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Episode: From Serial: ‘The Good Whale’

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:47:22

Episode Shownotes

After the movie “Free Willy” became a hit, word got out that the star of the film, a killer whale named Keiko, was sick and living in a tiny pool at a Mexican amusement park. Fans were outraged and pleaded for his release. “The Good Whale” tells the story of

the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean — while the world watched.An epic tale that starts in Mexico and ends in Norway, the six-episode series follows Keiko as he’s transported from country to country, each time landing in the hands of well-intentioned people who believe they know what’s best for him — people who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing.“The Good Whale" is a new show from Serial Productions and The New York Times. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts, or follow it at https://lnk.to/good-whale For an exclusive look inside the making of “The Good Whale,” sign up for the newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

This episode of 'The Good Whale' narrates the life of Keiko, the killer whale from 'Free Willy', detailing his journey from captivity in a polluted Mexican amusement park to attempts at rehabilitation and potential release back into the ocean. The narrative unfolds through the lens of his trainers' affection, public outrage over his deteriorating health, and the ambitious efforts by environmentalists to transition him from captivity, raising essential questions about human-animal relationships, conservation, and the complexities of rewilding efforts amidst emotional sacrifices.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (From Serial: ‘The Good Whale’) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
Hey, it's Michael. Today, we're going to pause our usual Sunday Reads programming to bring you something really special. It's the first episode of a new show from our colleagues over at Serial Productions. And I don't want to spoil too much here.

00:00:16 Speaker_05
What I can tell you is that this is a show about love, friendship, fear, Hollywood. And it poses enormous questions for all of us as humans about our relationships with animals and with nature. It's thought-provoking, and it's moving.

00:00:35 Speaker_05
It's the story of the captive killer whale named Keiko, who starred in the movie Free Willy. And it's hosted by Danielle Alarcón. And the show is called The Good Whale.

00:00:50 Speaker_05
To hear the whole six-part series, you can search for The Good Whale wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes come out every Thursday. Okay, here's episode one of The Good Whale.

00:01:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:01:16 Speaker_02
He's not from there, but for the last seven years, a tank in this polluted, landlocked mega city 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.

00:01:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:01:37 Speaker_02
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 two.

00:01:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:01:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:21 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:39 Speaker_02
So, of course, it's hard to talk about a pool in a 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.

00:02:53 Speaker_00
Well, obviously, my purpose in life at that time, it was Keiko and Keiko only.

00:03:01 Speaker_02
That's Renata Fernandez, who worked with Keiko at Reino Aventura.

00:03:05 Speaker_00
Before having kids, he was my kid. He was my baby. 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 worked there for seven years.

00:03:21 Speaker_00
It was the best seven years of my life.

00:03:26 Speaker_02
Renata started at Reino 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.

00:03:38 Speaker_02
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.

00:03:50 Speaker_00
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.

00:04:04 Speaker_02
If Keiko had his moods or played favorites, well, Renata says, that was just part of who he was.

00:04:09 Speaker_00
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 he was like a magnet for Keiko. He would love her, love to be with her. And why? Nobody knows.

00:04:23 Speaker_00
I mean, it's just, you know, it's like chemistry.

00:04:27 Speaker_02
In the offseason, when there were no weekday shows at Reina Aventura, Renata and the other trainers swam and played with Keiko for hours.

00:04:34 Speaker_02
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.

00:04:47 Speaker_02
And as far as anyone could tell, Keiko genuinely seemed to like it.

00:04:50 Speaker_00
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.

00:05:11 Speaker_00
just to make us fall from the boat. And that was over and over. And obviously we would laugh and then get on top of the little boat again. He would give us a ride again. So, I mean, he would have a blast.

00:05:26 Speaker_02
There's nothing about that last sentence of Renata's that could be fact-checked. Not a word. We don't know if Keiko was having a blast. We can't know.

00:05:35 Speaker_02
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.

00:05:46 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:13 Speaker_02
Everything I'm going to tell you in the next six episodes was set in motion by these good intentions.

00:06:18 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:29 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:46 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:58 Speaker_02
And they would be arguing and fighting over those interpretations for years. From Serial Productions and the New York Times, this is The Good Whale. I'm Daniel Alarcón.

00:07:24 Speaker_02
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 Reino Aventura. It seems like pretty much every kid in Mexico knew him. He was beloved, a kind of national mascot.

00:07:37 Speaker_00
He was like the pet, Mexico's pet.

