The two beluga whales lay in the belly of the cargo plane, everyone on board eager for the final leg of a journey that had begun a year and a half earlier in a pristine river splashing into Canada’s Hudson Bay.
No. 1 and No. 3, as the two female belugas were then known, were to be the star attractions at Shedd Aquarium’s new $43 million Abbott Oceanarium. As crews got the world’s then-largest indoor marine mammal pavilion ready, the whales sojourned at Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington.
As the jet prepared to taxi down a snowy runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in early March 1991, an unattended truck, accidentally left in drive, slammed into the underside of one of the wings, damaging the plane and leaving humans and cetaceans alike stranded until repairs could be completed 14 hours later.
When the plane finally took off a day late, the pilot climbed too steeply, jolting the tanks holding the belugas.
“It was quite a wave,” said David Casper, then a Shedd veterinarian, who was among those who spent the four-hour flight shivering in wet clothes. “Imagine a very long bathtub filled with water and a beluga whale.”
That journey — like the one last month from Toronto to Chicago — drew international attention. In part, that was because of the sheer audacity of hauling marine behemoths out of tanks and trucking them to an airport, then flying them to a new home. Like the belugas’ arrival from Marineland Canada in July, those that came in 1991 sparked protests from animal activists saying it’s cruel to keep whales in “concrete tanks” — the point sharpened, those protesters said, when two Shedd belugas died within minutes of each other 1½ years after the Oceanarium opened.
Belugas an instant hit
In late spring, belugas by the thousands head south from their northern wintering grounds to the shallows of the Churchill River estuary in Manitoba, Canada, to feed and give birth. In the late 1980s as today, the indigenous Inuit people were allowed to hunt a small number of belugas each year as part of their traditional way of life.
Shedd made a deal with the Inuits to take two of those whales in the summer of 1989.
“We really felt like we were doing a good thing,” said Ken Ramirez, then Shedd’s assistant curator and supervisor of training. “We were taking these whales that were destined to be on the dinner table for the Inuits.”
Animal rights activists called the capture a “cold-water rodeo” and said it put the belugas under extreme stress.
The whales were flown from Canada to Washington state, then to Chicago. The plan, much like last month’s from Toronto, was to arrive under cover of darkness to avoid possible outside interference.
“That was always a big concern we had to face,” Ramirez said. “There have always been animal rights groups who feel that certain types of animals don’t belong in an aquarium.”
As it turned out, a crushed airplane wing flap proved to be more of an obstacle to the belugas’ safe arrival in Chicago. There were no protesters outside Shedd.
“The humans are in far worse shape today than the whales,” Ramirez joked as the belugas took in their new surroundings.
The belugas were an instant hit, helping double attendance for the aquarium to 2 million visitors a year.
“It’s an unusual looking whale,” said Jim Robinett, who spent 40 years working at Shedd, doing everything from chopping up herring and frozen shrimp to overseeing all marine mammals. “Most people have never seen one. And there was the ability to see them face to face through the underwater viewing windows.”
Hero or headache?
“I’m out in the field. Can we talk later?” said Steve Hindi, when a Chicago Sun-Times reporter called last week.
Hindi, 72, meant he was practicing with one of his drones, a tool he uses to catch cockfighters in the act, among other illegal animal activities.
In the early 1990s, Hindi, who lives about 50 miles west of Chicago, was arguably Shedd’s most visible, most persistent protester.
“He insults opponents,” the Sun-Times reported. “He gets in shouting matches, gets arrested.”
As visitors gathered in Shedd’s auditorium to watch dolphin and beluga shows, Hindi and other protesters would assemble outside the glass wall behind the oceanarium, in full view of the audience. They held signs and inflatable sea mammals.
“There were skits of the whales dying and [Hindi] trying to give them artificial resuscitation,” said Ramirez, who called Hindi “a thorn in our side.”
Rather than ignore the protesters, Shedd staff members pointed them out and encouraged questions from visitors after the show.
Hindi would bring a camera and shoot videos of the belugas circling the tank “over and over and over.”
