From sinking boats and feasting on shark livers to dining on whale tongue and tossing porpoises around for fun, orcas are displaying some fascinating—and sometimes terrifying—behaviors
“Magical orca effect” is the best terminology I’ve ever heard for this! I’ve found it tends to be focused on the fish-eating orcas, like the Southern Residents, while the mammal-eating ones seem to get quietly written off as “not real orcas”, because they dispel the “magic” of peaceful, highly moral, family-oriented orcas that people like to picture.
Of course, if one starts assigning human moral values to orcas, the Southern Residents could certainly be described as these magical, loyal beings who love their families above all else. But equally, given they only breed and interact with their own family (approx 70 individuals, they’re horrifically inbred at this point), even to the exclusion of other neighbouring orca populations that share their culture… they start looking like a weird, isolationist, fundamentalist cult, where the grandmothers arrange for their sons to marry their granddaughters because the people living in the next town are just “not the right kind of people”.
“If we judge them by human moral values, then that includes the bad as well as the good, so maybe we shouldn’t assign our moral values to them at all” was not a terribly popular opinion in the cetacean-loving community. Neither was thinking other cetaceans are interesting too. (Beaked whales forever! ❤️)
“Magical orca effect” is the best terminology I’ve ever heard for this! I’ve found it tends to be focused on the fish-eating orcas, like the Southern Residents, while the mammal-eating ones seem to get quietly written off as “not real orcas”, because they dispel the “magic” of peaceful, highly moral, family-oriented orcas that people like to picture.
Of course, if one starts assigning human moral values to orcas, the Southern Residents could certainly be described as these magical, loyal beings who love their families above all else. But equally, given they only breed and interact with their own family (approx 70 individuals, they’re horrifically inbred at this point), even to the exclusion of other neighbouring orca populations that share their culture… they start looking like a weird, isolationist, fundamentalist cult, where the grandmothers arrange for their sons to marry their granddaughters because the people living in the next town are just “not the right kind of people”.
“If we judge them by human moral values, then that includes the bad as well as the good, so maybe we shouldn’t assign our moral values to them at all” was not a terribly popular opinion in the cetacean-loving community. Neither was thinking other cetaceans are interesting too. (Beaked whales forever! ❤️)
Haha, I’m loving the idea of an inbred orca cult. I’ve always secretly thought the southern residents aren’t the smartest.
But yes, very much not a fan of assigning human morals to animals. They don’t think like us.
I feel like there’s actually an interesting xenofiction concept there…