00:07:40 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:54 Speaker_02
We talked to lots of people who grew up in Mexico City in the 80s and 90s.

00:07:57 Speaker_02
And they said again and again that Keiko had an aura about him, that seeing him at Reino Aventura 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.

00:08:09 Speaker_02
It was that kind of relationship. If you watched television in Mexico in the late 80s or early 90s, chances were that sooner or later you'd see Keiko. He was in Reino Aventura commercials, of course. There were pop songs dedicated to him.

00:08:22 Speaker_10
♪ Keiko, Keiko, Keiko viva ♪

00:08:27 Speaker_02
He even starred in a telenovela as himself. And then there were the shows, when visitors got to see their beloved pet up close. Reinaventura doesn't exist anymore. Not under that name, anyway. It's since been acquired by Six Flags.

00:08:46 Speaker_02
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.

00:08:58 Speaker_02
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 3,000 seats, consistently packed. I had Renata walk me through one of the routines.

00:09:11 Speaker_02
First, it was the sea lions, then the dolphins, including Richie, and then… — We would open the pen and Keiko would come out jumping.

00:09:23 Speaker_00
So the people would just go crazy, obviously. So that was the show, and after that, all the trainers would come out, go greet people and take pictures with people.

00:09:34 Speaker_02
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.

00:09:47 Speaker_02
So that's Keiko, occasional TV star, quasi-saint, telepathic confidant, and best friend to countless Mexican children. And this was his life.

00:09:56 Speaker_02
Constant attention from his trainers, games with his favorite Dolphin buddies, performances for thousands of adoring fans. But it was all about to change.

00:10:18 Speaker_02
In 1992, Radio Aventura was set to close for some much-needed renovations, which meant Keiko had some free time. Six months with no shows and no crowds.

00:10:27 Speaker_02
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.

00:10:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:10:48 Speaker_02
He told me he didn't even read the script. But that script is why we're telling you this story.

00:10:53 Speaker_02
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. Willy. Free Willy.

00:11:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:26 Speaker_02
The bad kid is a moody 12-year-old named Jesse.

00:11:29 Speaker_12
You're that graffiti kid, aren't you? I guess.

00:11:32 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:45 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:59 Speaker_10
I know you can do it, Willie. I know you 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. You can jump it."

00:12:10 Speaker_02
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.

00:12:22 Speaker_02
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?

00:12:42 Speaker_02
When it came to who would play Willie, it wasn't like Warner Brothers had a ton of killer whales to choose from.

00:12:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:12:56 Speaker_02
Finally, they landed on Reino Aventura, who signed off, as we mentioned, without even reading it. And Keiko, it turns out, was perfect for the part.

00:13:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:18 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:29 Speaker_02
He had a skin rash too, something called papillomavirus, which looked bad, even though the veterinarian at Reinoventura said it wasn't that serious. But most striking of all was his tank. It was small, disturbingly small.

00:13:42 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:50 Speaker_02
Renata says they checked the salt levels frequently and they weren't under any illusions that Keiko's living conditions were ideal. She told me Reino Aventura looked into building a larger pool, but just couldn't make it work financially.

00:14:02 Speaker_02
So strip away for a moment almost everything I've told you. Forget the love and the games and the trainers and the fans, and see instead what the camera sees.

00:14:11 Speaker_02
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.

00:14:28 Speaker_02
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.

00:14:42 Speaker_04
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.

00:14:56 Speaker_04
The whale that starred in the movie is sick and may die unless his living conditions are improved.

00:15:02 Speaker_02
Soon enough, Keiko had gone from Mexico's beloved pet to Mexico's dying orca, and kids around the world were not happy.

00:15:09 Speaker_11
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.

00:15:20 Speaker_12
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.

00:15:33 Speaker_02
In Mexico, Reino Aventura 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.

00:15:45 Speaker_02
When Life magazine published an article describing Keiko's tank as a cesspool, Reino Aventura's director, Oscar Porter, sent a letter claiming the magazine had gotten it all wrong, that Keiko's water was, quote, clean and clear.

00:15:58 Speaker_02
Back in Hollywood, Warner Bros. was getting hammered, too. Bags and bags of mail from kids arrived at the offices, all demanding the same thing. Free Willy. Or rather, free Keiko.

00:16:13 Speaker_02
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 him. In real life. That's after the break.

