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On August 8, 1970, the Southern Resident orcas of Puget Sound were herded into Penn Cove on Whidbey Island by explosives, spotter planes and speedboats in a coordinated effort to capture seven young whales. Between 1964 and 1976, dozens of these now-endangered orcas were torn from their home and sent to marine parks around the globe. Just over a decade later, all but one had died. This lone survivor is Tokitae, also known as Lolita, and she's spent most of her life performing at the Miami Seaquarium. For twenty years, the Orca Network has called for her release, and now the indigenous Lummi Nation, People of the Sea, have joined the fight. Author Sandra Pollard chronicles the extraordinary effort to bring Tokitae home.

Since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on the plight of the orca, the most profitable and controversial display animal in history. Yet, until now, no historical account has explained how we came to care about killer whales in the first place. Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s--the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. But that all changed in 1965, when Seattle entrepreneur Ted Griffin became the first person to swim and perform with a captive killer whale. The show proved wildly popular, and he began capturing and selling others, including Sea World's first Shamu. Over the following decade, live display transformed views of Orcinus orca. The public embraced killer whales as charismatic and friendly, while scientists enjoyed their first access to live orcas. In the Pacific Northwest, these captive encounters reshaped regional values and helped drive environmental activism, including Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaigns. Yet even as Northwesterners taught the world to love whales, they came to oppose their captivity and to fight for the freedom of a marine predator that had become a regional icon. This is the definitive history of how the feared and despised'killer'became the beloved'orca'--and what that has meant for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures.