Free Willy seeks humanity
By Roger Boyes
WILLY, the only killer whale to make it in Hollywood, yesterday swam into a Norwegian fiord apparently in search of human adulation after six weeks and 1,400km in the open sea.
The 33ft-long orca, despite his obviously high intelligence, chose to seek shelter in the only country that still officially commercially hunts whales. But the Norwegians nonetheless gave him a hero’s welcome: the locals swam alongside, stroked him and even sat on his back.
“He is completely tame and he clearly wants company,” Arild Birger Neshaug, who spotted Willy on Sunday while out rowing with his 12-year-old daughter, said. “We were frightened, but then he followed us to our cabin dock. At first we were sceptical but then we tried petting his back.”
Willy, whose real name is Keiko, was captured in Icelandic waters in 1978, had a brief career in aquariums in Iceland and Canada before ending up at an amusement park in Mexico City.
In 1993 Keiko got his big Hollywood break and starred in Free Willy, the story of a boy fighting to liberate the whale from an oceanarium where he was being exploited by an unscrupulous showman.
The success of the film raised questions about the condition of its star. Keiko had for years been kept in a small pool, barely 12ft deep, and denied contact with fellow killer whales.
An international campaign gathered pace to free Keiko, a case of life imitating art. Keiko was pampered for three years in a much larger pool in Oregon and then flown in 1998 to a pen in Iceland. There he was systematically trained to survive in the open sea.
Keiko was freed on July 15 and electronic tracking showed that he was swimming between 35 and 80 miles a day to depths of 180ft, a sign that he had learnt to forage for fish and maintain his strength.
Initial fears that Keiko would be malnourished or disorientated on release were dispelled when he swam into the Skaalvik fiord, about 250 miles northwest of Oslo. Yesterday Keiko was said to be happily eating fish thrown at him by clapping families, a killer whale blissfully unaware that he was a guest of a nation of whale-killers.
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