00:16:42 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:07 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:22 Speaker_02
Fishermen trawling for herring or salmon saw them as competitors, so they would shoot them on sight. The U.S. Navy would use orcopods for target practice.

00:17:30 Speaker_02
All told, it's estimated that some 3 million individual whales were killed by humans in the 20th century.

00:17:38 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:02 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:12 Speaker_02
And it's also when this next significant person in Keiko's life enters the story, a guy by the name of Dave Phillips.

00:18:19 Speaker_07
I was pretty young then. I was like two years out of college.

00:18:23 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:36 Speaker_07
I was green. There were 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.

00:18:49 Speaker_02
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 minutia of wildlife without doing anything to save it.

00:19:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:19:13 Speaker_02
There were bumper stickers and t-shirts emblazoned with the words, Save the Whales. The slogan itself becoming so ubiquitous, it was almost cliche, played as a punchline.

00:19:23 Speaker_02
There were Save the Whales marches and rallies across the world, and Dave was there for all of it.

00:19:28 Speaker_02
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.

00:19:40 Speaker_02
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.

00:19:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:20:13 Speaker_02
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?

00:20:23 Speaker_07
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, and there's Dick, and he's like all in a flutter.

00:20:38 Speaker_02
I haven't introduced you to Dick Donner yet, but I did mention his wife, Lauren Shuler Donner. Together, they were a legit Hollywood power couple, producing or directing blockbusters like The Goonies and Superman.

00:20:50 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:04 Speaker_08
Hey, what's that you're eating, Dad? My tuna fish sandwich. Tuna?

00:21:10 Speaker_11
Daddy, you can't eat tuna.

00:21:11 Speaker_03
I can't eat what? Well, Dad killed Flipper. We're boycotting tuna, honey, because they kill the dolphins and get caught in the nets. Only albacore.

00:21:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:21:31 Speaker_07
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?

00:21:45 Speaker_02
The whaling band 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.

00:21:53 Speaker_02
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.

00:22:03 Speaker_02
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.

00:22:09 Speaker_02
The idea was that 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.

00:22:19 Speaker_07
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.

00:22:32 Speaker_02
Nothing too elaborate, you called the number, you got a kit.

00:22:35 Speaker_02
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.

00:22:49 Speaker_02
Dave remembers Dick phoning him 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.

00:23:01 Speaker_02
He said, you've got to, 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?

00:23:14 Speaker_02
Or were you like, this man is crazy?

00:23:16 Speaker_07
I was like, I was, it was just dizzying because I'm starting to think, wait, how does this even work?

00:23:27 Speaker_02
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.

00:23:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:23:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:24:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:24:13 Speaker_02
But it seems Dick wouldn't take no for an answer.

00:24:15 Speaker_07
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's depending on it. You've got to do this. Will you try?

00:24:24 Speaker_02
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.

00:24:37 Speaker_02
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.

00:24:48 Speaker_02
Big, coordinated global actions to combat climate change and environmental damage. In 1985, scientists announced that they'd discovered a hole in the ozone layer.

00:24:58 Speaker_02
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.

00:25:07 Speaker_02
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, imprint it on the brain.

00:25:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:25:32 Speaker_02
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.

00:25:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:26:05 Speaker_02
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 can swim over 100 miles a day.

00:26:19 Speaker_02
Keiko was basically the aquatic equivalent of a couch potato.

00:26:22 Speaker_07
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.

00:26:43 Speaker_07
He swam in very small circles and he could make it across his pool in just a matter of seconds. It was 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 can't work.

00:27:06 Speaker_02
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 papillomavirus.

00:27:17 Speaker_02
but also get stronger, healthier, put on weight. And there was no way he could do that in his current tank at Reino Aventura.

00:27:25 Speaker_07
And where are we supposed to bring him? 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?

00:27:35 Speaker_07
We're not going to take him to some place where he's having to perform or be in a captive environment 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.

00:27:53 Speaker_02
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.

00:28:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:28:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:28:32 Speaker_02
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 whale's repertoire years before.

00:28:42 Speaker_02
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.

00:28:51 Speaker_02
Orcas 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 he didn't speak their language, that was going to be difficult.

00:29:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:29:14 Speaker_07
How are we going to get him back to Iceland? It's a whaling nation. Are you kidding me? What, we're going to go over to Iceland and convince them that we want to bring back this whale because the world wants to save him?

00:29:25 Speaker_02
Did you do like a back of the envelope, sort of like, what's this going to cost thing, like on the plane back?

