||| FROM YAHOO NEWS |||
Following news of the latest boat sunk by orcas in the waters near the Strait of Gibraltar, a killer whale researcher is warning that the incidents may be misunderstood.
News outlets (including HuffPost) have used the word “attack” to describe a spate of events in which orcas have damaged vessels in the waters around Morocco, Portugal and Spain. But Monika Wieland Shields, co-founder and director of the nonprofit Orca Behavior Institute, argued the term is misleading in an MSNBC opinion piece published Thursday.
“When I watch the videos of these so-called attacks, I see something completely different,” Shields wrote.
Rather than an act of aggression, “it looks like another behavior we often see killer whales engage in: play.”
On Tuesday, a group of orcas slammed into the hull and damaged the rudder of a 50-foot sailing yacht off the coast of Morocco. The people aboard were rescued and the vessel was left to sink. It was the fifth time orcas have sunk a boat in the region in recent years, The New York Times reported. There have been dozens of other incidents of damage, though no human deaths.
Shields said “from the whale’s perspective,” it makes sense that they often go after rudders.
“Rudders move and, when humans try to regain steering control, show resistance,” she wrote. “It’s probably more like a game of tug-of-war than a maliciously motivated attack.”
Orcas are highly intelligent and social animals, which means they have “a unique capacity for amusement and playfulness,” she wrote. It also means that new behaviors and fads spread easily among social groups. For example, during a brief in a period in the late 1980s, many orcas near Washington state began wearing dead salmon on their heads, like hats.
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The intent is irrelevant. Either way, the damage is the byproduct of actions. People amuse themselves by shooting squirrels too, and that’s just one example. It’s all in fun. Mindfulness is not a universal characteristic.