Tilikum's deathFollowing Brancheau's death, Tilikum stayed at the park until he died in 2017 from a lung infection.
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Tilikum was sold to the United States' SeaWorld theme park chain for performance shows and breeding. The whale's semen was collected and used for artificial insemination to breed a number of captive orcas for SeaWorld's shows and also for its sister park, Loro Parque in Spain.
The Shamu Show was canceled today. Tilikum, the whale that yesterday killed a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, will not be put down, The Orlando Sentinel reports.
Shamu died that year at SeaWorld of pyometra (a uterine infection) and septicemia (blood poisoning). She was just 9 years old. In the wild, she could have lived to be older than 100.
Tilikum was estimated to be about 36 years old at the time of his death. He was brought to SeaWorld after Canada's Sealand of the Pacific closed in 1992. He had been at the amusement park ever since.
The only place killer whales ever kill and injure humans is here, in the confines of tanks like these. Tilikum became so interested in the novelty of Dawn's ponytail, SeaWorld would have us believe, that he scalped and killed her. The autopsy report points to some impulse rougher than curiosity.
Soon after, Tilikum was sold to SeaWorld. Eight years later, a man who had apparently sneaked into SeaWorld during the night was found dead on Tilikum's back. As the years passed, Tilikum was considered by many expert observers to have become increasingly depressed and unstable.
SeaWorld Orlando has always known that Tilikum, a 12,000-pound orca that killed trainer Dawn Brancheau on Wednesday, could be a particularly dangerous killer whale. SeaWorld trainers were forbidden from swimming with Tilikum, as they often did with the resort's seven other orcas.
SeaWorld apparently did not see it that way, and the killer whale shows have continued as before, only now the trainers do not perform any water work with the orcas. This of course saves trainers from being attacked but does nothing to relieve orcas from the frustrations and anxieties of incarceration.