HUGGY
I Post Because I Care
I did volunteer work at the zoo here for a while. There are real careful protocols about how being in the exhibits or near the animals. It looks like she got sloppy bout safety rules.
Killer whales are supposed to be very bright. This one here saw his opportunity for either something tastier than herring, or for revenge for being made to do silly things in exchange for old fish, and took it.
The whale didn't eat her. It drowned her. It wasn't hungry. It was pissed. Up here in the NW where the whales came from these creatures seek out human attention from time to time. There was a recent Killer whale that became a nusance because it would folow right up against the ferry boats and seek out private vessels to interact with. People could reach outside thier boats and touch the whale.
The whales eat salmon and squid mostly but some of them eat mamals such as seals, sea lions, elephant seals and sea otters. Still there are no recorded instances to my knowledge of a Killer whale attacking a human in the wild. I have scuba dove up at Cattle point near San Juan Island(within 50 miles of the winter Olympics). I dive alone. One sunny summer afternoon I was there in the massive kelp beds and a pod of killers was chasing a pack of seals through the Kelp. The killers completely ignored me as they went about having lunch on the seals. This went on for over an hour. I never felt threatened even though it was clear that the whales knew I was there. They would circle the seals and keep them within the kelp beds about a mile by a qtr mile. Then one of them would come crashing through the kelp like a freight train and an unlucky seal would try to make a gettaway and end up facing the rest of the pod. Killer whales are incredibly agile and fast. They should release that whale as well as all of the wales and porpoises in captivity.