This Friday, February 9, marks the 30th anniversary of the transfer of the orca Ulisses from the Barcelona Zoo to the SeaWorld theme park in San Diego. This cetacean arrived in the Catalan capital in 1983 and became a real attraction for tourists, sharing the spotlight with the famous albino gorilla Snowflake, now deceased. However, 11 years later, in 1994, the enclosure where he lived was too small for this animal weighing more than four tons and Ulisses ended up being transferred to the American city.
On February 1, 1994, Ulisses starred in his last performance in Barcelona, and a few days later, on February 9, the transfer took place. The operation was complex: Ulisses was transported by plane, in a Jumbo 747 Freighter, and landed after almost twelve hours of flight in what was going to be his new home. The animal was moved dry, and Albert López, who had been his keeper and trainer at the Barcelona Zoo, supervised the operation and stayed in San Diego until he made sure the animal was integrated into his new home. . But what has become of Ulisses during all these years?
Ulisses continued to perform at the California theme park for many years, but is now retired from circus performances. At 48 years old, she is a long-lived orca - in the wild, these cetaceans reach 80 years, but their life expectancy is reduced by half when they are in captivity - and weighs more than 4,500 kilograms. He is the largest and longest-lived orca (Orcinus orca) of the seven in the park and has fathered several creatures.
Albert López, Ulisses' former caretaker, reunited with his old 'companion' in 2019 for the filming of the short documentary Ulisses, directed by Joan Bover. Twenty-five years after the transfer, López traveled to San Diego and took the opportunity to reflect on the captivity of animals in zoos and water parks. The documentary was nominated for the Goya Awards in 2022.
“When I saw Ulisses five years ago, it seemed to me that he was just as bad as he would be in any swimming pool,” López now admits to La Vanguardia. “He is still a captive animal, therefore, he is in very bad shape even though he is well cared for,” he adds.
The cetacean arrived at the Barcelona Zoo in 1983 from the Río Safari park (Tarragona) when it was barely 2 years old. "It is an animal that has been educated in freedom, with a family that it completely lost from the moment it was captured," says Albert López, "and it has spent almost its entire life in captivity, just as all its offspring will do and so many other animals in zoos and aquariums.”
After the documentary, Ulisses' former caretaker told RTVE his feeling after meeting the animal again: "My feeling was very sad: in 25 years I have had partners, children, jobs, a lot of experiences and Ulisses has continued to wander around." to a pool without stopping." López says that every time he thinks about the cetacean swimming in the same enclosure for its entire life without seeing or doing absolutely anything else, it produces "infinite sadness."
Trying to somehow settle a debt with the animals, Albert López stopped working at the zoo shortly after Ulisses' transfer in 1994. He gave up 30 years as a zoo professional to undertake activism against an activity for which he cannot find justification. “I realized that if you like animals, the last place you have to work is a zoo,” summarizes López, who remembers that he learned his lesson when he had to “‘murder’ a dingo.”
Since 2017, the Shamu Stadium at the SeaWorld theme park – named after Shamu, the first orca that lived in San Diego, in 1965 – no longer invites the public to watch these cetaceans perform pirouettes in shows. The complaints of animal defenders, amplified by the film Blackfish (2013), caused these exhibitions to be discredited in popular opinion for a time.
It is for this reason that a few years ago the SeaWorld company announced that it would end its shows with orcas to offer more "natural" experiences with these cetaceans. Now, the San Diego park offers an activity called Orca Encounter. This exhibition aims to reduce the pirouettes and show a more pedagogical content, explaining the behavior of orcas in nature: how they move, hunt, navigate, communicate... It even offers lunches at the edge of the pool in which the orcas swim.
For Albert López, this rethinking of shows with killer whales only represents a “whitening” of what continues to be a clear activity of “animal exploitation”, since the cetaceans that participate in it continue to live in captivity. Furthermore, according to this former caretaker, although it may be shocking, these exhibitions can be even worse for the animals: “From the orcas' point of view, the best thing that can happen to them is that they participate in shows because then, at least, they do something different during those 24 hours of the day,” he reflects.
“Without these shows, they spend 24 hours a day doing absolutely nothing,” López reflects. “Orcas are animals with very brutal cognitive abilities,” she points out, “now imagine yourself in a room 24 hours a day without having anything to do; “It is that not even the prisoners who are accused of rape and murder are subjected to this torture.”
These parks continue to welcome thousands of visitors each year, who come to see the animals up close. “The documentary Ulisses was recorded on a Tuesday in March, which wasn't even vacation time, and it was full, even though the ticket is very expensive!”, laments Albert López. For him, this is an example of the population's lack of awareness of the precariousness in which these animals live. “And in other countries the conditions are even worse, you couldn't even imagine it,” he points out.
Right now “it is totally impossible to do anything else with Ulisses other than live in captivity,” says Albert López. Returning Ulisses to the ocean would be an irresponsible act and a threat to his survival, as an animal that has lived most of its life in captivity could not survive in the ocean. “What they can do is stop reproducing these animals once and for all to breed new ones and extinguish zoos and aquariums.”
“Now they use Ulisses to be able to say that they have one of the oldest orcas born in the wild and inseminate other orcas to have new babies,” explains Albert López. Many zoos have stopped kidnapping new killer whales from the oceans, but they continue to reproduce the cetaceans they already have, so the cycle does not end and they continue to have new killer whales to fill the pools – and who will live their entire lives in them – and attract visitors year after year. For the former caretaker, “there is no possible justification for having animals in captivity.”
