Often when we’re filming our mammal cousins, it’s very tempting to impose our own
human anthropocentric values on their actions, and that is, I think, a mistake.
Probably the most interesting example of this I’ve seen has been working with Orca, s ometimes known as Killer Whale
. On a beach in Patagonia, at exactly the right time of the right tide,
a pod of Orca will surge up onto the sands to snatch seal pups,
and to drag them back down into the surf where they feed on them.
We waited for five days to see this, hunkered down low against, you know,
freezing Patagonian winds, trying to make as little an impression as possible on the seal pups that were playing around in the
surf, and finally the pod approached, they came up,
and one animal surged up and onto the sands itself to snatch an animal
and drag it back down into the water.
It’s an incredible thing to see, you know,
Orca could weigh eight or nine tons and to risk beaching themselves to find a meal,
you know, that is a really heavy investment of energy and of serious risk to themselves as well.
But the next bit was the part of the whole scenario that took us by surprise;
so once they had this tiny pup in the sea, instead of just it finishing off in a heartbeat,
as they surely could have done, they seemed to play with it, to toy with it, to go round and round it in circles,
tossing it out the water with their tails and not going in for the final killer bite.
Well, this wasn’t an adult fur seal, it was a small animal that seriously couldn’t have done them any
damage.
And then it got even weirder because we found on that same beach, several carcasses
of pups,
which had been taken by Orca.
They had very definitive bite marks from the Orca on them
and they had been killed, but not eaten.
Otherwise, the carcass was completely perfect.
Why would any animal go to that degree of effort and risk and then not
eat it? It didn’t make any sense to us.
Perhaps the answer lay in a different filming trip,
also with Orca, but in British Columbia.
My team and I had been lucky enough to happen upon a pod of Orca,
that were socializing, and we went out in our sea kayaks and paddled alongside them.
The Orca were leaping out of the water, breaching, coming alongside me, and just rolling onto their side so they could look
up at me as they came past.
It was truly breathtaking, but then they went from this,
this playful super sized dolphin, which is essentially what they are,
into full on predatory mode and I’ve never seen an animal switch as fast as this ever.
They’d encountered a fully grown male Steller’s sea lion, which is three quarters of a ton,
750 kilos of flashing teeth, a serious predator in its own
right, and the pod of Orca cornered it into a bay.
So we got out of our kayaks and got on to shore, and we came right up close
to see the whole breathtaking spectacle play out.
They took it down by breaching up and landing on top of it, by slapping it with their tails,
and just generally tiring the animal out.
You know, it was outgunned, outnumbered, outweighed,
and it simply had no chance, although it kept trying to make a run for the for the kelp beds;
where the Orca wouldn’t follow.
Watching this happen, it took a long, long time and you could see it getting more and more tired,
more and more worn out and, you know, you feel for them.
Everyone’s seen sea lions
and they have these great big, dark eyes.
They really pull on your heartstrings because they have,
it would appear, so many similarities to us as human beings.
They certainly are, they do share a common ancestor with us.
But then finally, when the animal was no longer a threat, when it was so tired
and so beaten that it couldn’t fight back, then they brought in their youngsters, they brought
in their calves. They were quite young animals, but they were clearly being taught by their parents how
to hunt, replicating their parents maneuvers.
They were also breaching up out of the water and tail slapping on the Steller sea lion,
and this went on for for a good while.
You can see that it was an instructional process.
They were using the Steller sea lion as a teaching aid, and that was pretty uncomfortable to
watch.
It would appear to us to be incredibly cruel,
but the next bit was the bit that just took it to a whole different level,
because once all of that was finished, once the the lesson was over,
rather than coming in and finishing off the stellar sea lion, they all turned on some unseen,
unheard signal and just swam off to sea and left it.
They didn’t eat a single mouthful of that Steller sea lion, and we just couldn’t understand
why. But it seems that Orca are one of the animals that indulge in what is known as surplus
killing. That is killing that is not designed to be for food.
Kind of seems that they compartmentalise their lives.
So if they’re traveling,
they’re traveling; they’re socialising, they’re socialising; if they’re hunting, that’s what they’re doing,
and likewise, if they’re teaching and learning, well, they don’t play with their
food. It’s really tough for you as an observer to see
an animal going through so much stress and pain and overwhelming
exertion,
and then for it not even to result in, you know, precious calories for the Orca; it
seems so cruel.
But then surely, we as human beings are the worst culprit of that.
There is no other animal that will, that will engage with and kill potential
food, but then not eat it and just kill it for sport.
In that surely we human beings are the master.
