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 Raino Aventura, or Adventure Kingdom. He's not from there, but for the last seven years, a tank in this polluted, landlocked mega city 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 in 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 mother's side, they depend on her. A mother orca might catch a fish, bite it into and give half to her son. This kind of closeness is documented in male orcas 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 been largely spent by her side.
So, of course, it's hard to talk about a pool in a Mexican amusement park as a substitute for any of that. But what I can say is that the people who work there, they truly sincerely love Keiko. They are, for all intents and purposes, his pod. Well, obviously, my purpose in life at that time, it was Keiko and Keiko only. That's Renata Fernandez, who worked with Keiko at Reyna Ventura.
Before having kids, he was my kid. He was my baby. He was... I mean, I had boyfriends back then, but they were not that important as K-Co. I had to break up with two boyfriends because I spent most of my time with him. I mean, it was... I worked there for seven years. It was the best seven years of my life.
Renata started at Renoventura when she was 20 years old. She chopped frozen fish, mopped the pool deck, and eventually worked her way up to be one of Keiko's trainers. Working with a killer whale had long been a dream of hers, and even now when she talks about Keiko, she sounds the way a mother might when reminiscing about her kid's childhood. She remembers all of Keiko's favorite games, his favorite toys, his favorite playmate,
His best friend was a dolphin named Vichy, and they would just play non-stop. And between shows, he would just have Vichy on top of him, just kind of like giving him a ride. If Keiko had his moods or played favorites, well, Renata says that was just part of who he was.
Keiko would choose who to play with. I mean, we had this very young girl. She was 16 or 17. And she would come into the water and it was like a magnet for Keiko. He would love her, love to be with her. And why? Nobody knows. I mean, it's just, you know, it's like chemistry.
In the off-season, when there were no weekday shows at Reyna Ventura, Renata and the other trainers swam and played with Keiko for hours. Most of the people who worked with Keiko were young, none older than 30, and they made Keiko the center of their lives. They fed him by hand, gave him belly rubs all the time. They even set up a special hose just for him. He loved to be sprayed. And as far as anyone could tell, Keiko genuinely seemed to like it.
We had this little boat and there was a rope tied to the front, like a long rope. But we would put it in the water and like three girls would get, you know, hopping it and he would pull us all over the pole and then he would pull it down.
just to make us fall from the boat and that was over and over and obviously we would laugh and then get on top of the little boat again. He would give us a ride again. So I mean he would have a blast.
There's nothing about that last sentence over Natas that could be fact checked, not a word. We don't know if Keiko was having a blast, we can't know. Maybe he was dragging the trainers around because he was bored, or because he loved these friendly people who fed him every day. Maybe what his humans interpreted as Keiko having fun was really just habit, or even defeat. Like, why not lift the people ride? They seem to like it.
We can't really know what animals are thinking, so we do our best with the information we have, making educated guesses about the inner lives of the creatures we love, and that's what the story is really about. An imperfect attempt to understand what might be best for an animal who can't speak for himself. The intention to make things right for him, to make things better.
Everything I'm gonna tell you in the next six episodes was set in motion by these good intentions. And by everything, I mean an unprecedented global campaign, a high-profile, high-stakes science experiment, and a debate about what exactly we humans owe the natural world.
At the center of it all is Keiko, who would become, almost by accident, a symbol for all whales, for the health of the oceans, for the very concept of wildness, but who was also an individual orca with a name and specific history and trauma and character.
A character with fears and limitations that no human could ever hope to interpret with any certainty, not that they wouldn't try. In fact, lots of well-intentioned people would claim they knew exactly what was best for this whale. And they would be arguing and fighting over those interpretations for years. From serial productions and The New York Times, this is The Good Whale. I'm Daniel Arcon.
It wasn't just Renata and the other trainers who loved Keiko, or even just the people in Mexico City who went to see Keiko at Renau Ventura. It seems like pretty much every kid in Mexico knew him. He was beloved, a kind of national mascot. He was like the pet Mexico's pet.
One person I spoke to compared him to a Mexican Mickey Mouse, and in fact, a lot of people assume that Keiko was Mexican, like actually from Mexico. They never considered that he could have come from anywhere else. He was just theirs. We talked to lots of people who grew up in Mexico City in the 80s and 90s.
And they said again and again that Keiko had an aura about him, that seeing him at Reynov and Duda was like hanging out with your 7,000 pound best friend, the killer whale you told your secrets to, what was happening at school, who your crush was, it was that kind of relationship. If you watched television in Mexico in the late 80s or early 90s, chances were that sooner or later you'd see Keiko. He was in Reynov and Duda commercials, of course. There were pop songs dedicated to him.
he even started in Attila Novella as himself.
And then there were the shows, when visitors got to see their beloved pet up close. Reynaventura doesn't exist anymore. Not under that name, anyway. It's since been acquired by Six Flags. But back in its heyday, in the early 90s, Keiko was the star attraction. And these shows, they were legendary. At the peak of his fame, there might have been 200 people lining up a couple of hours before the gates opened. A pair of clowns marched around, playing trumpets, entertaining Keiko's fans as they filed in.
On weekends, there were three shows a day, more than 3,000 seats, consistently packed. I had Renata walk me through one of the routines. First, it was the sea lions, then the dolphins, including Richie, and then... We would open the pen and cake or we'd come out jumping. So the people would just go crazy obviously. So that was the show and after that, all the trainers would come out, go greet people and take pictures with people.
There were so many people clamoring to see Keiko up close that his veterinarian told me they set up a kind of receiving line. He even compared the crowds to the believers who wait in line to see the Virgin of Guadalupe. That reverential, that devoted.
So that's Keiko, occasional TV star, quasi-saint, telepathic confidant, and best friend to countless Mexican children. And this was his life. Constant attention from his trainers, games with his favorite dolphin buddies, performances for thousands of adoring fans. But it was all about to change.
In 1992, Ray d'Oventura was set to close for some much needed renovations, which meant Keiko had some free time. Six months with no shows and no crowds. So, when a production company proposed to film a movie with Keiko, the Parks director, Oscar Porter, thought, what the hell, why not? It wasn't much money, but it might keep Keiko entertained. Once he said yes to the movie, Porter didn't give it much more thought.
He was busy overseeing all the details of the park's upgrades, the installation of new rides, new contracts with vendors, more than 600 employees. He told me he didn't even read the script. But that script is why we're telling this story. While you probably already know Keiko is, even if it's by a different name, the studio behind this proposal was the American movie powerhouse Warner Brothers. And Keiko was about to get the name you might know him by. Willie. Free Willie.
If you're my age, mid-40s, you've probably seen the movie. But if not, or it's been a minute, here's a quick refresher. Lauren Schuller Donner, one of the producers, told me the movie could be boiled down to this. Bad kid? Bad whale. The Bad Kid is a moody 12-year-old named Jesse. You're like a feeding kid, aren't you? I guess.
The bad whale is Willie, captured and separated from his pod, stuck in a small pool in a ramshackle aquarium. The park staff find him stubborn, hard to train. He has three black spots on the underside of his jaw, his dorsal fin droops to one side, a killer whale's version of an emo haircut. Jesse decides he has to save Willie's life, get him back to the ocean, back to his family, and somehow, against all kinds of obstacles, he does.
The movie poster is what most people remember. It's the image that was absorbed into the culture, a still from the film's climax. Willy in mid-flight against an orange sunset jumping over a breakwater, the ocean beckons. The boy stands just below Willy beneath an arc of sea spray, a triumphant arm pointing to the sky.
The tagline reads, how far would you go for a friend?
When it came to who would play Willy, it wasn't like Warner Bros. had a ton of killer whales to choose from. A producer on the film told us her team approached a few different marine parks, but people weren't excited about the message of the movie and wanted changes to the script. Finally, they landed on Renov and Tuda, who signed off, as we mentioned, without even reading it.
And Keiko, it turns out, was perfect for the part. See, for the film to work, the producers needed something very specific. A kind of sad looking whale, living in less than ideal conditions. They needed a whale kids would feel sorry for. A whale of children would want to save.
And the fact is, while Keiko might have been happy, he wasn't actually that healthy. He was a couple thousand pounds under weight. Not because he was underfed, but probably because the warm water affected his appetite. He had a skin rash too, something called papilloma virus, which looked bad, even though the veterinarian at Renov and Duda said it wasn't that serious. But most striking of all was his tank. It was small, disturbingly small. One of the film's producers joked it was smaller than some swimming pools in Beverly Hills.
The water he swam in wasn't even seawater, just fresh water was salt added. Renata says they checked the salt levels frequently and they weren't under any illusions that Keiko's living conditions were ideal. She told me Renata looked into building a larger pool but just couldn't make it work financially.
So strip away for a moment almost everything I've told you. Forget the love and the games and the trainers and the fans and see instead what the camera sees. Keiko, a smaller than average killer whale with a droopy dorsal fin swimming alone in a tiny shallow pool. He was exactly what the movie required.
Free Willy was released on July 16, 1993, and the reviews were positive, at least until journalists started asking what was up with the star of the movie, and news reports about Keiko's subpar living conditions and health began spreading.
The movie Free Willy has a great ending, but real life didn't treat the real star of the box office hit the way it treated Willy in the movie, not at all. News tonight that will surely upset all those children who saw the movie Free Willy this summer, the whale that starred in the movie is sick and they die unless his living conditions are improved. Soon enough, cake would gone from Mexico's beloved pet to Mexico's dying orca, and kids around the world were not happy.
I'm writing this letter to ask you to consider helping the killer whale, Keiko, in Mexico. We would like everybody to donate a dollar and we'd get lots of money so we can try to help save this whale. Here is this whale that people have made millions off of and now he's just sitting in this tank dying. I don't think Keiko deserves to die.
In Mexico, Reyna Mendura and the staff were suddenly having to defend themselves in ways they hadn't before, trying to convince crusading celebrities and animal rights activists that they did indeed care about Keiko's well-being. When Life Magazine published an article describing Keiko's tank as a cesspool, Reyna Mendura's director, Oscar Porter, sent a letter claiming the magazine had gotten it all wrong, that Keiko's water was, quote, clean and clear.
Back in Hollywood, Warner Bros. was getting hammered too. Bags and bags of mail from kids arrived at the offices, all demanding the same thing. Free willy. Or rather, free cake-o. And so, if the studio wanted to avoid a PR nightmare and not break the hearts of millions of children, then it was clear. Someone had to save it. In real life. That's after the break.
For centuries, we humans hunted and killed whales as if their numbers were infinite, and over time we got better and better at it, more efficient, more ruthless, extracting more value from each kill. We harvested their blubber, their organs, their bailing, their meat, and it was all transformed into everyday commercial products from makeup to heating oil. More than 700,000 whales were killed in the 1960s. Whaling was a huge global industry, with profits to match.
The killing of orcas was a little different, since they didn't have much to offer us commercially speaking. But, humans being humans, we killed them anyway. For fear, for sport, for bloodlust. Fishermen trawling for herring or salmon saw them as competitors, so they would shoot them on site. The US Navy would use orcapods for target practice. All told, it's estimated that some 3 million individual whales were killed by humans in the 20th century.
By the early 1970s, scientists understood that whales were far more scarce than we'd all previously thought, and began warning that the steep declines they were seeing in wild populations might be irreversible. In response, the Save the Whales movement was born, with the goal of ending commercial whaling worldwide, a bold, quixotic idea to convince the countries that still practice whaling to simply stop.
I'm telling you all this because in a way, everything that happens to Keiko a couple of decades later is a result of it, of this idea that these creatures were worth protecting. And it's also when this next significant person in Keiko's life enters the story, a guy by the name of Dave Phillips.
I was pretty young then. I was like two years out of college. It was the late 70s. The Save the Wales campaign was just starting to pick up steam and Dave wanted in. So he packed up his life, drove his turquoise Volkswagen rabbit out to California and soon joined the movement to do his part. I was green. There were other people there that were a lot more experienced than I was. I was more likely to be out there with hiking boots and lung hair and just getting dirty.
