
How far could Keiko go?
For the moment, no one knew.
Daniel Eilikon, the host of the new podcast series, The Good Whale.
Of course, as the story unfolds, we hear exactly how far they go to help Keiko.
The series is produced by Serial Productions in The New York Times.
You can hear episode two right now.
Wherever you get your podcasts, the New York Times subscribers can hear the entire series right now, including episode five, which is the episode that is a musical like an old school musical from Keiko's point of view, created by the songwriters who did La La Land and Dear Evan Hansen, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul,
sung by Jordan Fisher and other actual Broadway stars.
Daniel also did a Spanish language version of episode one that you can hear on radio on Galante.
Coming up, some other animals get thrown into show business and they don't seem to be so crazy about it.
That's in a minute.
Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.
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This is the story of the one as a maintenance engineer.
He hears things differently to the untrained ear.
Everything on his shop floor might sound fine, but he can hear gears grinding or belts living.
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This American life from Ira Glass.
Today's program, the truly incredible story of Keiko the killer whale.
We have arrived at Act 2 of our program Act 2, America's next top gobble.
So thinking about what kind of story would go with Keiko today, we found this one.
Also about our dominion over animals fates.
In this case, it's a bunch of birds who are going through months of training for an extremely specific task that is very different from anything they naturally do on their own.
Diane Woo has the story.
There's this barn in southeastern Minnesota.
I want to tell you about on the outside.
It's very plain. It's white next to a field.
Smells a little like skunk, but inside there's this whole project that's been going on for months now.
Should I shut this door?
Oh, here they are. They are turkeys, not just any turkeys.
Yes. So this is a this is where we're raising the presidential flock.
This is the group of birds contending to be the special Thanksgiving turkeys at the White House.
Two of them will be selected to go to Washington and be officially pardoned by the president.
It's an annual tradition going back decades organized by the turkey lobby.
A person showing me around today is John Zimmerman, who's raising these birds with help of his shy nine year old son Grant.
Yeah Grant, this is Diane.
Say hi. Hello. To decide which turkeys make it to the White House, John is basically selecting for the ones that act least like a turkey.
He needs to that can stand politely on a special stage while voices boom out over loudspeakers, all in front of hundreds of people, school children, photographers, military band.
Most commercial turkeys would freak out in this noisy, unfamiliar, unbarred like environment.
Well, I mean, turkeys are prey animal, you know, their natural instinct is to be afraid of us humans, you know, any other animal because they would normally be killed and eaten.
So John's an industry lifer.
He grew up on a turkey farm and took over the family business 25 years ago when his dad passed away.
Each year, John raises around 140 ,000 birds and many giant barns.
These presidential turkeys are a brand new thing for him, though.
He's the chairman of the National Turkey Federation.
And the way it works is that every year that's the person who's in charge of raising these presidential turkeys and taking them to the White House.
But being chairman is only a one year gig.
So every chairman is in the situation of being a total novice at training turkeys to be on television.
Something turkeys have no interest in or talent for at all.
And they get exactly one shot to get it right, right in front of the president of the United States.
I don't want to go down in history as the turkey farmer who had a turkey fly in the president's face or get away or you know, act in a uncontrollable manner.
So I just don't want to have a flappy turkey up there.
He's been watching lots of YouTube videos of previous White House turkey parternings, trying to anticipate everything that can go wrong.
The birds that don't get taken to the White House get put back in with a regular turkeys and then slaughtered.
It's an avian hunger games in here, and whoever wins will be basically the only two commercial turkeys in America out of over 200 million raised each year who get to live.
So this is there's like you said like 20 birds.
Twenty nine left. Out of how many did you start with?
Started about 40. Okay, and how did you choose to the 11 so far that have been, I guess, deselected?
Yes. One had a scratch on its head.
One was kind of flighty, I'll say when we tried to pick it up.
It just didn't want to have anything to do with it.
So I mean, if they if they weren't as docile as others, we took some out of that.
One was a hen. So when we got them from the hatchery, we wanted all males.
Obviously, they missed one.
So one was a hen. So obviously she wasn't going to go.
Apparently, female turkeys share the same problem as female women in this country.
Terms of getting to the White House.
The males are the only ones anyone considers because they strut, which in a turkey means they puff up their chests, their snoods and waddles turn bright red, and their tail feathers spread out like a peacocks.
By the way, I was surprised to see that all of these turkeys are white, not brown.
John tells me it's because brown feathers left dark spots in the skin, which people didn't like.
He points over at a turkey with big snood energy.
He's very dark red on his neck.
He's that he's the picturesque Thanksgiving bird right there.
How do you read his energy?
Like, is he like feeling aggressive?
Is he feeling calm?
A lot of it's physiologically looking for mates.
So he's. Both glance at the nine year old.
You're recording right now.
I mean, he's he's horny.
I mean, that's yeah, they're they're males.
They're they're looking for a mate.
They're trying to be the big guy in the beach.
That's what they're doing.
This kind of strut is exactly what John is hoping two exceptional turkeys can bring to the White House.
So he's outfitted the barn into a sort of South Lawn boot camp.
He and Grant give me a tour.
First, to get the turkeys used to noise and random human voices, John plays the radio for them every day from dawn to dusk.
This is a tip he got from previous chairman.
Alexa, play Power 96.
Grant, correct, says dad, Power 96 Radio, he's saying.
Alexa off. They don't like the station in a sort of Alexa off.
Alexa, play Power 96 Radio.
Power 96. So a plastic rock.
A plastic rock. They're not yelling at this one.
Next, John got this special light off of Amazon.
The kind that projects colored patterns onto your house at Christmas.
It bothers them a little bit, but that's good.
They need to get used to flashing lights from camera flashes and whatnot.
