For most of the 20th century, scientists on the Pacific Coast of North America held two basic assumptions about the killer whale (Orcinus orca): first, it was a voracious predator inclined to attack anything in the water, including people; second, the species constituted an abundant and cosmopolitan population. Both turned out to be wrong, and it was captivity that revealed the truth.
Until the 1960s, research on cetaceans remained extremely limited. Most marine mammalogists worked in connection with commercial industries such as whaling and sealing, and their research involved dissecting target species. This was certainly true of killer whales, which scientists and fishermen regarded as threats to valuable marine resources. In 1961, the Canadian Department of Fisheries mounted a machine gun on Maud Island, between Vancouver Island and the mainland, to cull the “killers” believed to threaten Chinook salmon runs, and between 1960 and 1967 the US government’s Marine Mammal ...