“That is a cage-crazy animal,” Hindi said. “That is an animal that has lost its very identity.”
Shedd administrators said Hindi’s videos were misleading and often showed belugas behaving much as they would in the wild.
Tragedy strikes
In early August 1992, the aquarium announced plans to capture four more belugas — after a federal judge ruled, over the pleas of animal rights groups, that permits for the whaling trip were valid.
The belugas — two males and two females — arrived at Shedd late that August, by all accounts healthy.
One day in mid-September, Shedd vets brought the new arrivals into a shallow “medical” pool and injected two of them with an anti-parasite drug. The drug had been used on other belugas but not those two. Within minutes, “It was very obvious that something was wrong,” Ramirez said.
The whales began to wheeze, their hearts beating rapidly, according to Ramirez.
“Suddenly, they started tilting to the side,” he said.
The whales, a male and female, died within 15 minutes of each other. They’d been at Shedd a little more than a month.
“For us, it was just a tragedy,” Ramirez said. “We cared deeply about the welfare of those animals.”
Both Chicago newspapers ran front-page stories about the deaths.
“It was bigger news than the political turmoil going on in the Middle East,” Ramirez said.
For the activists, it felt like vindication for what they’d argued about belugas in captivity.
Ken Ramirez (left) says the Shedd Aquarium’s captive belugas have helped scientists studying the marine mammals’ cousins in the wild. In this photo, taken in 2004, Ramirez, who was vice president of marine mammal program and animal training, administers an ultrasound to Mauyak, a pregnant beluga.
John H. White / Sun-Times
“These whales died to serve a tourist attraction,” a spokesman for the International Wildlife Coalition said at the time. “It’s horrific.”
The cause of death: “cardiovascular collapse” due to an adverse reaction to the anti-parasite drug.
About three months later, the Canadian government announced a ban on the capture of whales for export. Canadian officials said the ban had nothing to do with Shedd’s dead belugas.
Ever since, all new arrivals at Shedd have been rescues — including the four from Marineland Canada — shared from other aquariums or the result of successful breeding.
‘I saw some fish’
For a time, the beluga deaths at the Shedd Aquarium energized activists. Led by Hindi, they gathered at the aquarium weekly to protest.
Shedd officials say the aquarium provides an opportunity to educate the public about marine mammals. Hindi said that’s “nonsense.”
He and his group would approach Shedd visitors as they were leaving and ask what they learned. Hindi said one man, after seeing the beluga show, shrugged and told him, “I saw some fish.”
“Well, of course, belugas and dolphins aren’t fish,” Hindi said.
Neither the deaths nor the questioning of what visitors were taking away from seeing belugas in captivity had much impact on attendance.
“I don’t shirk from any of that,” Hindi said. “We were out there. And I watched the [protester] numbers dwindle and dwindle.”
Until one day, he was outside the aquarium, alone.
“I said I’m going to have to move to something where we can get more momentum going,” Hindi said.
He said he couldn’t compete with Shedd’s messaging.
“No question about it,” Hindi said, “their publicity team does a fabulous job, and they have the backing of the city, county and the state — all of whom consider [Shedd] to be prestigious.”
He said he acknowledges that the aquarium serves a purpose, which, in his eyes, is providing for the rescue of poisoned or injured marine mammals. The public would benefit, he said, in seeing more of those rather than so many of the “pretty ones.”
“They are primarily there to entertain people,” Hindi said. “They don’t want to show you a one-eyed seal or an otter missing a leg.”
Ramirez, who now lives in Washington state, said the Shedd’s captive belugas have helped scientists in vital ways as they study the marine mammals’ cousins living in the wild, for instance by using Shedd belugas to understand how to safely fit the large, slippery mammals with radio tracking devices “so that [marine biologists] could then [fit] those trackers on the wild beluga population and be able to track their movements and understand their diving and reproduction.”
Still, Ramirez said he thinks that he and Hindi, as well as other animal welfare activists aren’t that different.
“We have this overriding desire to see these animals protected in the wild,” Ramirez said. “We just stand on different sides of a philosophical fence about the best way to do that.”