This American Life - 847: The Truly Incredible Story of Keiko the Killer Whale

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Keiko was a hugely beloved adventure park attraction. He was also captured in the wild and taken away from his mother when he was just a calf. When Hollywood learned about him, a colossal effort began to un-tame him and send him back to the ocean. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Ira introduces a new series from Serial Productions and The New York Times. "The Good Whale" is about the killer whale Keiko and is reported by Daniel Alarcón. (2 minutes)Act One: Daniel Alarcón takes us back to the early 90’s when Keiko lived in an adventure park in Mexico City, swimming with human friends. (43 minutes)Act Two: Producer Diane Wu travels to Minnesota, where the turkey set to be pardoned by The President of the United States later this month is having the turkiness trained out of him. (10 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

I don't know about you, but you know what I think would feel great today? An animal story. And I wonder if the stories with the animals are some metaphor for human beings and we see ourselves through their actions and learn some important lesson. 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 am 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 other 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 he 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 co-workers 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 their first two episodes this week, and I'm gonna play you episode one of their show right now. And then after the break, we have another story, not from zero, but a story that we made, about animals and what we expect of them. From WBZ Chicago, it's this American life, Amara Glass. Danielle Alarcon, the novelist and journalist and host of Radio Ambilante, is the host of 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 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.

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 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 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. Well obviously my purpose in life at that time, it was Keiko and Keiko only. That's Renata Fernandez, who worked with Keiko at Reino Aventura. Before having kids, he was my kid. He was my baby. 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, and it was the best seven years of my life. 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. 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 Vrichi and they would just play non-stop. And between shows he would just have Vrichi 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 Reino 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 then get on top of the 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's 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 this 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.

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 Reino Aventura. It seems like pretty much every kid in Mexico knew him. He was beloved, a kind of national mascot. 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 assumed 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 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, 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. He even starred in a telenovela as himself. And then there were the shows, when visitors got to see their beloved pet up close. Reynaventura 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 3,000 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, obviously. 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, Reydo 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.

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 forties, you've probably seen the movie, but if not, or it's been a minute, here's a quick refresher. Lauren Schuller Donner, one of the producers told me the movie. But if not, or it's been a minute, here's a quick refresher. Lauren Shuler 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 feeny 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 you kinds of obstacles, he does. 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 Reyna Aventura, 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 have

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 Reynauventura 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. 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 Reynauventura 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 and 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 Caico's subpar living conditions and health began spreading. who saw the movie Free Willy this summer. The whale that starred in the movie is sick and may 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, Reynauventura 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, Reino Aventura's director, Oster 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 too. 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. Danielle Alocron. That's after the break, when our program continues. 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 Thru Line, the history podcast from NPR. It's American Life. We pick up the story of Keiko where we left off. Here's Danielle Alocone.

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 sight. The US Navy would use orcapods for target practice. All told it's estimated that some 3 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 seventies. 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 were other people there that were a lot more experienced than I was. I was, I was more likely to be out there with hiking boots and long hair and, and, 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 words Save the Whales. The slogan itself becoming so ubiquitous it was almost cliché, 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, this is Dick Donner calling from Hollywood. Like what is and, and, 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 Schuller 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, hey, what's that you eating, dad? My tuna fish sandwich. Tuna? Daddy, you can't eat tuna. I can't eat what? No, you can't eat tuna. I can't eat what?

No, that kill Flipper. We're boycotting tuna honey because they kill the dolphins and get caught in the nets. Only Albuquerque. 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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. He said you you've got to you've got to get involved

and 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 that 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, and print it 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 8 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 a hundred 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 at 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, it was very, very, uh, poor facility.

I almost started crying really to tell you the truth. I was just hit by it saying, this is just, this, this, 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 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, but also get stronger, healthier, put on weight. And there was no way he could do that in his current tank at Reino Aventura.

And where are we supposed to bring him? We're not bringing him into like, we couldn't bring him into the captive facilities. 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 a 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, too, 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 whale's 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. 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. 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? 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 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 on the while I was 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. It's just, I don't,

you know, we're not used to things with six figures behind it. I can 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, 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? 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.

What if Keiko, the individual, could become Keiko, the symbol? What if you could use Keiko to tell a story about the ocean itself? Dave Kempner 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. 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 he 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 Kaco Foundation. The U.S. Humane Society chipped in a million dollars. Dave secured a couple million more from a billionaire cell phone magnet. Warner Bros. also agreed to put in two million dollars, 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 Reynauventura. But it turned out that Oscar Porter, the director of Reino 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 Reino 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 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. 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. Wow. 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 U S that Keiko was being saved from a terrible life in

Mexico. Do you feel like there was an element of like, Mexico, you know how things are down there? Of course. Yeah. Oh, of course. She's like, yeah, we have to always 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,

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 loved that. We did the best we could. We hired the best people. 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 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. So we were like 30 people in this place, in the delphinarium, 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

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 Land or any other aquarium in the world. If you tell this to a veterinarian from these huge aquariums, they would tell you that that's not a good idea because the animal gets stressed. I don't know what would they say, but he was so happy. On January 6, 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 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. 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. 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 might put on a baby to protect from diaper rash. You need his skin to be protected. So we were rubbing hard, like thick, thick cream on all over his body. And we would be talking to him the whole time, the whole time. But I was like just thinking about him and how nervous he was getting. So he started, you know, like crying a little bit because he was nervous and everybody was so nervous.

