by guest contributor Valerie Greene

On August 15, 2023, the Miami Seaquarium issued a press release stating that the park’s lone killer whale Lolita, AKA Tokitae (Toki) was “very stable and as good as she can be at 50 years of age.” Three days later, she was dead. Toki’s body was craned out of the Seaquarium for all the world to see. Even her death was made to be a chaotic sideshow of exploitation. 

At a press conference in March 2023, the Mayor of Miami-Dade County (Seaquarium landlord), the Dolphin Company (park owner), Friends of Toki (non-profit sanctuary group) and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay pledged to return her to her home waters in the Pacific Northwest.

That same day, the Herald published an opinion piece I wrote recommending Toki be relocated to SeaWorld, which has a medical pool and would have provided a drastic improvement in her welfare. SeaWorld stayed silent. So, along with my collaborator, Joe Kleiman, a veteran attractions manager, who, as a stranding network volunteer, participated in more than thirty dolphin and whale necropsies, I wrote to Jim Irsay and Friends of Toki and proposed a brand new pool that could be repurposed as a rescue facility for stranded dolphins or manatees. Friends of Toki remained as silent as SeaWorld.

Over the past five decades, many have talked about improving Toki’s conditions, but little has happened, and the press conference laid out no plan of action. The wealthy businessmen overseeing her future spoke, each giving a different timeline. The veterinarians and her care staff oddly did not present at the March 2023 event. Even months after the press conference, the timeline for Toki’s sea pen relocation kept getting pushed back. Recent Freedom of Information Act requests have revealed that there were no permit applications for any sea pen, though Irsay declared she would be moved by September, then Christmas.

Toki lived in the smallest tank in the world for an orca at the Seaquarium for 52 years. Her first year at the Seaquarium was in a pool so small it’s now home to elderly manatees. In August 2021, Miami-Dade county condemned the whale stadium along with the dolphin and sea lion stadiums. The county repair order for the whale stadium lapsed the day before Toki died.

USDA has oversight over zoo and aquarium animals on public display. A hidden USDA report from February 1, 2022, acknowledged for the first time that her tank failed to meet federal size guidelines. The report also outlined how the tank was leaking and crumbling around her.

In an unprecedented move, the USDA granted the new owners, The Dolphin Company, a license for the entire Miami Seaquarium, excluding Toki’s tank. As a consequence, Toki and her Pacific white-sided dolphin companion, Lii, both lost their federally mandated welfare protections. 

Toki was unable to perform due to The Dolphin Company’s arrangement keeping her off public exhibition. When the movie “Free Willy” came out in 1993, Toki had been in her tank for over two decades. In the film, Willy lived in a tiny tank and refused to perform, angering his owners who couldn’t profit off him. In “Free Willy,” park owners deliberately compromised his tank hoping he would die so they could collect his $1 million insurance policy. 

The last few years of USDA reports for the Miami Seaquarium show starving animals, including Toki, whose diet was significantly reduced several years ago, and reduced even further under The Dolphin Company’s ownership. 

There is no sea pen. There never was. It would have taken years to get the necessary permits for such an endeavor. Toki could have and should have been moved to a safe, clean location equipped with a medical pool. That could’ve saved her life while she was waiting to go home.

That would have also benefitted Li’i, who is now stuck in the tank alone, while negotiations continue to send him to another facility, his only option. There is no cold water sanctuary for him to go to – neither the one promised by Friends of Toki in the Pacific Northwest, nor the one promised by its sister organization, Whale Sanctuary Project, on Canada’s Atlantic coast.

The public was fed a BIG lie: “Toki will be going home soon. Just look away from the whale in the disgusting, illegal cesspool.” 

Toki’s life and death was the systematic failure of government, park owners, and animal rights opportunists: working together to bring a tragedy decades in the making to a conclusion that even P.T. Barnum would have been ashamed of. 

*Valerie Greene is a former animal trainer at SeaWorld Orlando and graduate of Barry University’s Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law