Wikie and Keijo Are Still Trapped

Wikie and Keijo aren’t characters in a dystopian novel. They’re not CGI creations meant to pull at your heartstrings. They’re real individuals, still breathing — just. Trapped in a decaying concrete tank in a theme park that closed months ago, abandoned like broken fairground rides. 

Marineland Antibes shut its gates in January 2025. It forgot to unlock one. The orca enclosure remains sealed — not to the public, but to freedom. Wikie, 23, and her son Keijo, 11, are circling the same stagnant pool they’ve been circling their entire lives. Every echo in that tank is one they’ve heard before. Every surface has been scraped with their frustration, every turn another pointless lap in a race to nowhere.

But of course, the tragedy isn’t just abandonment. It’s that they were there in the first place.

These orcas were born in captivity. Not just born — bred. Manufactured by an industry that sees wild, intelligent, social beings as programmable performers. And when the crowds stopped coming, the lights switched off, and the money dried up, Wikie and Keijo weren’t “freed.” They were warehoused.

Because that’s what happens when living beings are property. When they’re someone’s asset, not someone.

France’s legacy

The last two captive orcas in the country, rotting in their own chlorinated prison, green algae crawling up the pool walls while caretakers clock in just long enough to throw fish and tick a legal box. No stimulation. No plan. Just biological maintenance.

The park’s owners now say the orcas must “leave now” — not out of compassion, but because even they admit the place is falling apart. Their bodies are outlasting their enclosure. But not by much.

Their pod is already gone. Moana died in 2023. Inouk ingested a tiny piece of metal in 2024 and died a grotesque death no one in charge wants to talk about. And now Wikie and Keijo wait for their turn.

No Tanks

A scientific panel recently blocked a proposed transfer of Wikie and Keijo to Tenerife’s Loro Parque — not because captivity is the problem, but because the next tank wasn’t quite big enough. Another plan, involving a Japanese park, was scrapped too. The conversation isn’t “Should they be captive?” It’s “Where’s the least-bad prison?”

Imagine the absurdity: these beings, who can swim 100 miles a day in the open ocean, are being denied transfer to another tank because the new cell fails to meet size guidelines. Nobody’s talking about ocean freedom. Just better containment.

Canada’s Whale Sanctuary Project promises 100 acres of sea, enclosed but expansive. Finally, space to move. Finally, something beyond concrete and walls. But the sanctuary isn’t ready, and the clock is ticking. Keijo and Wikie don’t have five years for a sanctuary that hasn’t put “a stick in the ground.”

They have now. Or not at all.

How did we get here?

It’s not just poor management. It’s not just lack of funding. It’s not even just bureaucratic incompetence. It’s the mindset. The very idea that these animals are ours to confine, breed, sell, perform, and discard. 

People like to ask why they can’t be released into the wild. But you don’t get to destroy someone’s mind, deny them their culture, their family, their freedom — and then blame them for not knowing how to survive without you.

We are in the golden age of animal cognition science — and the stone age of animal ethics.

We’ve spent decades proving dolphins and orcas are sentient, self-aware, emotionally complex. That they grieve. That they name each other. That they teach their children. That their communication is structured, meaningful, and possibly translatable.

But what’s the use of a translated scream, if we still ignore it?

What’s the point of decoding dolphin distress calls, while 12 bottlenose dolphins languish in another tank at Marineland, right next to the orcas, with no plan and no future?

What are we saying to them — and what are they saying to each other — as the walls crumble and the water darkens?

You don’t need a PhD to know that captivity kills. You just need eyes. Aerial footage from Tidebreakers shows a rotting facility: green scum creeping along the edges of tanks, brown water stagnating in half-drained pools. Orcas and dolphins aren’t immune to infection, to boredom, to despair.

They are dying — mentally first, physically second.

Wikie and Keijo are now the poster animals not just for captivity, but for abandonment. 

For what it looks like when society creates a problem, and then dithers about how inconvenient the solution might be.

There is no justification left. No more shows. No more ticket sales. No more excuses. Just two orcas pacing their prison, waiting for someone — anyone — to treat them as something other than a problem to be solved.

Here’s the choice:

Do we want to be the species that figured out how to talk to dolphins — while ignoring everything they were already saying? Or do we finally listen, not just with machines, but with morality? Set them free — not just from Marineland, but from the mindset that put them there in the first place.