847: The Truly Incredible Story of Keiko the Killer Whale

Ira Glass

I don't know about you, but you know what I think would feel great today? An animal story, and not one of those stories where the animals are some metaphor for human beings and we see ourselves through their actions and learn some important lesson.

No, no, no, no. I'm talking about an old-fashioned animal story where you hear about some amazing creature in some surprising situation. And that creature then does things that have such personality and seems so specifically them. It just gets to you.

I am pleased to say we have a story like that for you today. And the creature is not a dog, or a cat, or a bunny, or a horse, or any of the lovable creatures you usually find in this kind of story. It's an orca, a killer whale that we humans captured from the wild, took from his mother and trained to be completely tame and live alongside us.

This killer whale was so tamed that at night, when his trainers went home, and he was all alone, he would watch TV from inside his tank. He liked old Andy Griffith reruns and action movies. And that continued for years, until, one day, we got the idea that maybe this killer whale didn't need to continue as a giant domesticated pet. Maybe it will be possible for him to lead a very different life in the wild again.

Today's story comes from our co-workers at Serial. They, of course, have done so many remarkable series that have changed everybody's expectations of what you can do in a podcast. I have been sitting in on readthroughs of drafts of episodes of this new series for a year now. I'm one of the people who gives editing notes.

And whenever we do one of these listening sessions, I have to say it's always one of the best parts of my week. I really love this story, one of my favorite things they've ever done. This new series is called The Good Whale, six episodes long, including-- I'm not kidding-- a musical episode. Maybe I'll tell you about that later. They launched the first two episodes this week, and we're going to play you episode 1 of the show right now.

And then after the break, we have another story-- not from Serial, but a story that we made-- about animals and what we expect of them. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Daniel Alarcón, the novelist and journalist and host of Radio Ambulante, is the host of this new show for Serial. And with that, I will turn things over to Daniel. Here's episode 1 of their show.

Daniel Alarcón

Our story begins in the early '90s with an orca named Keiko. He's just entering his teenage years, living at an amusement park in Mexico City called Reino Aventura, or Adventure Kingdom. He's not from there, but for the last seven years, a tank in this polluted, landlocked megacity more than 7,000 feet above sea level has been his home.

Before that, it was a marine park in Canada, where he was bullied by the other orcas. Before that, it was a tank in a big, concrete building in Iceland, where he was kept for about three years, unable to see the sky. And even before that, it was the North Atlantic, where he was captured and separated from his mom and the rest of his whale pod, probably when he was around two.

I don't think I really understood how traumatic this could have been until I learned that male killer whales are essentially mama's boys, and not just when they're young, but basically their entire lives. Even as adults, they might swim by their mother's side. They depend on her. A mother orca might catch a fish, bite it in two, and give half to her son. This kind of closeness is documented in male orcas well into their 20s or 30s.

And Keiko was deprived of the chance to have that. At age two, Keiko would probably still have been swimming in his mother's slipstream, still mastering the language of his pod. He wouldn't have yet learned how to hunt on his own. Despite weighing more than 1,000 pounds, in developmental terms, Keiko would have been just a baby, ripped from his mother, from everything he'd ever known and from a life that may have been largely spent by her side.

So of course, it's hard to talk about a pool in a Mexican amusement park as a substitute for any of that. But what I can say is that the people who work there, they truly, sincerely love Keiko. They are, for all intents and purposes, his pod.

Daniel Alarcón

That's Renata Fernandez, who worked with Keiko at Reino Aventura.

Daniel Alarcón

Renata started at Reino Aventura when she was 20 years old. She chopped frozen fish, mopped the pool deck, and eventually worked her way up to be one of Keiko's trainers. Working with a killer whale had long been a dream of hers. And even now, when she talks about Keiko, she sounds the way a mother might when reminiscing about her kid's childhood. She remembers all of Keiko's favorite games, his favorite toys, his favorite playmate.

Daniel Alarcón

If Keiko had his moods or played favorites, well, Renata says, that was just part of who he was.

Daniel Alarcón

In the offseason, when there were no weekday shows at Reino Aventura, Renata and the other trainers swam and played with Keiko for hours. Most of the people who worked with Keiko were young, none older than 30, and they made Keiko the center of their lives. They fed him by hand, gave him belly rubs all the time. They even set up a special hose just for him. He loved to be sprayed. And as far as anyone could tell, Keiko genuinely seemed to like it.

Daniel Alarcón

There's nothing about that last sentence of Renata's that could be fact-checked, not a word. We don't know if Keiko was having a blast. We can't know.

Maybe he was dragging the trainers around because he was bored or because he loved these friendly people who fed him every day. Maybe what his humans interpreted as Keiko having fun was really just habit-- or even defeat. Like, why not let the people ride? They seem to like it.

We can't really know what animals are thinking, so we do our best with the information we have, making educated guesses about the inner lives of the creatures we love. And that's what this story is really about-- an imperfect attempt to understand what might be best for an animal who can't speak for himself, the intention to make things right for him, to make things better.

Everything I'm going to tell you is set in motion by these good intentions. And by everything, I mean an unprecedented global campaign, a high-profile, high-stakes science experiment, and a debate about what exactly we humans owe the natural world.

At the center of it all is Keiko, who would become, almost by accident, a symbol for all whales, for the health of the oceans, for the very concept of wildness, but who was also an individual orca with a name, and specific history, and trauma, and character, a character with fears and limitations that no human could ever hope to interpret with any certainty-- not that they wouldn't try. In fact, lots of well-intentioned people would claim they knew exactly what was best for this whale. And they would be arguing and fighting over those interpretations for years.

It wasn't just Renata and the other trainers who loved Keiko, or even just the people in Mexico City who went to see Keiko at Reino Aventura. It seems like pretty much every kid in Mexico knew him. He was beloved, a kind of national mascot.

Daniel Alarcón

One person I spoke to compared him to a Mexican Mickey Mouse. And in fact, a lot of people assumed that Keiko was Mexican, like actually from Mexico. They never considered that he could have come from anywhere else. He was just theirs.

We talked to lots of people who grew up in Mexico City in the '80s and '90s, and they said again and again that Keiko had an aura about him, that seeing him at Reino Aventura was like hanging out with your 7,000-pound best friend, the killer whale you told your secrets to-- what was happening at school, who your crush was. It was that kind of relationship.

If you watched television in Mexico in the late '80s or early '90s, chances were that sooner or later, you'd see Keiko. He was in Reino Aventura commercials, of course. There were pop songs dedicated to him.

Daniel Alarcón

He even starred in a telenovela as himself.

Daniel Alarcón

And then there were the shows, when visitors got to see their beloved pet up close. Reino Aventura doesn't exist anymore-- not under that name anyway. It's since been acquired by Six Flags. But back in its heyday, in the early '90s, Keiko was the star attraction. And these shows, they were legendary.

At the peak of his fame, there might have been 200 people lining up a couple of hours before the gates opened. A pair of clowns marched around, playing trumpets, entertaining Keiko's fans as they filed in. On weekends, there were three shows a day, more than 3,000 seats consistently packed. I had Renata walk me through one of the routines. First it was the sea lions, then the dolphins, including Richie. And then--

Daniel Alarcón

There were so many people clamoring to see Keiko up close that his veterinarian told me they set up a kind of receiving line. He even compared the crowds to the believers who wait in line to see the Virgin of Guadalupe-- that reverential, that devoted.

So that's Keiko, occasional TV star, quasi saint, telepathic confidante, and best friend to countless Mexican children. And this was his life-- constant attention from his trainers, games with his favorite dolphin buddies, performances for thousands of adoring fans. But it was all about to change.

In 1992, Reino Aventura was set to close for some much-needed renovations, which meant Keiko had some free time-- six months with no shows and no crowds. So when a production company proposed to film a movie with Keiko, the park's director, Oscar Porter, thought, what the hell? Why not? It wasn't much money, but it might keep Keiko entertained.

Once he said yes to the movie, Porter didn't give it much more thought. He was busy overseeing all the details of the park's upgrades, the installation of new rides, new contracts with vendors, more than 600 employees. He told me he didn't even read the script.

But that script is why we're telling you the story, why you probably already know who Keiko is, even if it's by a different name. The studio behind this proposal was the American movie powerhouse, Warner Brothers. And Keiko was about to get the name you might know him by-- Willy, Free Willy.