So yeah, he was kind of a hippie, but he was a hippie with a degree in biology who found he was too impatient to spend his adult life in a lab studying the minutiae of wildlife without doing anything to save it. Given the scale of the environmental crisis he saw, science moved too slowly for him.
The central message for the Save the Wales campaign was simple. Wales are not commodities, they're living beings. This message was everywhere. There were bumper stickers and t-shirts emblazoned with the words Save the Wales. The slogan itself becoming so ubiquitous it was almost cliche, played as a punchline. There were Save the Wales marches and rallies across the world and Dave was there for all of it.
Most importantly, he was there in 1982, a pivotal moment in his career, when the International Whaling Commission caved to the pressure and voted to impose a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling. They'd done it. They'd saved the whales from what many felt was their almost certain extinction.
So Dave learned two things. One, to succeed your message had to be everywhere. If your slogan becomes a joke, so be it. At least people are hearing the message. And two, whales are magic. It's that simple. They're just one of those species that people fall in love with.
A decade later, in the 90s, Dave's still in the environmental movement, still advocating for wild whales and attending meetings. And it's at one of these meetings in Glasgow when he gets a call. He's out to dinner with a few colleagues when somebody comes up to the table and says, Mr. Phillips here, we have a call for you.
Mr. Donner is calling and I'm like, oh my goodness, this is Dick Donner calling from Hollywood. Like what is and and there's Dick and he's like all in a flutter. I haven't introduced you to Dick Donner yet, but I did mention his wife Lauren Schuler Donner. Together they were a legit Hollywood power couple producing or directing blockbusters like The Goonies and Superman.
Dick has since passed away, but Lauren told me that they both were self-proclaimed animal lunatics. David actually worked with a couple before. They asked him to consult on a few lines of pro dolphin dialogue in the buddy cop movie Lethal Weapon 2. Hey, hey, what's that you eating, dad? All right, my tuna fish sandwich. Tuna! Daddy, you can't eat tuna. I can't eat tuna. Oh, thank you, Flipper. We're boycotting tuna honey because they kill the dolphins that get caught in the nets. Only albacorn.
It was small, barely a scene, but Dick felt good about it. And now he had something bigger in mind. Free Willy, a movie he and Lauren were putting together. And Dick wanted Dave's help. And he's like, you know, this movie is going to be big. He's like, it's going to be a great movie. And I'm doing this because I want to make a difference for Wales. And I want to know are you in?
The whaling band Dave had fought for all those years ago, protected whales from commercial slaughter. But some species were still captured or killed on a smaller scale. The way Dave saw it, Dick and Lauren were offering him an opportunity to finish the job he'd started all those years ago. A chance to save the rest of the whales.
Dave and the producers started with something simple, an 800 number that would pop up on the screen at the end of the movie credits. The idea was that people would call, leave their address, and Dave's organization, Earth Island Institute, would send them a packet of information about the plight of whales across the world, how they could help. The kit was like steps you can take, like go watch whales in the wild instead of going to watch them in captivity and put pressure on the International Whaling Commission to stop killing whales.
Nothing too elaborate. You called the number, you got a kit. But fast forward a year and once the movie was released and word got out that the star of free willy was sick and still living in a tiny pool in Mexico. Well, calling an 800 number and getting a kit just didn't feel like enough. Dave remembers Dick phoning him up again and saying, we're being crucified down here. You got to help us.
Now Dick was proposing something far more ambitious, something that honestly sounded a little nuts. He said, you've got to get involved in saving Keiko, rescuing Keiko from his life in captivity, and releasing him back into the ocean, like in the movie. Did you immediately say, like, this is something I can do? Or were you like, this man is crazy? I was like, I was just dizzying because I'm starting to think, wait, it's how does this even work?
What fans of the movie wanted was to see their favorite celebrity orca back in the ocean, but that wasn't so simple. First off, nothing quite this ambitious had ever been attempted. True, other Captain Marine mammals had been released to the wild, but they hadn't been in captivity nearly as long as Keiko.
So, saving Keiko would require an extraordinary effort. Dick Donner wanted Dave to do it, but this wasn't exactly Dave's specialty. His whole career had been focused on big, huge problems, protecting the ocean and saving wild whales plural.