And you can transfer that to Keiko, obviously. So there are, you know, moments where you just hope 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 Reino 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, que se quede, que se quede, he should stay, he should 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 Colondrinas. 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. We would see all these people on the street with signs. I just want to cry, just 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 okay. But it was for Mexicans to say goodbye to the only, obviously,

orca that they would ever have. 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. Renata and Dave fly alongside in another aircraft, close enough to see Keiko's plane from their window. Keiko no longer belonged to Reno Aventura, 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. Dave It's kind of funny because it was part 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 Willie 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. Danielle Elikon, 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 and 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. Daniela also did a Spanish language version of episode one that you can hear on Radio Ambulante. 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 on Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

This is American Life, Myra Glass. Today's program, the truly incredible story of Keiko, the killer whale. We have arrived at act two of our program, act two, America's Next Top Gobble. So thinking about what kind of story we'd go with Keiko today, we found this one, also about our dominion of our program, Act 2, America's Next Top Gobble. So thinking about what kind of story we get 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 Wu 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?

Yeah, you can. Oh, here they are! Yeah. They are turkeys. Not just any turkeys. Yeah, so 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. The person showing me around today is John Zimmerman, who's raising these birds, with help of his shy 9-year-old son, Grant. Yeah, Grant, this is Diane. Say hi.

Hello. Hi. To decide which turkeys might get to the White House, John is basically selecting for the ones that act least like a turkey. He needs two that can stand politely on a special stage while voices boom out over loud speakers. All in front of hundreds of people. School children, photographers, military band. Most commercial turkeys would freak out in this noisy, unfamiliar, unvarn-like environment.

Well, I mean, turkeys are a prey animal. 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 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 pardonings, trying to anticipate everything that can go wrong. The birds that don't get taken to the White House get put back in with irregular 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? We've got 29 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 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 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 gonna go. Apparently female turkeys share the same problem as female women in this country, in 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 peacock's. 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 snooze energy. He's very dark red on his neck. He's the picturesque Thanksgiving bird right there. How do you read his like energy? Like is he like feeling aggressive?

Is he feeling calm? A lot of it's physiologically looking for a mate. So he's... We both glance at the nine year old. Are you recording right now? I mean, he's horny. I mean, that's, yeah, they're males. They're looking for a mate.

They're trying to be the big guy on 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 corrects his dad. Power 96 radio, he's saying. Alexa, off. They don't like the station. They don't know what I'm doing. Alexa off! Alexa play Power 96 radio! 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 culling 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.

I see three good choices right there. Three nice tails. Right here in the front? Oh, wow. 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 turkeys 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 longest. 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. So their range is like? Seven seconds, but then there's a couple. Two minutes. Could you do like a little demo of that? Try. 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. Okay, and you set it down.

And now the hope would be that he would just... Stand and do nothing. Just, hi 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 medal 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 them used to interacting with adults because he's a nine year old boy and that's not

their favorite thing to do always. So have you been practicing at all, Grant, for the White House ceremony or thinking about how that'll 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 to you. Yeah.

Are you like that that you think? Mm-hmm. 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 gonna 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. ["The Trap"] Diane Wu is one of the producers of our show. The program is produced today by Sean Cole. People put together today's show include Fia Benin, Jendayi Banz, Michael Kamate, Henry

Larson, Miki Mi, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Ryan Rummary, Lily Sullivan, Francis Swanson, Christopher Sertala, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editors, David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor, is Emanuel Barry. Special thanks to Jessica Lassenhop, Michael Krom, Peter Gruhl, Marissa Erasmus, and Jason Fields. The serial's new series about Keiko, the Good Whale, was co-reported by Danielle Alacon

and Katie Mingle, produced by Katie and Alyssa Shipp. 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 Golondrinas 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 Ndei Chubu, Mac Miller, Liz Davis Morer, Susan Westling, Alamin Sumar, and Simone Prokis.

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 life partners. The link is also in the show notes of this episode.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tory Malatia. You know, he knows his name, pops up in my cell phone every time he calls. But still, he opens every single conversation the same way, every single time. Is this Dick Donner calling from Hollywood? All right, Glass. Back next week with more stories 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.