Daniel Alarcón

If you're my age-- mid 40s-- you've probably seen the movie. But if not, or it's been a minute, here's a quick refresher. Lauren Shuler Donner, one of the producers, told me the movie could be boiled down to this-- bad kid, bad whale. The bad kid is a moody 12-year-old named Jesse.

Daniel Alarcón

The bad whale is Willy, captured and separated from his pod, stuck in a small pool in a ramshackle aquarium. The park staff find him stubborn, hard to train. He has three black spots on the underside of his jaw. His dorsal fin droops to one side, a killer whale's version of an emo haircut. Jesse decides he has to save Willy's life, get him back to the ocean, back to his family, and somehow, against all kinds of obstacles, he does.

Daniel Alarcón

The movie poster is what most people remember. It's the image that was absorbed into the culture, a still from the film's climax-- Willy in mid-flight against an orange sunset, jumping over a breakwater. The ocean beckons. The boy stands just below Willy, beneath an arc of sea spray, a triumphant arm pointing to the sky. The tagline reads, "How far would you go for a friend?"

Daniel Alarcón

When it came to who would play Willy, it wasn't like Warner Brothers had a ton of killer whales to choose from. A producer on the film told us her team approached a few different marine parks, but people weren't excited about the message of the movie and wanted changes to the script.

Finally, they landed on Reino Aventura, who signed off, as we mentioned, without even reading it. And Keiko, it turns out, was perfect for the part. See, for the film to work, the producers needed something very specific, a kind of sad-looking whale living in less than ideal conditions. They needed a whale kids would feel sorry for, a whale children would want to save.

And the fact is, while Keiko might have been happy, he wasn't actually that healthy. He was a couple thousand pounds underweight, not because he was underfed, but probably because the warm water affected his appetite. He had a skin rash, too, something called papillomavirus, which looked bad, even though the veterinarian at Reino Aventura said it wasn't that serious.

But most striking of all was his tank. It was small, disturbingly small. One of the film's producers joked it was smaller than some swimming pools in Beverly Hills. The water he swam in wasn't even seawater, just fresh water with salt added. Renata says they checked the salt levels frequently, and they weren't under any illusions that Keiko's living conditions were ideal. She told me Reino Aventura looked into building a larger pool, but just couldn't make it work financially.

So strip away for a moment almost everything I've told you. Forget the love and the games and the trainers and the fans and see instead what the camera sees-- Keiko, a smaller-than-average killer whale with a droopy dorsal fin swimming alone in a tiny, shallow pool. He was exactly what the movie required.

Free Willy was released on July 16, 1993, and the reviews were positive, at least until journalists started asking what was up with the star of the movie. And news reports about Keiko's subpar living conditions and health began spreading.

Daniel Alarcón

Soon enough, Keiko had gone from Mexico's beloved pet to Mexico's dying orca. And kids around the world were not happy.

Daniel Alarcón

In Mexico, Reino Aventura and the staff were suddenly having to defend themselves in ways they hadn't before, trying to convince crusading celebrities and animal rights activists that they did, indeed, care about Keiko's well-being. When Life Magazine published an article describing Keiko's tank as a "cesspool," Reino Aventura's director, Oscar Porter, sent a letter claiming the magazine had gotten it all wrong, that Keiko's water was, quote, "clean and clear."

Back in Hollywood, Warner Brothers was getting hammered, too. Bags and bags of mail from kids arrived at the offices, all demanding the same thing-- free Willy, or rather, free Keiko. And so if the studio wanted to avoid a PR nightmare and not break the hearts of millions of children, then it was clear-- someone had to save him in real life.

Ira Glass

Daniel Alarcón. That's after the break, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. We pick up the story of Keiko where we left off. Here's Daniel Alarcón.

Daniel Alarcón

For centuries, we humans hunted and killed whales as if their numbers were infinite. And over time, we got better and better at it, more efficient, more ruthless, extracting more value from each kill. We harvested their blubber, their organs, their baleen, their meat, and it was all transformed into everyday commercial products, from makeup to heating oil. More than 700,000 whales were killed in the 1960s. Whaling was a huge global industry, with profits to match.

