Keiko Free At Last

The touching story of Keiko the killer whale is well known so it is of little surprise that his death at the age of 27 has been covered by newspapers and media outlets across the globe.

His history is familiar due to the success of the movie Free Willy. Found languishing in marine squalor in Mexico, Keiko was transported to a more suitable enclosure in the United States where it was then decided to attempt to reintroduce him into open waters. He became the darling of millions of schoolchildren and adults worldwide who saw him both as a symbol of the consequences attached to human interference in nature as well as an icon of human willingness to correct past mistakes.

The details of Keiko's death were that he succumbed quickly to pneumonia in the waters near Norway. Those who followed his saga will remember that it was off Iceland - not Norway - that Keiko was released into the wild. It was surmised that he swam to Norway in an effort to locate more people and achieve the human contact he had come to crave.

That small fact is what elevates this tale beyond that of a filler for the last item on a newscast into a moment of sublime beauty mingled with sadness.

The heart of the story lies not in a mass media driven spectacle but in the realization that man and nature are inextricably linked. Both constitute part of the web of creation and existence. In moments such as Keiko's death, our paths intersect, overlap and leave impressions on us all.

Stories such as Keiko's touch us because animals have the ability to tap into emotions that humans sometimes believe have been lost or forgotten - emotions that are not even or always present in our dealings with one another on this planet. Certain animals become like children, threats to none and provoking feelings of care and compassion in most. We want to protect and the conscientious see themselves as responsible for a stewardship of their future.

Yes, we want to protect. We want the animals to thrive. Ay, there's the rub. For in the fulfillment of that want lies a very human obstacle - our desire to connect, our need for communication and exchange. In other words, in order to serve that which we love we have to deny ourselves the ability to have the kind of interspecies interaction which decades of Disney films and anthropomorphized nature documentaries have hardwired into our brains. Namely, the belief that animals can be our friends.

What made Keiko so loved and his story so heartwrenching was that, at least in the case of this one killer whale, it appeared that an animal also believed that human beings could provide the companionship which whales need to survive. Even when released, Keiko had become so accustomed to daily human contact that despite the vastness of the ocean at his disposal he repeatedly chose to return and seek out humans. Skeptics will say he had found a source of regular food but that would be to discount the complexity and intelligence which biologists have long known exists in whale species. They have language, thought, emotion and the ability to feel. Given all that, it would be the height of cynicism to say that the promise of food was what Keiko most desired.

What Keiko desired was what we all desire at our most basic level - the promise of a connection with another living thing. What is profoundly human in all of us is the potential to care for something outside of ourselves, outside of our own needs and, in this case, outside of our own species. Keiko's need was not greater nor lesser than our own.

It is the recognition of that need in this one whale which touches everyone. It is not the otherness of it which tugs at our heartstrings but its very familiarity - a fleeting connection through whose consummation we seek to be reminded that we are part of a universe and we are not alone.

Those who would affect a world-weariness will not be touched by Keiko's story - not his life nor his death. For them, the mask of cynicism will reject such romantic and foolish musings. But implication in the world around us is what makes for a true citizen. This implication also means caring not only about that which is political, economic or suitably "grand" but that which is nothing less than life-affirming.

There are children all over the world who wrote about Keiko's plight and who adopted him in spirit. They will undoubtedly feel that their world is the tiniest bit colder with the news of his death. There will be sadness for a lost friend.

It is remarkable that a single whale can capture the imagination of so many people. It is moments such as these where the full contradiction of the human animal can be seen. We may have been the architects of Keiko's captivity but we were also the dreamers who tried to correct that violation. His story may make us less willing in future to extract from nature for our own passing amusement that which is best left alone.

This is a story that will pass quickly from the radar screen. In a world so crying out for inspiration is it not worth seeing this story as a reminder that the cruelty we routinely inflict on one another is not the sole attribute of humanity - that we do have the capacity for imagination and love and this recognition can only serve to elevate us all.

Sometimes it takes a whale to make us feel more human.