Waves of Compassion

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McTaggart had grown up in the wealthy, Southwest Marine Drive neighborhood of Vancouver, was a Canadian badminton champion at 17, and a successful entrepreneur. He brought an athlete's toughness and a businessman's determination to the peace movement. 'Greenpeace matured with McTaggart,' says Hunter, 'because he gave Greenpeace a hard edge that balanced the soft, cuddly stuff.'

We Are Whales

As McTaggart fought France in their own courts, Dr. Paul Spong started appearing among the Greenpeace crowd at the Cecil pub in Vancouver, talking about the intelligence of whales and why they should be saved. Some of the anti-war activists thought this was a distraction from more important matters.

Spong, a brain scientist from New Zealand, had been hired in 1967 by Dr. Patrick McGeer of the Neurological Laboratory at the University of British Columbia. Part of his assignment was to perform behavioral research on the Vancouver Aquarium's first captive Orcinus orca, or killer whale, Skana. Spong's subsequent experiences with Skana convinced him that whales were highly intelligent beings that should not be held in captivity nor hunted by whalers. 'It took a lot to push me out of my comfortable, scientific corner,' recalls Spong, 'and it was Skana who did it.'

Spong was testing Skana's visual acuity when the whale suddenly failed all the tests she had already easily learned. Her scores dropped from nearly 100% to zero. Paul concluded that she was failing on purpose, as a sort of protest. This convinced him that she was an intelligent and self-aware creature. He got into the habit of playing flute to her late at night. Skana tested Paul's trust by raking her 3-inch teeth across his feet as he dangled them in the water. Once he learned to trust her and keep his feet in the water she stopped. Paul almost felt that she was the trainer and he was the student.

When he told McGeer and Aquarium Director Dr. Murray Newman that Skana should be set free, he was fired. He then moved to Hanson Island, 200-kilometers north of Vancouver, and established an orca observation post in the wild, where he lives and studies whales to this day. 'I later met Farley Mowat,' recalls Spong, 'and he convinced me to get involved in the whaling issue. When Greenpeace started to have an impact on nuclear weapons, I called Hunter.'

Spong took Hunter to the Aquarium to meet Skana and he convinced Hunter that he could safely place his head inside Skana's mouth. 'I could feel her teeth on the back of my neck,' Hunter recalls. 'I was totally at her mercy. She could have snapped my neck like a matchstick but her touch was as gentle as a kiss. I had the feeling that Skana found out more about me than I did about her. It was as if she looked inside my mind and played with my courage and my fear. I was convinced that Paul was right about her, and about whales in general.'

In November, 1974 Hunter brought Spong to my rented suite on 1st Avenue in Kitsilano, saying they needed a photograph. Spong carried a large cardboard box. While Hunter and I talked, Spong lifted two damp, grey brains from the box and set them triumphantly on my kitchen table. The human brain I recognized, the other brain was twice the size. 'I want a picture of these for the Whale Show,' Spong said. As I set up the photograph, Paul explained to me that the Orca brain was not only twice the size of the human brain, but the cerebral cortex was four-times as big and had many more convolutions, or folds. 'This brain evolved for a reason,' he argued. 'The portion of the brain that drives the motor functions of the body is about the same size in a monkey, a human, or a whale. All the rest of this,' said Spong, passing his hand over the cerebral cortex, 'is for thinking, data processing, and communicating. These creatures have more analytical brain power than we have!'

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