The killing of orcas was a little different since they didn't have much to offer us, commercially speaking. But humans being humans, we killed them anyway-- for fear, for sport, for bloodlust. Fishermen trawling for herring or salmon saw them as competitors, so they would shoot them on sight. The US Navy would use orca pods for target practice. All told, it's estimated that some 3 million individual whales were killed by humans in the 20th century.

By the early 1970s, scientists understood that whales were far more scarce than we'd all previously thought and began warning that the steep declines they were seeing in wild populations might be irreversible. In response, the Save the Whales movement was born, with the goal of ending commercial whaling worldwide, a bold, quixotic idea to convince the countries that still practiced whaling to simply stop.

I'm telling you all this because in a way, everything that happens to Keiko a couple of decades later is a result of it, of this idea that these creatures were worth protecting. And it's also when this next significant person in Keiko's life enters the story, a guy by the name of Dave Phillips.

Daniel Alarcón

It was the late '70s. The Save the Whales campaign was just starting to pick up steam, and Dave wanted in. So he packed up his life, drove his turquoise Volkswagen Rabbit out to California, and soon joined the movement to do his part.

Daniel Alarcón

So yeah, he was kind of a hippie. But he was a hippie with a degree in biology, who found he was too impatient to spend his adult life in a lab studying the minutiae of wildlife without doing anything to save it. Given the scale of the environmental crisis he saw, science moved too slowly for him.

The central message for the Save the Whales campaign was simple-- whales are not commodities. They're living beings. This message was everywhere. There were bumper stickers and T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Save the Whales," the slogan itself becoming so ubiquitous, it was almost cliché, played as a punchline. There were Save the Whales marches and rallies across the world, and Dave was there for all of it.

Most importantly, he was there in 1982, a pivotal moment in his career, when the International Whaling Commission caved to the pressure and voted to impose a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling. They'd done it. They'd saved the whales from what many felt was their almost certain extinction.

So Dave learned two things. One, to succeed, your message had to be everywhere. If your slogan becomes a joke, so be it. At least people are hearing the message. And two, whales are magic. It's that simple. They're just one of those species that people fall in love with.

A decade later, in the '90s, Dave's still in the environmental movement, still advocating for wild whales and attending meetings. And it's at one of these meetings in Glasgow when he gets a call. He's out to dinner with a few colleagues when somebody comes up to the table and says--

Daniel Alarcón

I haven't introduced you to Dick Donner yet, but I did mention his wife, Lauren Shuler Donner. Together, they were a legit Hollywood power couple, producing or directing blockbusters like The Goonies and Superman.

Dick has since passed away, but Lauren told me that they both were self-proclaimed animal lunatics. Dave had actually worked with the couple before. They asked him to consult on a few lines of pro-dolphin dialogue in the buddy cop movie Lethal Weapon 2.

Daniel Alarcón

It was small, barely a scene, but Dick felt good about it. And now he had something bigger in mind-- Free Willy, a movie he and Lauren were putting together. And Dick wanted Dave's help.

Daniel Alarcón

The whaling ban Dave had fought for all those years ago protected whales from commercial slaughter, but some species were still captured or killed on a smaller scale. The way Dave saw it, Dick and Lauren were offering him an opportunity to finish the job he'd started all those years ago, a chance to save the rest of the whales.

Dave and the producers started with something simple-- an 800 number that would pop up on the screen at the end of the movie credits. The idea was that people would call, leave their address, and Dave's organization, Earth Island Institute, would send them a packet of information about the plight of whales across the world, how they could help.

Daniel Alarcón

Nothing too elaborate. You called the number, you got a kit. But fast forward a year, and once the movie was released and word got out that the star of Free Willy was sick and still living in a tiny pool in Mexico, well, calling an 800 number and getting a kit just didn't feel like enough. Dave remembers Dick phoning him up again and saying--

Daniel Alarcón

Now Dick was proposing something far more ambitious, something that honestly sounded a little nuts.

Daniel Alarcón

Rescuing Keiko from his life in captivity and releasing him back into the ocean, like in the movie.

