847: The Truly Incredible Story of Keiko the Killer Whale

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Keiko was a hugely beloved adventure park attraction. He was also captured in the wild and taken away from his mother when he was just a calf. When Hollywood learned about him, a colossal effort began to un-tame him and send him back to the ocean.

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Prologue: Ira introduces a new series from Serial Productions and The New York Times. "The Good Whale" is about the killer whale Keiko and is reported by Daniel Alarcón. (2 minutes)
Act One: Daniel Alarcón takes us back to the early 90’s when Keiko lived in an adventure park in Mexico City, swimming with human friends. (43 minutes)
Act Two: Producer Diane Wu travels to Minnesota, where the turkey set to be pardoned by The President of the United States later this month is having the turkiness trained out of him. (10 minutes)

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0:00.0	I don't know about you, but you know what I think would feel great today?
0:05.3	An animal story.
0:07.3	And I'm one of the stories where the animals are some metaphor for human beings, and we see
0:11.8	ourselves through their actions and learn some important lesson.
0:14.3	No, no, no, no.
0:15.1	I'm talking about an old-fashioned animal story, where you hear about some amazing creature
0:19.4	in some surprising situation and that creature
0:22.1	then does things that have such personality and seem so specifically them, you know, it just
0:26.2	gets to you.
0:28.3	I am pleased to say we have a story like that for you today.
0:31.7	And the creature is not a dog or a cat or a bunny or horse or any other lovable creatures you usually find in this kind of story.
0:40.9	It's an orca, a killer whale,
0:44.4	that we humans captured from the wild,
0:46.6	took from his mother and trained to be completely tame
0:49.0	and live alongside us.
0:51.9	His killer whale was so tame that at night,
0:56.0	when his trainers went home and he was all alone, he would watch TV from inside his tank.
1:00.0	He liked old Andy Griffith reruns and action movies.
1:04.0	And that continued for years, until one day, we got the idea that maybe this killer whale didn't need to continue as a giant
1:12.1	domesticated pet. Maybe it would be possible for him to lead a very different life in the wild
1:19.0	again. Today's story comes from our co-workers at Serial. They, of course, have done so many
1:25.6	remarkable series that have changed everybody's expectations of what you can do in a podcast. I have been sitting in on read-throughs of drafts
	...

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