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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 Reno Aventura, or 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 just when they'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

orca's well into their 20s or 30s. And Keiko was deprived

with 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 the baby, ripped

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