00:29:31 Speaker_07
Yeah, exactly. Before even on the, while I was down there and on the way back, I was like, I lined it out. I was way over $10 million. And I was like, at that point, I pretty much just stashed it back in my pack saying, I don't know about this.

00:29:45 Speaker_07
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.

00:30:02 Speaker_02
So 10 impossible steps, at least. But let's be real. For Dave, it was also one giant opportunity.

00:30:10 Speaker_02
Up until this point, Dave 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?

00:30:22 Speaker_02
He'd experienced firsthand the hold that whales had over people at anti-whaling 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.

00:30:34 Speaker_02
What if Keiko the individual could become Keiko the symbol? What if you could use Keiko to tell a story about the ocean itself?

00:30:42 Speaker_07
You talk about trying to protect all the oceans and that those are the big issues. Those are the big, huge... unsolvable problems, global warming, et cetera. But they're so diffuse. People can't see acidification rising in the oceans.

00:30:57 Speaker_07
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.

00:31:18 Speaker_07
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.

00:31:46 Speaker_07
And 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 gonna be the most famous, or he could be the most famous whale in the world.

00:32:03 Speaker_02
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.

00:32:18 Speaker_02
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.

00:32:29 Speaker_02
One of the first things Dave did was create a whole new organization, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. The U.S. Humane Society chipped in a million dollars. Dave secured a couple million more from a billionaire cell phone magnet.

00:32:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:32:53 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:06 Speaker_02
Which you might assume would be the hard part, given that Keiko was the main attraction at Reino Aventura. But it turned out that Oscar Porter, the director of Reino Aventura, wasn't opposed to the idea of giving him up.

00:33:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:43 Speaker_02
Porter really didn't want that to happen at Reino Aventura. So over the course of several months, Dave and Oscar Porter made a deal. Reino Aventura agreed to donate Keiko to Dave's foundation for free.

00:33:56 Speaker_06
Today, we are proud to announce that we have reached agreement on a formal plan, a workable plan.

00:34:06 Speaker_02
In February 1995, it was announced to the world that Keiko would be leaving Reino Aventura for his new temporary home at an aquarium on the Oregon coast in an enormous new tank with cold seawater.

00:34:18 Speaker_02
Dave laid out a vision for Keiko's future, invoking the plot to Free Willy 2, which would hit theaters a few months later.

00:34:25 Speaker_06
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.

00:34:53 Speaker_02
Rescue, rehab, release. That was Dave's ultimate plan, even if the last part seemed improbable at best.

00:35:02 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:14 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:25 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:38 Speaker_02
Which is why I was so offensive to Renata and many others I talked to to hear how the story was being told in the U.S. that Keiko was being saved from a terrible life in Mexico.

00:35:48 Speaker_02
Do you feel like there was an element of like, ah, Mexico, you know how things are down there?

00:35:53 Speaker_00
Of course.

00:35:53 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:35:55 Speaker_00
Oh, of course. She's like, yeah, we have to always, you know, help the little brother because he does everything wrong. I'm not saying, I don't want to say that this is the best place for an animal, obviously.

00:36:09 Speaker_00
But I'm trying to say that when he was there, he got a lot of attention. I mean, he got all the attention. We would all the time play and he would love that, absolutely love that. We did the best we could. We hired the best people.

00:36:28 Speaker_00
We wanted the best for Keiko and we donated Keiko without receiving nothing, not one cent in return.

00:36:40 Speaker_02
A few days before Keiko was scheduled to leave Mexico, the Reino Aventura 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.

00:36:54 Speaker_00
So we were like 30 people in this place and in the delphinium. We made a big luncheon and we all got into the water.

00:37:02 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:12 Speaker_02
Wait a second. So you're telling me Renata that like 30 people got in the pool with Keiko at the same time to play?

00:37:19 Speaker_00
Yes. Yeah. I mean, you would never get this in SeaWorld or Marine Land or any other aquarium in the world.

00:37:30 Speaker_00
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. I mean, I don't know what would they say, but he was so happy.

00:37:44 Speaker_00
He was so happy.

00:37:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:00 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:07 Speaker_02
Getting Keiko out of Reino Aventura 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.

00:38:17 Speaker_02
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 his process.

00:38:27 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:38:59 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:11 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:25 Speaker_02
Actually, the same stuff you might put on a baby to protect from diaper rash.