Daniel Alarcón

What fans of the movie wanted was to see their favorite celebrity orca back in the ocean. But that wasn't so simple. First off, nothing quite this ambitious had ever been attempted. True, other captive marine mammals had been released to the wild, but they hadn't been in captivity nearly as long as Keiko.

So saving Keiko would require an extraordinary effort. Dick Donner wanted Dave to do it, but this wasn't exactly Dave's specialty. His whole career had been focused on big, huge problems, protecting the ocean and saving wild whales, plural.

What Dick was proposing in response to the public outcry around the movie was much narrower in scope-- saving the whale, singular. Dave remembers telling Dick Donner essentially, thanks, but I'm not the right guy for this job. But it seems Dick wouldn't take no for an answer.

Daniel Alarcón

And there was something about this that resonated. Think of it this way. If you're Dave or an environmentalist of his generation, crazy doesn't necessarily mean impossible. Just a few years before, in 1990, an estimated 200 million people took part in Earth Day celebrations, the most ever by far. This is the decade of the Earth Summit in Rio, the Kyoto Protocol-- big, coordinated global actions to combat climate change and environmental damage.

In 1985, scientists announced that they'd discovered a hole in the ozone layer. And by the '90s, an international treaty was in place to ban some of the chemicals thought to have created it, and it seemed to work. The ozone layer began to heal itself.

Even I remember, and I was just a kid. Those years were my childhood, a time I remember as fundamentally optimistic. We learned about separating our trash in school, reduce, reuse, recycle imprinted on the brain.

We learned about the Amazon and the dangers of climate change, which still felt so far away. We didn't despair because we thought we could still work together to save the planet, that if people just knew what was happening, we'd do the right thing and that the right thing would be clear to all of us.

That's the moment we're in, the moment Dave's in. And so, sure, saving Keiko sounds a bit nutty, but maybe if you've seen what he's seen, that sort of thing doesn't scare you. So Dave said, OK, I'll check it out. I'll fly down to Mexico City and meet Keiko. He was, if not hopeful, intrigued, until he got there and realized this is a terrible idea.

By the time Dave visited, Keiko was a teenager and had been living in Mexico City for about 8 and 1/2 years. Dave could see right away, this captive whale was nowhere near ready to live in the ocean. A wild orca can swim over 100 miles a day. Keiko was basically the aquatic equivalent of a couch potato.

Daniel Alarcón

I asked Dave to tick through the reasons Keiko was not an ideal candidate to rewild, and there were many. Before they could even think of releasing him back into the ocean, Keiko needed to get rid of his papillomavirus, but also get stronger, healthier, put on weight. And there was no way he could do that in his current tank at Reino Aventura.

Daniel Alarcón

The bill for that alone would probably be millions of dollars, and then they'd have to spend years and millions more teaching him the most basic ocean survival skills and pray that some of those lessons took. Keiko had lived in the care of humans and without his family since he was around two, missing out on years of life in a pod, years of company and hunting and language and what I can only think of as camaraderie, the kind of social environment that makes a killer whale a killer whale.

He had millions of human fans, but not a single orca friend. There were so many things he'd never learned. Not only did Keiko not know how to hunt for food, he didn't know how to eat live fish. Think about that. If you put a live fish in his mouth, this killer whale wouldn't eat it.

And language, Keiko had stopped making most of the sounds in a wild whale's repertoire years before. Pods have different dialects, and it was unlikely Keiko even remembered the dialect he spoke before his capture. This was crucially important to his survival.

Orcas very rarely live alone in the open ocean, so if he was to make it out there, Dave knew Keiko would have to be integrated into a pod, his original pod, preferably. But if he didn't speak their language, that was going to be difficult. And then there was the small detail that no one knew for certain which pod that might be, or where to find them-- somewhere in the North Atlantic, near Iceland, presumably.

Daniel Alarcón

So 10 impossible steps, at least. But let's be real. For Dave, it was also one giant opportunity. Up until this point, Dave had been thinking about Keiko the way everyone in the world was thinking about Keiko-- as one individual killer whale in need of saving.

But what if he allowed himself to see it differently? He'd experienced firsthand the hold that whales had over people at anti-whaling marches across the world. He'd seen the power that media campaigns could wield with the Save the Whales movement. This could be something much bigger. What if Keiko, the individual, could become Keiko the symbol? What if you could use Keiko to tell a story about the ocean itself?

