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The Remarkable Journey of Lolita the Killer Whale: A Captive for 50 Years, Finally Set Free!

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The Remarkable Journey of Lolita the Killer Whale: A Captive for 50 Years, Finally Set Free!
Randy Meeks

Randy Meeks

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Depending on your generation, if we say “Lolita” there are two possibilities: you might think of the singer of ‘Sarandonga’ or you might think of an influencer who has been caught smoking in a bar. But there is one more whose story you have to know, one that seems inspired by ‘Free Willy’, that 1993 movie: the killer whale that, at last, is going back to the sea.

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Free Lolita

August 8, 1970. Penn Cove, a place full of Washington islands. Tokitae, a four-year-old killer whale, is trapped and sold to the Miami Seaquarium for about $20,000. Eventually, based on the work of Vladimir Nabokov and as a tribute to his best-known character, she ended up being named Lolita. It was 1970, let’s not ask for exquisite sensibilities.

Lolita started living with Hugo, a male with whom she never stopped mating (without offspring) and who died ten years later. Since then, she has shared her aquarium with dolphins and whales… until, finally, at over 55 years old, it has been formally announced that the orca will be released (finally) into the sea. There, as if it were a Pixar movie, her mother, Ocean Sun, who is almost a century old and still alive, lives on.

Lolita weighs 2267 kilos and has not been doing shows of any kind for a year. Seaquarium managers are confident that this will be positive for the animal: “I know Lolita wants to swim in free water”, they said, confident that real life is like a cartoon movie. Of course, she will have to wait between 18 and 24 months to be moved, and it will cost about twenty million dollars (three zeros more than it cost at the time).

It must be said that this does not come from the Seaquarium suddenly becoming responsible, but from the fact that in 2015 there was a protest with thousands of people at the gates with the slogan #FreeLolita… And the complaints have continued and grown over the years. Come on, those 20 million buy more a good PR case than the kindness of some millionaires, who probably have not thought that after fifty years stuck in a water tank, it is difficult for her to learn to move in freedom.

Along with Lolita, there are 55 other orcas in captivity around the world, four of them in Spain: Adam, Morgan, Tekoa and Keto, in the Loro Parque de Tenerife. Will we ever see their release?

Randy Meeks

Randy Meeks

Editor specializing in pop culture who writes for websites, magazines, books, social networks, scripts, notebooks and napkins if there are no other places to write for you.

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