Meet Corky. She has endured the longest captivity of any wild-captured orca.
She has spent the last 45 years in a concrete tank.
She is reportedly blind in her left eye, and her upper and lower teeth are worn and decayed.
She was a youngster learning how to be a grown-up orca. She lived with her family in the waters off British Columbia. One minute she was swimming next to her mother—and the next, she was trapped in a net.
© Terrell C. Newby, Ph.D.She would never see her mother again.
Corky has been forced to endure seven pregnancies (she was continuously pregnant for almost 10 years from 1977 to 1986), and none of her calves survived more than 46 days. Her last stillborn fetus was found at the bottom of her holding tank.
And she is confined to a tank smaller than an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Of the 13 members of her pod who were captured in 1968 and 1969, she is the only one left alive.
But she could spend her senior years in an ocean sanctuary where she belongs.
Urge SeaWorld to abandon its dead business model and put its resources toward the development of safe ocean havens for marine life.