Daniel Alarcón

And Dave knew you could do a lot with that kind of star power, with that kind of attention. So he set aside his doubts and decided that, yes, as absurd as it sounded, he was all in.

Once they've committed to getting Keiko out of Mexico, the next step was logistics. And what I'm about to say is pretty obvious, but it's worth saying anyway-- moving an orca is not easy. One of the first things Dave did was create a whole new organization, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. The US Humane Society chipped in a million dollars. Dave secured a couple million more from a billionaire cell phone magnate.

Warner Brothers also agreed to put in $2 million, which sounds like a lot until you consider they made $150 million on Free Willy. And by this point, the sequel, Free Willy 2, was already in production. Still, with that money, Dave was able to convince a small marine park in Oregon to let the foundation build them a new, much bigger pool just for Keiko.

And so now, all Dave needed was the whale, which you might assume would be the hard part, given that Keiko was the main attraction at Reino Aventura. But it turned out that Oscar Porter, the director of Reino Aventura, wasn't opposed to the idea of giving him up. He had a whole park to run, and managing his most famous attraction had become an all-consuming headache. There were journalists and activists to deal with, Mexican television stars and singers calling to arrange private swims with Keiko.

Porter told me he was spending three hours a day dealing with Keiko-related nonsense-- which is a lot, sure, but most worrying of all was what some of the outside veterinarians were saying, that Keiko might die soon. Porter really didn't want that to happen at Reino Aventura. So over the course of several months, Dave and Oscar Porter made a deal. Reino Aventura agreed to donate Keiko to Dave's foundation for free.

Daniel Alarcón

In February 1995, it was announced to the world that Keiko would be leaving Reino Aventura for his new temporary home at an aquarium on the Oregon Coast in an enormous new tank with cold seawater. Dave laid out a vision for Keiko's future, invoking the plot to Free Willy 2, which would hit theaters a few months later.

Daniel Alarcón

Rescue, rehab, release. That was Dave's ultimate plan, even if the last part seemed improbable at best. For Keiko's trainer Renata and many of the staff that worked closely with Keiko, the decision to let him leave was heartbreaking, even if they knew it was the right one.

Giving him up was a kind of noble, even maternal, sacrifice. That's how Renata saw it, which, of course, didn't make it hurt any less. Goodbyes are like that, especially when you can't explain what the future holds. You feel guilty, like you're betraying a friend.

And across Mexico, a lot of people were feeling this way. They wanted him to stay. They wished he could stay. But letting him go was a sacrifice they were willing to make because they loved him, and they wanted what was best for him. Which is why it was so offensive to Renata and many others I talked to, to hear how the story was being told in the US, that Keiko was being saved from a terrible life in Mexico.

Daniel Alarcón

A few days before Keiko was scheduled to leave Mexico, the Reino Aventura staff threw him one last party, a kind of final spring break bash. Everyone was invited-- current trainers, former staff, all of Keiko's friends, his extended human pod.

Daniel Alarcón

On January 6, 1996, it was time for Keiko to go. They decided to move him in the middle of the night for a few reasons-- to avoid the heat and the traffic, but also the crowds that were sure to want to say their goodbyes.

Moving any object as big as a killer whale is an engineering problem, but when that object is a living thing, there's an added complication. Getting Keiko out of Reino Aventura and onto a plane would depend in no small measure on the cooperation of Keiko himself, and that required training. For months, they'd worked on it with him.

First, he'd swim into a small, shallow pool and then into a custom-made sling, swimming in and out of it, weeks spent just getting comfortable with this process. He had to be comfortable because once he was in that sling, he'd stay wrapped in it for at least 14 hours. The challenge would be to keep him calm. He had to trust his humans, not fight or flail. Trust.

The night of the move, it's noisy and chaotic. I've seen the videos, and it's just manic. It doesn't look like an aquarium or even an amusement park. It looks like a construction site. All this movement and whirring of motors and beeps and shouting and lights. Renata stayed close to Keiko, touching him close to his eyes so he could see her.

