Border Wars: A Border Collie Blog

Posted: 26 Feb 2010 03:01 PM PST

Disclaimer: This post is not for the faint of heart, the prude, or those who have but a small reservoir of hope left for humanity. Rated NC-17 for discussion of perverse sexual behavior.

I could have gone with “Serial Killer Whale,” but the death of a trainer isn’t the worst take-away from the latest Orca incident: the depth of human perversion is. Others analysts have funneled the splashy news event into discussions of how these animals are trained or the conditions of their captivity, often suggesting or battling the idea of abuse. Are Orca’s really the premier example of a positive-only training approach? Is it even ethical to keep them in captivity? Will this just make them more popular?

But what caught my attention is that this is the third time Tilikum has been implicated in the death of a human: two trainers and a midnight trespasser. Well that last one intrigued me: what sort of weirdo [pictured at left] would be literally caught dead with an Orca in the middle of the night? After a little research it gets worse, the stiff was found naked, on top of the whale. Now there’s really no innocent way to write this story given the multiple levels of intentional illegal and inane decisions “victim” #2 had to make to remove himself from the breeding pool. One doesn’t just walk into Mordor, nor does one find himself sans-clothing in a Killer Whale tank after-hours in an amusement park.

That level of determination requires a very powerful desire, and among the candidate emotions {curiosity, reverence, empathy, lust} only perverse sexual desire is strong enough to find you dead in a tank in the dark in your birthday suit. All the other options could be expressed in public, in the light of day, in socially acceptable ways, with no risk and the benefit of clothing.

I wish my analysis were wrong so I’d never have to write this post and my investigation into Victim #2 could have ended with hapless accident. But no, not only wasn’t this some innocent mishap, Victim #2’s family decided to sue Sea World for marketing Killer Wales as sexual objects.

09-21-1999
Killer Lawsuit Filed

ORLANDO , Fla. – The parents of a man found naked and dead on the back of a killer whale at SeaWorld Orlando are suing the marine park, alleging the dangerous orca was portrayed as a huggable stuffed toy, a lawyer for the family said Monday.

Patricia and Michael Dukes of Columbia, S.C., filed suit Sept. 10 in Orange County Circuit Court seeking several million dollars for pain and suffering at the loss of their only son, Daniel, 27, a drifter who drowned in July in a whale tank at the Florida theme park.

Attorney Patricia Sigman said SeaWorld is legally liable because it portrayed the killer whale as human loving.

SeaWorld general manager Vic Abbey said the park would vigorously fight the lawsuit.

Twenty-seven year old men don’t play with huggable stuffed toys alone in the dark without clothing. Those toys are generally silicone and require lubrication. If Daniel Dukes had only consulted the internet before he decided to rape an Orca in the blow hole as his final act, he would have found a ready supply of like-minded zoophiliacs willing to supply him with silicon Orca genitalia [pictured at left]. Not to miss the opportunity to make a buck off of a “tragedy,” those same wackjobs have put said sex toys on sale today to take advantage of the growing interest in Orcas that is most certainly going to follow in the wake of this non-tragedy.

Although the Dukes were represented by an attorney who now proclaims herself among the “elite” of Florida ambulance chasers, the lovely couple who gave the world Daniel finally realized that they were not, in fact, entitled to millions of dollars because Sea World failed to post signage saying “DO NOT RAPE THE ORCAS, Please. Thanks.”

Killer Whale Lawsuit Dropped
Reprinted from the Houston Chronicle

Tuesday, October 5, 1999
Orlando, Florida

The parents of a man found naked and dead on the back of a killer whale at Sea World Orlando have dropped a lawsuit alleging Sea World caused their son’s death by portraying the dangerous orca whale as safe and huggable.

“They voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit,” Sea World executive vice president and general manager Vic Abbey said. “This was a very tragic accident that occurred, but as we’ve said all along we felt the lawsuit had no merit.”

Patricia and Michael Dukes of Columbia, South Carolina, had filed suit on September 10 seeking several million dollars for pain and suffering at the loss of their only son, Daniel, 27, a drifter who was found drowned to death in July in the whale tank. Heavy intoxication apparently contributed to this untimely event.

What, you say? Such a handsome young fellow couldn’t have wanted to rape the male Orca. Surely he was just drunk and mistook the tank for a hot tub. Well, anyone who’s been to college can tell you that 99% of sexual encounters start with alcohol and that “tub hopping” never involves breaking and entering into a guarded amusement park to get access to freezing tanks where giant animals defecate. Sure, some of the faculty hot tubs are pretty nasty, but a little jock itch fungus is about the most lethal thing you’ll find at the end of your junk after an ill advised dip.

You see, this wasn’t the first time Daniel Dukes broke into a well secured property, removed his clothing and got into bed with an unreceptive millionaire alpha male who could kill him.

The killer whale that apparently killed a trainer today in front of a horrified SeaWorld audience was also connected to the death in 1999 of a drifter so obsessed with Ultima Online that he once wandered into Richard Garriott’s [author of the game] home.