What Dick was proposing in response to the public outcry around the movie was much narrower in scope, saving the whale, singular. Dave remembers telling Dick Donner essentially, thanks, but I'm not the right guy for this job. But it seems Dick wouldn't take no for an answer. He was like, nobody else can do this. You have to do this. You've got to do this. The kids are depending on it. Everybody is depending on it. You've got to do this. Will you try? And you know, there was something about this that resonated.
Think of it this way, if you're Dave or an environmentalist of his generation, crazy doesn't necessarily mean impossible. Just a few years before, in 1990, an estimated 200 million people took part in Earth Day celebrations, the most ever by far. This is the decade of the Earth's summit in Rio, the Kyoto Protocol, big coordinated global actions to combat climate change and environmental damage.
In 1985, scientists announced that they discovered a hole in the ozone layer, and by the 90s, an international treaty was in place to ban some of the chemicals thought to have created it. And it seemed to work. The ozone layer began to heal itself. Even I remember, and I was just a kid, those years were my childhood, a time I remember as fundamentally optimistic. We learned about separating our trash and school, reduce, reuse, recycle, and print it on the brain.
We learned about the Amazon and the dangers of climate change, which still felt so far away. We didn't despair because we thought we could still work together to save the planet, that if people just knew what was happening, we'd do the right thing, and that the right thing would be clear to all of us. That's the moment we're in, the moment Dave's in, and so sure, saving Keiko sounds a bit nutty. But maybe, if you've seen what he's seen, that sort of thing doesn't scare you.
So Dave said, OK, I'll check it out. I'll fly down to Mexico City and meet Keiko. He was, if not hopeful, intrigued until he got there and realized this is a terrible idea.
By the time Dave visited, Keiko was a teenager and had been living in Mexico City for about eight and a half years. Dave could see right away. This captive whale was nowhere near ready to live in the ocean. A wild orca can swim over 100 miles a day. Keiko was basically the aquatic equivalent of a couch potato. First time I ever went to Mexico to see Keiko, I was completely freaked out.
I was just, I was sitting up at the bleachers looking down at this whale in this tiny pool in Mexico City. And he didn't look good. He swam in very small circles and he could make it across his pool in just a matter of seconds. It was very, very bore facility.
I almost started crying really to tell you the truth. I was just hit by it saying this is just this this this just can't work. I asked Dave to take through the reasons Keiko was not an ideal candidate through wild and there were many before they could even think of releasing him back into the ocean. Keiko needed to get rid of his papilloma virus.
but also get stronger, healthier, put on weight. And there was no way he could do that in his current tank at Reyna Ventuda. And where are we supposed to bring him? We're not bringing him into like, we couldn't bring him into the captive facilities. I'm thinking, where are we going to go? We're not going to take him to some place where he's having to perform or be in a captive environment where they're making money off of these whales. We couldn't do that.
So we're gonna have to build a place. And that's just at step one. The bill for that alone would probably be millions of dollars. And then they'd have to spend years and millions more teaching him the most basic ocean survival skills and pray that some of those lessons took.
Keiko had lived in the care of humans and without his family since he was around two, missing out on years of life in a pod, years of company and hunting and language and what I can only think of as camaraderie, the kind of social environment that makes a killer whale a killer whale. He had millions of human fans but not a single orca friend. There were so many things he'd never learned. Not only did Keiko not know how to hunt for food, he didn't know how to eat live fish. Think about that.
If you put a live fish in his mouth, this killer whale wouldn't eat it. In language, Keiko had stopped making most of the sounds in a wild whale's repertoire years before. Pods have different dialects, and it was unlikely Keiko even remembered the dialect he spoke before his capture. This was crucially important to his survival. Orca's very rarely live alone in the open ocean, so if he was to make it out there, Dave knew Keiko would have to be integrated into a pod.
his original pod, preferably. But if he didn't speak their language, that was gonna be difficult.
And then there was a small detail that no one knew for certain which pod that might be or where to find them. Somewhere in the North Atlantic near Iceland, presumably. How are we going to get him back to Iceland? So whaling nation, are you kidding me? Well, we're going to go over to Iceland and convince them that we want to bring back this whale because the world wants to save him. Did you do like a back of the envelope, sort of like, what's this going to cost thing, like on the plane back?
