An orca trainer died at SeaWorld yesterday. By all accounts she was a kind, devoted animal trainer who loved her work.

This isn’t funny, of course, and I don’t intend to make light of a tragedy. However, this is a good time to question the captivity of orcas. Tilikum, the orca in question, has killed twice before, and such deaths aren’t uncommon, according to Discovery News:

Even more disturbing, perhaps, is the fact that captive Orcas are regularly involved in the deaths of trainers. Tilikum himself, a 12,000 pound bull, killed his trainer at Sealand of the Pacific in 1991. The body of a homeless man was found draped across his back at SeaWorld in 1999.

I’m not going to footnote everything here, but personally, I believe well-run zoos are crucial for animal conservation and education. Yes, many animals live shorter, less healthy lives in captivity and, of course, zoos should do their best to ease the burden of a sedentary lifestyle. (Although, I wonder about lions, males in particular are nature’s primo loafers.) It appears to me that any well-run zoo would find ways to create challenging situations for their animals to alleviate boredom, whether it is wrapping a rat for the vultures to puzzle over before dinner or teaching primates pinochle (kidding, they cheat).

Animal rights activists may disagree, but zoos are an important part of animal conservation and not just a source of cheap entertainment. Certainly, as parents, Aly and I would have gone mad long ago without the Philly Zoo and the (much smaller scale) Elmwood Park Zoo nearby. They are entertaining, but also educational, and I know the money I spend there goes to caring for animals there and protecting them in the wild. Not every zoo can be expansive as San Diego’s, but well-run smaller zoos can manage healthy creatures. Without captive breeding, we would have lost many species (of course, those species saved are just a fraction of the extinction rate, but that’s part of what makes humans remarkable).

Caging aquatic creatures — much like caging birds — seems particularly cruel, given the nearly unlimited nature of the sea or sky. Truth is, most of the critters you see at the local aquarium aren’t great roamers, with exceptions, of course. I think you can make good arguments for the need of both aquariums and avaries.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think orcas, I think, are different, even more so than dolphins (which aren’t as cute and cuddly as we’d like to believe). They are apex predators accustomed to roaming large distances. Sure, you say, so are lions, which are often fond of eating people. And elephants, while not predatory, are often bigger, weight-wise and have been known to kill handlers too.

True, but lions and elephants aren’t expected to perform (in a legit zoo setting, of course). And caged orcas are a hot commodity.

The bottom line is that these animals are very lucrative, as are the relationships trainers establish with them for shows. A 2004 investigative report by Sally Kestin of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel revealed that SeaWorld paid $875,000 for an Orca in the mid-1990s. Though WDCS hasn’t been able to find any current numbers, Vail speculated that the whales likely now sell for “millions of dollars.”

Being a campaigns director for WDCS, Vail’s stance is that no whales should be kept in captivity. Of the 41 Orcas currently alive in captivity around the world, only 13 are wild. Still, captive breeding programs need new blood from wild populations to maintain genetic viability. Animals will continue to be harvested from the wild, simply because they are money makers.

And for the same reason, the position of SeaWorld trainer to a killer whale isn’t llikely to disappear any time soon, no matter how dangerous a job it is.

I dunno, even if you can say that they are not cruel, trained orca acts just seem…well…unnecessary…and I think we’ll look back on them like we do the old Atlantic City diving horse acts.