• Orca

  • How We Came to Know and Love the Ocean's Greatest Predator
  • By: Jason M. Colby
  • Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
  • Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (34 ratings)

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Orca  By  cover art

Orca

By: Jason M. Colby
Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
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Publisher's summary

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. 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.

©2018 Oxford University Press (P)2019 HighBridge Company
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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informative yet heartbreaking - we must do better

One of my favorite recent listens. This book goes into great detail to explore our relationship with orca whales since the 1960s. Super interesting, heartbreaking, and a call for us all to think more critically about how we interact respectfully with the ocean and its creatures. The narrator is a bit monotone but it really doesn’t matter - you can get over that by the first chapter.

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My heart is forever Orca filled.

This book taught me so much and I fell I inlove with these beautiful animals. My wish is that they could all be free but I know that if not for a trip to Sea World in Florida, where I became mesmerized by their beauty, I doubt I would have ever been able to see one in the wild. Thank you Jason Colby for writing this amazing book and thank you Paul Heitsch for your wonderful narration of it, I was captivated.

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Heart rending but necessary read!

I learned so much about orcas, and humans from the stories in this book, but chapter after chapter of death, abuse, ignorance, and arrogance was hard to take. The reader was easy to understand but very haulting and unexpressive. Overall, a humbling history and legacy worth knowing.

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The history and story is amazing!

Such a great book. I learned so much about the pacific northwest in such a short time! And about the connection between human and orca.

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