It's been all over the news (both the kind you watch and the kind Yahoo! makes you read before it lets you check your e-mail).
TRAINER KILLED BY KILLER WHALE
Holy crap! I thought. That is unbelievable. It turns out the in front of a giant audience at Sea World Orlando, a whale grabbed a female trainer off the side of the tank in its jaws and thrashed her around. It is unclear if she died from drowning or the thrashing. The article I read also pointed out the fact that this animal was involved in other human deaths.
WHAT?!?!?!
Okay, so why am I freaking out? I mean, I work in an office, not with Killer Whales (Though when I was a kid I did want to be a marine biologist.)
Because when I was like 7 my mom was on Wheel of Fortune. Yeah, it was as awesome as you think it would be. I believe she coined the term "Game Show-aholic". Any who, while we were out in California we did all kinds of awesome tourist things, which included a trip to Sea World San Diego.
Since I wanted to make sure we had seats in the Splash Zone I dragged my parents to the show area uber early. It was cool that I was such a punctual kid, because one of the trainers approached my family and said that a baby whale had been born recently and did my family of three want to meet the whale family of three.
Oh. Hell. Yes.
I don't imagine there is anything more exciting for a kid that being in front of a few thousand people. (Okay, maybe I was and still am some sort of attention whore...) I remember it like it was more recent than 21 years ago.
I got to throw handfuls of raw fish into the whales mouth. My dad got to pet the whale. And my mom, the woman who gave me life, got to do the coolest thing of all. She leaned over the tank and held her arms out in an "o" and the freaking whale came up and she HUGGED IT! Somewhere I have a picture of this momentous occasion.
An occasion which I now look back on and think "It would have been so easy for that whale to have grabbed my 7 year old ass and dragged me to the briny depths of that tank."
Ah, childhood memories. Thanks for sullying them Yahoo!
~ The Office Scribe
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“Holy Crap” was the lead-in words to my FB post yesterday. Reading about this lady being grabbed by the killer whale was a déjà vu.
ReplyDeleteYou see, this happened to a friend of mine at the San Diego Sea World. The killer whale took him in his mouth down to the bottom of the tank and up where he could grab a breath and back down. Suffering numerous injuries including a punctured lung....unlike her, he survived! Holy Crap indeed.