Daniel Dukes, 27, the son of Columbia, S.C., real estate brokers, drifted into Austin, Texas in the late 90s, compiling an impressive arrest record.

The Austin America-Statesman reported at the time that the crimes included “stealing a Barbie doll, briefcase and women’s camisole from a Target store; clocking a fellow patron in the head at Joe’s Generic Blues Bar; and breaking into a home where he was discovered resting in a downstairs bedroom.”

But the crime that finally pushed him out of the city and towards his eventual death in Florida, was the strangest of all.

During an interview years ago, Garriott, creator of popular computer role-playing game Ultima, told me that it was Dukes who broke into his castle-like home in Austin in the late 90s. It’s a story he tells with the ease of someone one who’s told and retold the tale countless times.

Garriott says that the man, who he described as an obsessed Ultima fan, slipped into his fenced property, smashed out a glass door with a rock and headed to the stairs to his bedroom. Frightened, Garriott says he pulled out a gun and told the man to stop. When Dukes didn’t, he fired off a warning shot leaving a bullet hole in the wall.

Ignoring the shot, the man walked up to Garriott’s bedroom, stripped and got into bed. That’s where police found him when they responded to Garriott’s 911 call.

Their claim of SeaWorld’s implied invitation to rape an Orca wasn’t the most preposterous thing about the Dukes’ claim… the notion that they were suffering from Daniel’s loss was. This young adult was strange, estranged, and had a record of troubling behavior that his family should have realized would lead to his death and possibly the death of others. Orcagate was just the last in a long line of embarrassments that these parents unleashed on the world, and yet they truly felt that SeaWorld owed THEM money. Amazing.

In digging for the truth in this story, not only did I find that the most sensational and troubling aspect of this story–that Tilikum was likely sexually assaulted–had been hushed up, but that emotional and sexual objectification of animals like Tilikum is alive and well on the internet. Daniel Dukes might have missed out on the Orca dildo, but instructions on how to seduce and rape your Cetacean of choice have been proudly published on the internet for more than ten years by a “Liberated Christian” website called the Sexwork Cyber Resource Center whose goal is to “support sexwork as a legitimate profession.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Now, it’s probably not a huge shock that if you combine a random verb with a random noun, there’s probably someone out there with a sexual fetish combining the two. The internet term for this phenomenon is called “Rule 34” which states: “pornography or sexually related material exists for any conceivable subject.” Apparently getting eaten alive by an Orca is one example of this fetish and there are plenty of artists out there willing to provide content. If you want to be horrified, google “Orca Vore.” For those like me who had never heard of “vore” before, it’s defined:

“Vorarephilia (shortened to vore) is a sexual fetish and paraphilia where arousal occurs from the idea of being eaten or watching someone or something eating someone or something else. The fantasy may involve the person being swallowed alive, and may or may not include digestion.”

And sadly, this is only a small part of the sexualization of animals, in specific Cetaceans, that permeates our popular culture. It isn’t just confined to fringe underground groups with unresolved issues from their childhoods, the treatment of whales and dolphins as sexual objects is rather mainstream. And no, not just in the double entendre of “Free Willy.”

We have reports of suicidal dolphins who attempt to rape divers in England.

We have articles and documentaries which detail young male dolphin gangs kidnapping and raping hapless dolphin females.

We have numerous videos of Dolphins being trained to mock-rape humans for laughs:

**
**
**

An episode of King of the Hill features Hank being sexually assaulted by a dolphin:

“Return to La Grunta”
February 23, 1999
Luanne convinces Hank to swim with a dolphin in a local country club pool, but his pride takes a plunge when the mammal tries to seduce him.

Yesterday as I used Google Fast Flip to view the most popular articles of the day, the top story was a repost of a three year old story asking if Orcas can be gay!

Even when Cetacean advocates are trying to document the institutionalized abuse of these animals from their capture at sea through to their dubious repatriations, there exists questionable sexual undertones to their choice of titles:

From “Lolita, Slave to Entertainment”

If you were shocked at SeaWorld’s press conference advertisement today where their director said that absolutely nothing was going to change at their facility in response to this latest incident, I’ll give you one hint at the reason: Orca sexuality. That’s right. Besides being a rather small part of the “Dine with Shamu” shows at Sea World–a bit part (splashing the audience with his tail) that could easily be filled by one of the smaller less aggressive females–Tilikum makes big bucks by being “milked” by his trainers. With less than 50 Orcas in captivity and a huge market for baby Shamus, Tilikum’s seed is the reason he’ll likely never be returned to the wild or put down.

We can dance around this issue all we want, claim that it’s animal husbandry and not sexual, that Daniel Dukes has nothing in common with the trainer in the picture who has been “training Tilikum for artificial insemination” since 1999, that it’s conservation not exploitation, or we can wake up and ask if what we are doing to these animals in the light of day is as questionable as what has been done to them under the cover of darkness.

P.S. Whoever spent $165.00 for 12-inch replica Orca wang most certainly did not get an authentic experience.