For two months, Sam Burich and Josef Bauer had waited for their chance to snag a killer whale.
Perched atop Saturna Island’s sandstone bluffs, they sat vigil beside a mounted harpoon gun near East Point, part of a team sent by Vancouver Aquarium director Murray Newman to gather information on orcas. But capture wasn’t their goal; Burich and Bauer were shooting to kill.
“At the time, the killer whale was regarded as the most ferocious beast on earth,” recalled UBC researcher Dr. Pat McGeer, the first to study an orca up close, in an interview before his death. “Everybody was afraid of it.”
Before 1964, orcas were a scientific mystery. Considered ferocious man-eaters, they were, Newman noted in his autobiography, “the marine world’s Public Enemy Number One.” The Department of Fisheries even installed a machine gun overlooking Seymour Narrows to shoot whales on sight. Burich and Bauer weren’t taking chances. Their orders were to kill a smaller specimen so the 38-year-old sculptor could cast a life-sized model for the aquarium’s lobby.
Early on July 16, 1964, their prey came into view. Loading the harpoon, Burich took aim at an adolescent near the back of the pod. As his finger touched the trigger, he later recalled, the whale looked him in the eye.
Then, he fired.
What happened next transformed the world’s relationship to orcas, setting off a decade of scientific discovery and animal cruelty, and kickstarting a debate about the relationship between aquarium and specimen.
The harpoon struck the whale in the neck, and it froze, stunned. As Burich clambered into a waiting boat, intending to finish it off with gunfire, something curious happened. Other members of the pod gathered around their companion, lifting it to the surface to breathe. A series of squeaks and whistles echoed across the water—signs of possible communication. The whale thrashed, attempting to free itself, but to Burich’s surprise, it made no effort to attack their boats. It sounded less like a predator than a wounded child, and after waiting months to kill an orca, Burich lost his nerve. He called Newman and McGeer, who raced to the scene by seaplane. McGeer arrived first, and he too was surprised by the whale’s disposition.
“[Burich] thought they were in trouble and had started firing bullets at it,” he explained. “But it didn’t look to me like it was threatening at all. So my suggestion was: Let’s leave everything as it is—Murray Newman will be along soon, and we can decide what to do.”
Glimpsing the captive whale, Newman made a decision: they would transport it to temporary quarters at North Vancouver’s Burrard Dry Dock, and keep it for study, for however long it survived. Overnight, Burich and Bauer braved squalls and darkness to transport their victim to safety, towing it by the harpoon still buried in its flesh. But keeping it alive would prove challenging. For starters, they had no idea what orcas ate. Of greater concern was preventing infection around the harpoon wound site, and since nobody had ever seen an orca up close, Newman and McGeer brought in every expert they could, including racetrack veterinarian Dr. Joe Lomas.
“We’re feeling our way,” Lomas admitted to reporters. “As far as we know, nobody in the world ever gave a penicillin shot to a whale before. There’s nothing in any books about it.”
Eventually, they succeeded, using a 12-foot syringe suspended from a crane above the dock. Though the wound appeared to be healing well, the orca refused to eat, instead swimming around its pen in endless counterclockwise circles. Nonetheless, its docile nature made it an instant global sensation, and Newman realized he had a crucial opportunity to shape public opinion. A softer image, he reasoned, was essential, so the aquarium used initial confusion about the orca’s gender to declare their captive was female, dubbing her “Moby Doll.” This was a hit with the public, but privately, staff had ample evidence to the contrary.
Assistant curator Gil Hewlett called up McGeer, he later recalled. “His young daughter—they were down looking after the whale, and she said: ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ And the whale had this huge penis extended.”
He chuckled. “So Gil Hewlett’s daughter … she was the first to see Moby Doll’s dick.”
By the end of July, Moby Doll had worn out his welcome at Burrard Dry Dock. The facility, with its oily waters and heavy marine traffic, was never intended as a permanent home, and for dockworkers, he proved an irresistible distraction.
“By then, Clarence Wallace wanted it out of his shipyard,” McGeer chuckled. “Everybody was watching the whale instead of working on ships.”
