Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) (by Crappy Wildlife Photography)
Check out this poor wild orca! He’s LOADED with rake marks! These are clearly from other orcas.
Once again; nothing wrong with orcas raking eachother. It’s natural behavior.
You can find 2 pics of wild orcas who appear to have “rake marks.” How many pics can I find of captive orcas with rake marks?My point is: the pictures in and of themselves, do not prove anything as you have to determine who statistically exhibits the most rakes. The proof is in the ratio/rate of raked animals to non-raked animals, and the frequency at which they are raked. (You can determine all this with simple statistics.)
100 pictures of wild orcas. 100 pictures of captive orcas. Which group has the most rake marks? Due to the number of whales in captivity who have rake marks/the number of whales in captivity, and the lifestyle of captive orcas, we can use deductive reasoning to estimate which group will exhibit the most rake marks.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here, but if you want to prove your claim that wild orcas are raked excessively like captive orcas are, you have to do more than scour the internet for a couple of pictures.
Also, what do you think the purpose of raking is? I know a lot of pro captivity activists seem to believe that it is an attempt by the whales to show dominance as newcomers are integrated into the pod. What do you think?
OMG, seriously?
Thetruthaboutlolita you claim to know everything about orcas and anti caps know nothing!!!
Thats Mel, and he got those bite marks from the sealions he hunts.
^ Exactly.
Yes, these are f*cking bite marks. Don’t use Mel to show that captive orcas are healthy and behave in a natural way. -__-
Being bite marks from prey aside, as stated many times, wild orcas can flee. If they are being raked excessively, they can break away until tension has died down. The only way a captive orca can escape its aggressors is if the trainers put it into a different tank, but the orca cannot choose how or when to get away, so essentially it is forced into an unnatural dominance struggle from which there is no escape. Let’s not forget that orcas placed together from different regions (hey, Morgan is a great example!) ‘speak’ different dialects and cannot communicate with eachother in the same way a pod with a singular dialect would. There is also less of a dominance struggle in the wild anyway because the pod hierarchy has been long established with strong, long standing family bonds to reinforce it (uh, transients aside in this case).
Raking happens in the wild, yes, we get it. But the environmental circumstances are 100% different, so it’s not directly comparable, and is a weak argument of how a captive situation is “natural” and “normal.”
Regardless of my stance on cetacean captivity, SO TIRED of this argument. You can be pro-cap and still realize the difference between the two situations.