Yeah, exactly. Before, even while I was down there and on the way back, I was like, I lined it out. I was way over $10 million. And I was like, at that point, I pretty much just stashed back in my pack saying, I don't know about this. We're not used to things with six figures behind it. I could see about like 10 impossible steps here.
So 10 impossible steps, at least. But let's be real. For Dave, it was also one giant opportunity. Up until this point, Dave had been thinking about Keiko the way everyone in the world was thinking about Keiko, as one individual killer whale in need of saving. But what if he allowed himself to see it differently?
He'd experienced firsthand the hold that Wales had over people that anti-wailing marches across the world. He'd seen the power that media campaigns could wield with the Save the Wales movement. This could be something much bigger. What if Keiko, the individual, could become Keiko, the symbol? What if you could use Keiko to tell a story about the ocean itself? You're talking about trying to protect all the oceans and that those are the big issues. Those are the big huge
unsolvable problems, global warming, et cetera. But they're so diffuse. People can't see acidification rising in the oceans. They can't see the coral reefs dying out most of the time. They're not seeing it. It's too broad to say the oceans are dying. There are no grab points. There are no things to manifest what's at risk.
Wales are one of the things that is just so otherworldly, so majestic, just incredibly amazingly intelligent, social, powerful. And that means something. It hits people in a different way than talking about the threats to the ocean ecosystems.
And then that's what got me over my own view that this is only one whale. It's like, yeah, he's one whale, but he's going to be the most famous or he could be the most famous whale in the world. And Dave knew you could do a lot with that kind of star power, with that kind of attention. So he set aside his doubts and decided that yes, as absurd as it sounded, he was all in.
Once they've committed to getting Keiko out of Mexico, the next step was logistics. And what I'm about to say is pretty obvious, but it's worth saying anyway. Moving on, Orca is not easy.
One of the first things Dave did was create a whole new organization, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. The US Humane Society chipped in a million dollars. Dave secured a couple million more from a billionaire cell phone magnet. Warner Brothers also agreed to put in two million dollars, which sounds like a lot, until you consider they made 150 million on Free Willy. And by this point, the sequel, Free Willy 2, was already in production.
Still, with that money, Dave was able to convince a small marine park in Oregon to let the foundation build them a new, much bigger pool just for Keiko. And so now, all Dave needed was the whale.
which you might assume would be the hard part, given that Keiko was the main attraction at Reyna Ventuda. But it turned out that Oscar Porter, the director of Reyna Ventuda, wasn't opposed to the idea of giving him up. He had a whole park to run, and managing his most famous attraction had become an all-consuming headache. There were journalists and activists to deal with, Mexican television stars and singers calling to arrange private swims with Keiko.
Porter told me he was spending three hours a day dealing with Keiko-related nonsense, which is a lot, sure, but most worrying of all was what some of the outside veterinarians were saying. But Keiko might die soon. Porter really didn't want that to happen at Reynov-Intura. So over the course of several months, Dave and Oscar Porter made a deal. Reynov-Intura agreed to donate Keiko to Dave's foundation for free. Today we are proud
to announce that we have reached agreement on a formal plan, a workable plan. In February 1995, it was announced to the world that Keiko would be leaving Reyna Avantura for his new temporary home at an aquarium on the Oregon coast in an enormous new tank with cold seawater. Dave laid out a vision for Keiko's future, invoking the plot to free Willy II, which would hit theaters a few months later. And in that film, Willy
is reunited with a mate and has a child and lives happily. This is our goal. We would love to see the situation in which Keiko could have a mate and could be able to eventually be released to the wild.
Rescue Rehab Release. That was Dave's ultimate plan, even if the last part seemed improbable at best.
For Keiko's trainer Renata and many of the staff that worked closely with Keiko, the decision to let him leave was heartbreaking, even if they knew it was the right one. Giving him up was a kind of noble, even maternal sacrifice. That's how Renata saw it, which of course didn't make it hurt any less. Goodbyes are like that, especially when you can't explain what the future holds. You feel guilty, like you're betraying a friend. And across Mexico, a lot of people were feeling this way. They wanted him to stay. They wished he could stay.