Grant marches in with a kid sized picnic chair and plops it down in the middle of the flock.
So another thing we'll do, we'll bring a chair in here and we'll just sit.
This is to get them used to being around people.
John's also enlisted the neighbor kids to come by regularly to sit with the birds and pick them up a lot.
At this point, a few weeks out from Thanksgiving, it all comes down to who's hot.
The next calling will be for beauty.
Obviously here we want them to have perfect feathers.
So we're really watching their tail feathers and how they fan out.
That one looks really full like it's like a full circle.
Right here in the front.
My problem has been talking with other chairman who've gone through this process, they say, oh, you'll be able to pick the best two no problem.
That it will be very easy to pick the final two.
Now, maybe in the next week or two, the cream will rise to the top and we'll find, you know, the two that are the best.
But none of them are jumping out to him yet.
There's a test John's going to run on the birds soon.
He and Grant have built a box to mimic the ones that the turkey stand on at the South Lawn, and he plans to put each of these birds on the box and see who stays on it the long term.
He wants them to hit at least a minute.
They did a trial run back in September.
He shows me the notes.
This is the team test.
So this is how many seconds they were standing on top of the box.
And so the range is like seven seconds.
But then there's a couple.
To two minutes. Could you do like a little demo of that?
John goes to get a turkey and Grant explains how his dad picks it up.
So you grab the legs, put its belly on the ground.
And then put your other hand under its belly.
That one's flapping its wings a bunch.
That did not want to get picked up.
He's getting poor grade, but we'll give him a shot here.
Then you set it down.
And now the hope would be that he would just stand and do nothing.
Just high people. What's he doing?
He's behaving pretty well.
I mean, he's not comfortable.
It would be nice if he would just stand here and strut.
But he's obviously a little concerned.
We watched the bird hunch kind of nervously for 48 seconds.
He doesn't strut. The whole time I'm talking to John, Grant is quietly running around us, inventing chores for himself.
He brings in a pumpkin, feeds it to the turkeys, tries to turn on the Christmas lights, keeps picking up different birds, gets a random metal and puts it on one of them, climbs up onto the makeshift stage and squats down, posing as a turkey.
I get the feeling that he really wants to show me all of this.
He's excited to share his turkey project, but is too shy to say much or directly get my attention.
John's going to be bringing Grant to the White House, too, later this month.
My son is nine going on 10 at a shy age.
And I expect him to be standing up there with me in front of the cameras.
And it is a little bit disconcerting or overwhelming to him.
I don't think he's quite aware of what this experience is going to be.
So, you know, we're training the turkeys, but we're also, in a way, educating and training my son to be part of this event.
Part of that training is watching past pardoning ceremonies on YouTube together.
Part of it is getting him to talk to strangers like me, just getting him used to interacting with adults because he's a nine year old boy and that's not their their favorite thing to do always.
Have you been practicing at all, Grant, for the White House ceremony or thinking about how that will go for you?
Not really. I'm just shy.
Do you think are turkeys shy, too?
Sort of depends on what you do to them.
For the most part, I think they are not very shy.
If you just stand there, they want to go see who is this, who is this?
They're only shy if.
Probably if you're trying to catch one, but usually they're kind of curious and will eventually come up.
You like that, you think?
It's all about getting acclimated.
John's hoping that at the big press conference, when it's time to announce the turkeys names, Grant will say them, the week of Thanksgiving.
When I watch all of this, that's the part I'm going to be leaning in for, not to see whether or not the turkey flaps on the box, but Grant's moment to take the stage and strut if he wants.
Diane Wu is one of the producers of our show.
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oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh I hope I'm introduced today by Seán Cole.
People put together today's show include Viovenan Jindai Barnes, Michael Kometé, Henry Larson, Mickey Meeke, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Ryan Rummary, Lily Sullivan, Francis Swanson, Christopher Svetlau, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker.
Our managing editor, SIAAH ABDURAMN, and our senior editors David Kestenbaum, our executive editor.
He's Emmanuel Berry.
Special thanks today to Jessica lessenhaupe, Michael Kromm, Peter Gruul, Marisa Erasmus, and Jason Fields.
Serial's new series about Keiko, The Good Will, It was co -reported by Daniela Lacone and Katie Mingel, produced by Katie and Alyssa Ship.
It was edited by Jen Guerra with help from Julie Snyder, Carlos Lopez Estrada, and myself.
Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.
Original score from La Chica and Osmond.
The song Las Golan Drinas was performed by Mariachi Hidalgo NYC.
Research and fact checking by Jane Ackerman with help from Ben Phelan.
Other people who put together The Good Whale include Enday Chubu, Mac Miller, Liz Davis Moore, Susan Westling, Alamin Sumar, and Simone Prokus.
This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.
A note to our This American Life partners, we just released a bonus episode that is a conversation about some very fun, very old stories with producer Zoe Chase.
So check your feeds for that.
To everybody else, to become a Life Partner and get bonus content, ad -free listening, AMAs and other stuff, go to thisamericanlife .org slash LifePartners.
The link is also in the show notes of this episode.
Thanks to Zoe's Short Program's co -founder, Mr.
Tori Mount -Otia. You know, he knows his name.
It pops up in my cell phone every time he calls.
But still, he opens every single conversation the same way, every single time.
Just this Dick Donner calling from Hollywood.
All right, Glass. Back next week with more stories with This American Life.
Next week on the podcast of This American Life, after four years of living here in our country where something like a third of the population thinks the 2020 election was stolen, I was fascinated to learn about how another country put a system in place so there could be no mistaking who got the most
votes. The results for every voting machine posted for anybody to examine, which was great until this perfect system got its ultimate test.
That's next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.
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