Our story begins in the early 90s with an orca named Keiko.

He's just entering his teenage years, living at an amusement park in Mexico City called Reino

Adventure Kingdom. He's not from there, but for the last seven years, a tank in this polluted,

landlocked megacity more than 7,000 feet above sea level, has been his home.

Before that, it was a marine park in Canada, where he was bullied by the other orcas.

Before that, it was a tank in a big, concrete building in Iceland, where he was kept for about three years unable to see the sky.

And even before that, it was North Atlantic, where he was captured and

separated from his mom and the rest of his whale pod, probably when he was around too.

I don't think I really understood how traumatic this could have been until I learned that male

killer whales are essentially mama's boys, and not just when they're young, but basically their

entire lives. Even as adults, they might swim by their're young, but basically their entire lives.

Even as adults, they might swim by their mother's side. They depend on her. A mother orca might catch a fish, bite it in two, and give half to her son. This kind of closeness is documented in

male or corkas well into their 20s or 30s. And Keiko was deprived of the chance to have that.

At age two, Keiko would probably still have been swimming in his mother's slipstream,

still mastering the language of his pod.

He wouldn't have yet learned how to hunt on his own.

Despite weighing more than a thousand pounds,

in developmental terms,

Keiko would have been just a baby,

ripped from his mother,

from everything he'd ever known,

and from a life that may have

...