The Wide, Wide Ocean

Where the wild things should be

Yesterday, I happened upon a New York Times story about beluga whales in a Ukrainian aquarium. The war is bearing down on the city; the aquarium was running out of food for its wards, and was short on fuel needed to keep the belugas’ tanks cooled to the necessary chilly temperature. The animals were in grave danger, and the story reported on the extraordinary effort to remove them from Kharkiv and relocate them somewhere safer. My heart stuttered a bit reading the account of the relocation; you can imagine that moving several whales—during wartime, no less—is an effort of threading-the-needle delicacy.

Photo by Mendar Bouchali on Unsplash

They got moved successfully. The story has a happy ending, sort of. My reaction? What the hell are beluga whales doing in Ukraine to begin with? What are they doing anywhere other than in the ocean? Haven’t we settled this already, that whales and dolphins should not be held in captivity? And yet there are still 3,500 of them in aquariums worldwide. I could launch into my entire wild-animals-in-captivity monologue here; I will save that for another time, but I bet you can guess where I land in that argument.

I’m not a rigid, absolutist, animal rights partisan. It’s a complicated subject, perhaps too complicated to be neatly resolved. But the whale and dolphin portion is easy. One of the most moving pieces I ever worked on was the story of Keiko, the whale who played Willy in Free Willy. He had been captured as a baby and spent his early years in a overheated tub at a Mexico City aquarium. After his star turn in the film, he was moved to a better aquarium and then to a pen in the ocean in Iceland. Everyone wanted him to relearn his wild ways and join a pod of fellow orcas, but by then Keiko was so accustomed to human contact and frozen shrimp dinners that he lingered in Iceland, like a clingy puppy. He went on a few walkabouts, but never stayed away for long. The last time he left his keepers, he swam with a pod for a while and then resurfaced near a town dock in Norway, where he horsed around with local kids and begged for handouts. He returned to Iceland and died there, a pet but not a pet, not wild but not domesticated. He was a tragedy of our making.

Let’s not keep whales and dolphins in captivity.

SHOW NOTES

—On a much more upbeat note, I got a message the other day from a nice person who works for Great Jones, the very cool cookware company. She has been reading Wordy Bird and sent me one of their Dutch babies as a treat, and it is so very charming. Here it is in my house. This serves as both cookware porn and house porn, and a tiny bit of dog porn, since my dog Ivy poked her head in just a bit:

—I’ve just started Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History and so far, it’s great.

—I’m still savoring the aftermath of The Safekeep — what a brilliant book!

—I loved A Strange Loop.

—One of you asked for more book suggestions. I ran a Literati book club for a year (sadly, they no longer are doing adult book clubs) and I put together a great list for my group. Here it is:

Night Boat to Tangier — Kevin Barry

The Death of Vishnu — Manil Suri

We Germans — Alexander Starritt

There There — Tommy Orange

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — Ron Hansen

Buddha in the Attic — Julie Otsuka

In the Dream House — Carmen Maria Machado

Department of Speculation — Jenny Offill

Let the Great World Spin — Colum McCann

Life After Life — Kate Atkinson

City of Thieves — David Benioff

Salvage the Bones — Jesmyn Ward

The Association of Small Bombs — Karan Mahajan

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World — Elif Shafak