00:39:30 Speaker_00
you need his skin to be protected. So we were rubbing thick, thick cream all over his body. And we would be talking to him the whole time, the whole time. But I was just thinking about him and how nervous he was getting.

00:39:51 Speaker_00
He started crying a little bit because he was nervous. And everybody was so nervous. And you can transfer that to Keiko, obviously. So there are moments where you're just hoping that he just relaxes.

00:40:10 Speaker_02
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.

00:40:20 Speaker_02
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.

00:40:37 Speaker_02
When the caravan finally left, there were crowds, more than they'd expected.

00:40:40 Speaker_02
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 Reinoventura parking lot.

00:40:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:01 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:41:29 Speaker_02
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, Que se quede, que se quede. He should stay, he should stay.

00:41:53 Speaker_02
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 Colondrinas.

00:42:02 Speaker_02
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.

00:42:18 Speaker_02
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.

00:42:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:42:51 Speaker_00
We would see all these people on the street with signs. I just wanted to cry, just to remember about it. And people waving and crying and screaming, like, goodbye. It was so, so emotional.

00:43:08 Speaker_00
I was sad and happy at the same time, because we're all doing this, because we hope he's going to be OK. But it was for Mexicans to say goodbye to the only, obviously, orca that they would ever have.

00:43:34 Speaker_02
The UPS plane carrying Keiko to his new home leaves at around 5 in the morning, more than three hours behind schedule, just before a beautiful Mexican sunrise. Only Keiko's veterinarians fly with him.

00:43:45 Speaker_02
Renata and Dave fly alongside in another aircraft, close enough to see Keiko's plane from their window. Keiko no longer belonged to Renoventura, much less to Mexico.

00:43:56 Speaker_02
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.

00:44:07 Speaker_07
It's kind of funny because it was part of the movie narrative. They were like, how far would you go for a whale?

00:44:16 Speaker_07
He went as far as, you know, getting him, raising up his arm and saying some magical words and having Willie jump over the breakwater into freedom. I mean, simplistic? Yes. But that's what our narrative was too. How far could Keiko go?

00:44:35 Speaker_02
For the moment, no one knew. That's on the next episode of The Good Will.

00:44:41 Speaker_01
The story we were telling was a beautiful story of things going right.

00:44:47 Speaker_07
A simple story, but... He was the absolute worst candidate for a project like that. My comment was, that's not a killer whale, that's a golden retriever.

00:45:08 Speaker_02
New York Times All Access and Audio Subscribers can binge all episodes of The Good Whale right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

00:45:16 Speaker_02
Just head to the link in our show notes and subscribe, or if you're already a subscriber to the Times, link your account. Also, sign up for our newsletter, where each week we'll be sharing photos and behind-the-scenes info on The Good Whale.

00:45:28 Speaker_02
This week, we've got photos and links to video from Keiko's life at Reino Aventura, the place he called home for more than a decade. You should definitely check it out.

00:45:36 Speaker_02
The link to sign up is also in our show notes, or go to nytimes.com slash serial newsletter. And there's a Spanish language version of this first episode that we produced for my other podcast, Radio Ambulante.

00:45:52 Speaker_02
You can look for that at radioambulante.org. The Good Whale is written by me, Daniel Alarcón, and reported by me and Katie Mingle. The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Shipp.

00:46:04 Speaker_02
Jen Guerra is our editor, additional editing from Julie Snyder and Ira Glass. Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for The Good Whale comes from La Chica and Osman.

00:46:17 Speaker_02
Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn and additional music from Matt McGinley. The song Las Golondrinas in today's episode was performed by Mariachi Hidalgo NYC. It was produced and engineered by Dan Powell, Brad Fischer, and Pat McCusker.

00:46:32 Speaker_02
Research and fact-checking by Jane Ackerman with help from Ben Phelan. Tracking direction by Elna Baker. Susan Wessling is our standards editor. Legal review from Alamin Sumar and Simone Prokus.

00:46:43 Speaker_02
Carlos López Estrada is a contributing editor on the series. The supervising producer for Serial Productions is Zenday Chubu. Mack Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Liz Davis-Moore is the senior operations manager.

00:46:57 Speaker_02
Special thanks to Lauren Schuler Donner, Jenny Lou Tugend, Nina Litvak, Rob Friedman, José Solorzano, Kenneth Brower, Dalia Kozlowski, Pablo Arguelles, and Katie Fuchs. The goodwill is from Serial Productions and The New York Times.