In late July, he was transported to a hastily constructed pen at Jericho Beach. There, his hunger strike continued. Desperate, the aquarium appointed Sam Burich as his full-time guardian, hoping that a bond between the two might encourage him to eat. A remorseful Burich, seeking to make amends, spent eight hours a day at Jericho—tossing him fish, dangling his feet in the water, and trying to communicate.
“I whistle to her when she comes to the surface, or I play my mouth organ for her,” he told the Sun. “But I am running out of new ideas on how to get her to trust me.”
By mid-August, plans were being made to force-feed Moby Doll if necessary. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he began eating, after a visiting aquarium owner discovered he preferred to be hand-fed. Staff immediately adopted this approach, and soon, Moby was eating 45 to 90 kilograms of fish per day, even rolling onto his belly to beg for food.
The immediate crisis resolved, discussion turned to the future. The Jericho dock was too decrepit and its waters too polluted to be a long-term option, but the cost of constructing a proper pen—approximately half a million dollars—was money the aquarium didn’t have. Enclosures were suggested everywhere from Stanley Park to West Vancouver, while facilities worldwide offered princely sums to make the whale their own. That no serious discussion of releasing Moby Doll took place epitomizes the scientific zeal of Newman and his colleagues—and the era. Although they viewed their specimen with affection—and even love—it was still just that: a specimen. His obvious signs of distress and the many harms inflicted upon him were, it seems, all in the name of science.
“I’d be perfectly happy to release her if it was in her interests,” Newman told reporters, “but I don’t think it is.”
By then, public interest had hit its zenith. Newman was named Man of the Year by the Vancouver Visitors Bureau, and commissionaires had their hands full keeping people from sneaking onto the docks. Meanwhile, Newman was planning to assist in orca captures for aquariums across North America. Recordings of Moby’s calls were broadcast at the PNE and studied by researchers at Harvard. But by October, no meaningful progress was made in securing a new pen. Still, the whale appeared healthy and active, except for an infection that had developed on his skin.
Then, on October 8, something changed.
“Moby was having trouble surfacing to blow and breathe,” McGeer told reporters. “His last breath came when he was still beneath the surface, and the whale probably took in water instead of air. Then,” McGeer said, “he just sank to the bottom and drowned.”
Aquarium staff were devastated.
“At first I even kept the press at bay, refusing to let photographers into the dock area,” Newman later wrote. “After a few hours, I came to my senses, but it still felt like inviting a pack of strangers into the front parlour after a death in the family.”
And while Moby Doll’s sudden death, from a fungal lung infection, was the result of his confinement—specifically the low salinity and pollution in the surrounding water—Newman and McGeer sought to place the blame elsewhere.
“If the proper facilities had been made available soon enough, Moby Doll would undoubtedly be alive today,” McGeer told the Vancouver Sun.
Shortly thereafter, they authored a paper on their work—one which triggered a decade-long orca gold rush, as aquariums sought to cash in on orca popularity. The impact was catastrophic—within 10 years, orca populations declined by 40 per cent. Following public backlash, a moratorium was placed on their capture in 1976—which remains in place today. Yet Newman and McGeer remained unwilling to fully accept the ethical implications of their behaviour (Newman, who died in 2016, maintained Moby’s capture was “the best thing I’ve ever done”). Only Sam Burich expressed regret, later telling his wife that he was ashamed of his part in removing the whale from the wild.
“You can’t really say what’s best for [orcas],” McGeer protested, before his own death in 2022. “It’s a different kind of life, but we don’t know if it’s more or less stressful. There’s evidence it’s stressful for the animals, but they get medicare, they have friends—not whales, but friends. They don’t have to worry about getting a meal or being a meal. So we don’t know what they’re thinking.”
Today, Moby Doll’s legacy remains complicated. Information gleaned during his captivity was crucial in transforming public opinion, and consequently, cetacean capture is now viewed as unethical. But those opinions exist largely in spite of, not because of, McGeer and Newman’s work, and the decades of exploitation that followed.
For McGeer, however, the end justified the means.
“The end result was to completely change knowledge of, and understanding toward killer whales,” he shrugged. “Prior to that, the fisheries department had mounted guns in the strait to shoot [them] on sight. Nowadays, if a tourist boat goes within 50 metres, they get fined for bothering the whales.”