But letting him go was a sacrifice they were willing to make because they loved him and they wanted what was best for him. Which is why it was so offensive to Renata and many others I talked to to hear how the story was being told in the US that Keiko was being saved from a terrible life in Mexico. Do you feel like there was an element of like Mexico? You know how things are down there? Of course. Yeah.
Oh, of course. She's like, yeah, we have to always, you know, help the little brother because he does everything wrong. I'm not saying, I don't want to say that this is the best place for an animal, obviously. But I'm trying to say that when he was there, he got a lot of attention. I mean, he got all the attention.
We would all the time play and, you know, and he would love that. Absolutely love that. We did the best we could. We hired the best people. We wanted the best for Keiko and we donated Keiko without receiving nothing, not one cent in return.
A few days before Keiko was scheduled to leave Mexico, Doreenoventura staff threw him one last party, a kind of final spring break bash. Everyone was invited, current trainers, former staff, all of Keiko's friends, his extended human pod. So we were like 30 people in this place and in the definition, we made a big luncheon and we all got into the water.
And we all play with Keiko and there was a lot of crying and it was fun and Keiko was so happy and he would play with all of them. Wait a second. So you're telling me that like 30 people got in the pool with Keiko at the same time to play? Yes. Yeah. I mean, you would never get this in SeaWorld or Marina Lan or any other aquarium in the world.
If you tell these to a veterinarian from these, you know, huge aquariums, they would tell you that, I mean, that's not a good idea because he would, I mean, the animal gets tracer. I mean, I don't know what would they say, but, but he was so happy. He was so happy. On January 6th, 1996, it was time for Keiko to go. They decided to move him in the middle of the night for a few reasons, to avoid the heat and the traffic, but also the crowds that were sure to want to say their goodbyes.
Moving any object as big as a killer whale is an engineering problem, but when that object is a living thing, there's an added complication. Getting Keiko out of Reynov and Duda and onto a plane would depend in no small measure on the cooperation of Keiko himself, and that required training.
For months, they'd worked on it with him. First, he'd swim into a small, shallow pool and then into a custom-made sling, swimming in and out of it, weeks spent just getting comfortable with his process. He had to be comfortable because once he was in that sling, he'd stay wrapped in it for at least 14 hours. The challenge would be to keep him calm. He had to trust his humans, not fight or flail. Trust.
The night of the move, it's noisy and chaotic. I've seen the videos and it's just manic. It doesn't look like an aquarium or even an amusement park. It looks like a construction site.
All this movement and worrying of motors and beeps and shouting in lights. Renetha stayed close to Keiko, touching him, close to his eyes so he could see her. But when it was time for him to swim into the shallow pool where the sling awaited him, he refused and there was nothing they could do to persuade him. Finally, a dozen people in wetsuits encircled him with a net and pulled him into place.
In the shallow pool, Renata and the other trainer dried him off before applying moisturizer all over his body. Actually the same stuff you might put on a baby to protect from diaper rash.
you need his skin to be protected. So we were rubbing like thick, thick cream all over his body and we would be talking to him the whole time, the whole time. But I was just thinking about him and how nervous he was getting.
He started, you know, like crying a little bit because he was nervous and everybody was so nervous and you can transfer that to cake obviously. So there are moments where you just hope that he just relaxes.
Once Keiko was in the sling, it was attached to a crane that lifted him out of the pool and placed him in a shipping container filled with 3,000 pounds of fresh water ice. The container sat on the back of a tractor trailer, ready for the hour or so drive across the city to the airport. Once there, it would be loaded onto a giant cargo plane. David convinced UPS to deliver Keiko to Oregon for free.
When the caravan finally left, there were crowds, more than they'd expected. Ordinary people who loved this killer whale, whole families, children who dragged their parents out in the middle of the night to say goodbye, all gathered just outside the gates of the rainauventuda parking lot. So many that police had to move them just so the caravan could pass.
