6/8/09
by Kathy Fletcher

With their large brains and highly evolved society, maybe Puget Sound’s orcas spend some of their time discussing the many changes we humans have brought to their world. If they are aware that humans have designated June as Orca Month, perhaps they also realize that we people are locked in a struggle over the life and death of Puget Sound. Perhaps they have a sense of irony about all the talk about pollution and salmon while precious little seems to be improving for them. Or perhaps they have no explanation for their reduced circumstances. Are they even conscious of how close they are to extinction?

My husband and I have a running joke about how every month or so there is a news article about a new scientific study concluding that animals are intelligent. “News flash!” one of us will call out when we run across an article announcing that dogs can plan, or that apes feel empathy. As dog and cat owners, or should we say dog and cat house-mates, we could have saved somebody a lot of research money!

Even if the orcas survive and thrive because we finally get our act together to save the Sound, we may never know that much more about what they think and know. My musings may be idle conjecture. But let me make a modest suggestion. If empathy means the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes (or perhaps paws or flippers), let’s at least consider how our actions affect the critters whose fate—through no fault of theirs—we hold in our hands.

See you at Orca Sing!

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6/9/09
Howard Garrett writes:

I enjoyed your blog this morning and put it on our news page. I can call anything news that sounds like a conversation starter.

There doesn't seem to be a place to post comments, but if there was I would say that you moved the conversation along with mention of orcas' big brains and highly evolved society, but that only scratches the surface. I've been speaking to non-responsive crowds for many years to make the case that there is a far more precise and scientifically credible way to describe the mental and social life of orcas. It's true that "we may never know that much more about what they think and know." but if we apply the sciences that have looked into the processes that produce human societies, I think we can find parallels that can inform us about how the orcas build theirs. One problem is that apparently nobody knows that there is such a science of how human societies are constructed, so it's impossible to extrapolate from that body of investigation that has a long academic history, to clarify how orcas build and maintain their social systems. You mention empathy as a way for us humans to begin to see the world through the eyes of an orca. Empathy is a key concept to understand either human or orca societies. To operate on a cultural level to the extent that both humans and orcas do (but not dogs and cats), a prerequisite is to make instantaneous assessments of the thoughts and knowledge of others, just to communicate in culturally-defined symbols. Chinook salmon and harbor seals have completely different meanings depending on whether you are a resident or a transient orca, and when they communicate with each other they have to know that the others share their meanings before they can coordinate their behavior.

I dont know if they are even conscious of how close they are to extinction,(probably) but to operate on the level of cultural abstraction that they demonstrate, they have to be aware of themselves and of their cultural identity, and presumably their own mortality, and that there are other orcas with totally different cultural identities, including different diets, vocalizations, etc. They have to have an acute awareness of "us and them."

These are issues that humans have grappled with for millennia, and overall not very successfully if the record of genocidal war and self-destructive environmental devastation is any measure of success. So maybe we could learn a thing or two by watching orcas through the lens of established sciences of human cultural foundations, to appreciate that they have met very similar fundamental challenges that humans are constantly facing, only they've had about 8-10 million years in marine ecosystems to work out their issues, whereas humans have had maybe a quarter million years in terrestrial environments. Not to say that orcas have it all figured out and have perfect social systems, but they can provide some examples of other ways of doing things, if we can see what they're doing and why.

I think there's fertile grounds for some interesting conversations there.

I hope you can come to the "Southern Resident Orcas Then and Now: What Have We Learned? on June 23, 6:30 PM at the Seattle Aquarium to celebrate Orca Awareness Month.

Howard Garrett
Orca Network
Greenbank WA 98253
360-678-3451
www.orcanetwork.org