My grandfather used to hunt sea turtles with guns.
He and his buddies took small boats out on the Atlantic Ocean with rifles on their laps.
“We’d wait for them to stick their heads out of the water for air, and then we’d shoot ‘em,” he said.
When he moved to Florida, I told him not to go near the water. He had enemies there.
But he did, and always emerged from the sea unmolested. Apparently, sea turtles are not good at the revenge business.
I think, from recent press reports, killer whales are much better at it.
Some killer whales (usually called orcas nowadays for some reason outside my knowledge and curiosity) have taught each other how to attack sailboats. They’ve apparently sunk three of them in or around the Strait of Gibraltar. They disable the rudders, then generally bang into the boats with their heads, which are big and hard.
Biologist Alfredo López Fernandez, quoted in various media, claimed to have traced the behavior of the killer whales to one particular specimen named White Gladis. She sustained a "critical moment of agony" somehow related to a sailboat, he said, adding that he didn’t know exactly what. "That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat(s).”
It’s a mystery to me – and apparently to the ace reporters covering this tale of the Iberian Peninsula as well — how López Fernandez knows even this much about the activities of White Gladis, not to mention how he got on a first-name basis with her.
White Gladis’ involvement notwithstanding, I think the orcas are, unlike gramps’ sea turtles of 1920, getting even, perhaps for the annoying proliferation of rich gadabouts tacking through their stamping grounds.
Alternatively, they may have animus toward the fishing fleets, which consistently catch the orcas' lunch and transfer it to the mouths of other humans instead of theirs.
I find it hard to believe that, as the biologist infers, this is all the fault of one crazy orca, which started the teaching of unhinged behavior to its buddies, who don’t mind bashing their heads against hulls for White Gladis’ amusement.
I think they have a grudge, and they’re all in on it. I just don’t know what it is.
Other kinds of creatures are known to exact revenge. Elephants occasionally get even, for instance, with ivory-seeking poachers.
One herd of Indian elephants, after losing a member to bullets, enlisted a second herd and they all went nuts on the local people population. They’re said to have destroyed 54 houses.
If elephants’ mental capacities for payback is well-developed enough to do this, orcas’ probably are, too. Elephant brains top out at about 11 pounds; orcas, 15.
Orcas are smart enough to steal. Indian Ocean killer whales follow the local fishing trawlers regularly, snatching Chilean sea bass off the boats’ long hook lines stretching across the bottom.
Animals don’t have to be enormous to exact revenge. Case in point: the Chinese dog who was literally kicked out of a driver’s parking spot.
Photos of the victim and a pack of his dogbuddies chewing up the car was taken by a neighbor later that day. They’re heartwarming.
Crows captured and banded in Seattle responded upon release by scolding and dive-bombing the ornithologists who banded them, even a year later. Other crows who had never been captured joined in.
Suspecting that the crows were capable of recognizing individual human beings, the science guys tried it again, this time wearing masks that were different for each person. The crows identified the guilty parties like bartenders remembering combative drunks.
Other birds, especially magpies, are good at recognizing people they don’t like. So are lions and tigers and bears. Dogs and cats. Horses and cows. Raccoons. Bees.
There are certainly a lot more.
Animals have long been capable of recognizing bad actors. Maybe they’re just now deciding to do something about it.
What if cows finally said, in their Native Moo, “Enough with the hamburgers?” They do have big heavy feet, and they might figure out how to use them.
Might hens stamp their little claws and fight to keep all those eggs? We might yearn to see $5 cartons again.
What if the surviving descendants of those weirdly popular rattlesnake hunts of the 1950s and 1960s take it personally? They’re naturally well-armed.
And if wild African beasts plot to even the score with trophy hunters? The Trump family might shrink.
What if the killer whales, who weren’t named that for nothing, blame us for the most significant harm people have done to them?
Every winter, the orcas follow the fish to their favorite chilly fjords, where they eat herring and fatten up.
But warmer sea water from climate change has sent the herring hundreds of miles further north. The orcas have followed them, and in their new digs, have sometimes turned to eating other, more warm and cuddly, mammalian things like seals.
We’re warm and cuddly mammals, too.