Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity by David Kirby
★ ★ 

One night I was sitting on my couch and trying to find something to watch on Netflix. I had heard a lot about this documentary called Blackfish so I thought I’d give it a try. Now, as a kid I LOVED Free Willy so it was understandably a little hard for me to watch the movie and see how harmful SeaWorld actually was to their whales. It was also very eye-opening to be reminded that the whales weren’t performers or animatronic showstoppers. With all the tricks that you see performed in front of you, it can be all too easy to forget that these are really animals and therefore they’re uncontrollable and unpredictable. Watching the footage of the different whale incidences made me go on to Wikipedia to find out more about Dawn and more about the other dangerous attacks that had happened prior. I was shocked to find that Wikipedia actually had a list of different whale attacks and even listed the number of incidences for each whale, including Tilly. If this had happened so often, why hadn’t I heard about it? So I went onto Google and tried to find more information. That’s how I found Death at SeaWorld.

This book was well-researched and provided many more eye-opening looks into the many incidences that have happened in the parks. It makes you question why, if there are so many attacks or problems in the parks, why we haven’t heard more about them. It helps to open eyes to see how corrupt a company SeaWorld is. Now, don’t get me wrong. The book is very obviously biased. It does its best to represent SeaWorld fairly at first but with Dr. Naomi’s (from the Humane Society) story taking up such a large part of the second half of the book, the bias quickly sets in. The book also goes into FAR too much detail about various people’s childhoods and college experiences to show you how they got into their line of work. The amount of detail is wholly unnecessary and could have been summarized better to provide the same effect. It was a very educating book but, with a bit of editing it could have remained a consistently interesting book as well. Instead, this book has amazing moments where you can’t put it down and then pages where it’s all you can do not to skim to get to the good stuff again.