And they soon discovered it wasn't just at the gates that the crowds had gathered, it was everywhere. I've talked to a lot of people who were there that night, lining the streets desperate to say their farewells. One person told me the only thing he could compare it to was the time the Pope visited Mexico City. The route to the airport was supposed to be secret, but that's not how it worked out. Reporters kept the city abreast of the caravan's progress.
There were thousands of people lining the streets. Boys and their pajamas carrying handwritten signs and girls in pigtails carrying Mexican flags, teens shouting and calling Keko's name. You have to wonder if the whale could hear them chanting. He should stay. He should stay.
Then, somewhere along the slow, ponderous route to the airport, there was a mariachi band playing an old song about a loved one's goodbye, Las Colondrinas. Where can the tired swallow go, say the lyrics, tossed by the wind with nowhere to hide, remember my homeland, beloved pilgrim, and cry?
Cars and mopeds follow the procession, drivers waving, honking their horns. Honestly, it's a little bit mad. The emotion on people's face is the palpable sense of loss. Dave says some people had to be peeled off Keiko's container as they tried to climb it.
The procession just creeps along as best they can through the impossibly crowded late night streets. A city, a country saying goodbye to its beloved will.
We would see all these people on the street with signs and just want to graduate through a memory about it. And people waving and crying and screaming like goodbye. It was so emotional. I was sad and happy at the same time because we're all doing this because we hope he's going to be okay.
But it was for Mexicans to say goodbye to the only, obviously, or Canada they would ever have.
The UPS plane carrying Keiko to his new home leaves at around five in the morning, more than three hours behind schedule, just before a beautiful Mexican sunrise. Only Keiko's veterinarians fly with him, Pernata and Dave fly alongside in another aircraft, close enough to see Keiko's plane from their window.
Keiko no longer belonged to Renovantuda, much less the Mexico. He belonged to the story being told about him, the uncertain real-life sequel to the movie that had made him a star, only more far-fetched and with no happy ending assured. It's kind of funny because it was part of the movie narrative. They were like, how far would you go for a whale?
He went as far as, you know, raising up his arm and saying some magical words and having Willy jump over the breakwater into freedom. I mean, simplistic? Yes. But that's what our narrative was too. How far could Keiko go? For the moment, no one knew. That's on the next episode of The Good Whale.
The story we were telling was a beautiful story of things going right, a simple story, but... He was the absolute worst candidate for a project like that. Come on, people, do it. Do it, Kiko. Here he goes, there he goes. There he goes. Now, little late, little late. My comment was, that's not a killer whale, that's a golden retriever.
Sign up for our newsletter, where each week we'll be sharing photos and behind-the-scenes info on The Good Whale. This week we've got photos and links to video from Keiko's life at Renau Ventura, the place you called home for more than a decade. You should definitely check it out. The link to sign up is also in our show notes, or go to nytimes.com slash serial newsletter.
And there's a Spanish language version of this first episode that we produce for my other podcast, Radiol Ambulante. You can look for that at radiolambulante.org.
The Good Whale is written by me, Daniel Alarcon, and reported by me and Katie Mingle. The show is produced by Katie and Alyssa Ship. Jen Guera is our editor, additional editing from Julie Snyder and Ira Glass. Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for The Good Whale comes from La Chica and Osmond.
Our theme music is by Nick Thorburn, an additional music from Matt McGinley. The song Rascalondrinas in today's episode was performed by Mariachi Dargo NYC. It was produced and engineered by Dan Powell, Brad Fisher, and Pat McCusker. Research in fact-checking by Jane Ackermann, with help from Ben Phalan. Tracking direction by Elna Baker, Susan Wesley is our standards editor. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Simone Prokis.
Carlos Lopez Estrada is a contributing editor on the series. The supervising producer for serial productions is Ande Chubu. Mac Miller is the executive assistant for serial, Liz Davis Moore is the senior operations manager. Special thanks to Lauren Schuller Donner, Jenny Lou Tugend, Nina Litvak, Rob Friedman, Jose Solorsano, Kenneth Brower, Talia Kozlowski, Pablo Arguees, and Katie Fuchs. The Good Whale is from serial productions in the New York Times.