But when it was time for him to swim into the shallow pool where the sling awaited him, he refused, and there was nothing they could do to persuade him. Finally, a dozen people in wetsuits encircled him with a net and pulled him into place. In the shallow pool, Renata and the other trainer dried him off before applying moisturizer all over his body-- actually, the same stuff you might put on a baby to protect from diaper rash.

Daniel Alarcón

Once Keiko was in the sling, it was attached to a crane that lifted him out of the pool and placed him in a shipping container filled with 3,000 pounds of fresh water ice. The container sat on the back of a tractor trailer, ready for the hour or so drive across the city to the airport. Once there, it would be loaded onto a giant cargo plane. David convinced UPS to deliver Keiko to Oregon for free.

When the caravan finally left, there were crowds, more than they'd expected-- ordinary people who loved this killer whale, whole families, children who dragged their parents out in the middle of the night to say goodbye, all gathered just outside the gates of the Reino Aventura parking lot, so many that police had to move them just so the caravan could pass.

And they soon discovered it wasn't just at the gates that the crowds had gathered. It was everywhere. I've talked to a lot of people who were there that night, lining the streets, desperate to say their farewells. One person told me the only thing he could compare it to was the time the Pope visited Mexico City. The route to the airport was supposed to be secret, but that's not how it worked out. Reporters kept the city abreast of the caravan's progress.

Daniel Alarcón

There were thousands of people lining the streets--

Daniel Alarcón

--boys in their pajamas carrying handwritten signs and girls in pigtails carrying Mexican flags, teens shouting and calling Keiko's name. You have to wonder if the whale could hear them chanting, [SPANISH]. "He should stay. He should stay."

Daniel Alarcón

Then, somewhere along the slow, ponderous route to the airport, there was a mariachi band playing an old song about a loved one's goodbye, "Las Golondrinas." "Where can the tired swallow go?" say the lyrics. "Tossed by the wind with nowhere to hide. Remember my homeland, beloved pilgrim, and cry."

[SIRENS WAILING]

Cars and mopeds follow the procession, drivers waving, honking their horns.

[HORNS HONKING]

Honestly, it's a little bit mad-- the emotion on people's faces, the palpable sense of loss. Dave says some people had to be peeled off Keiko's container as they tried to climb it. The procession just creeps along as best they can, through the impossibly crowded late night streets. A city, a country saying goodbye to its beloved whale.

Daniel Alarcón

The UPS plane carrying Keiko to his new home leaves at around 5:00 in the morning, more than three hours behind schedule, just before a beautiful Mexican sunrise. Only Keiko's veterinarians fly with him. Renata and Dave fly alongside in another aircraft, close enough to see Keiko's plane from their window.

Keiko no longer belonged to Reino Aventura, and much less to Mexico. He belonged to the story being told about him, the uncertain real-life sequel to the movie that had made him a star, only more far-fetched and with no happy ending assured.

Daniel Alarcón

For the moment, no one knew.

Ira Glass

Daniel Alarcón, host of the new podcast series, The Good Whale. Of course, as the story unfolds, we hear exactly how far they go to help Keiko. The series is produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times. You can hear episode 2 right now, wherever you get your podcasts.

The New York Times subscribers can hear the entire series right now, including episode 5, which is the episode that is a musical, like an old-school musical from Keiko's point of view, created by the songwriters who did La La Land and Dear Evan Hansen, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, sung by Jordan Fisher and other actual Broadway stars. Daniel also did a Spanish language version of episode 1 that you can hear on Radio Ambulante.

Coming up, some other animals get thrown into show business, and they don't seem to be so crazy about it. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Truly Incredible Story of Keiko the Killer Whale. We've arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, "America's Next Top Gobble."

So thinking about what kind of story would go with Keiko today, we found this one, also about our dominion over animals' fates. In this case, it's a bunch of birds who are going through months of training for an extremely specific task that is very different from anything they naturally do on their own. Diane Wu has the story.

Diane Wu

There's this barn in Southeastern Minnesota I want to tell you about. On the outside, it's very plain. It's white, next to a field, smells a little like skunk. But inside, there's this whole project that's been going on for months now.

Diane Wu

They are turkeys, not just any turkeys.

Diane Wu

This is the group of birds contending to be the special Thanksgiving turkeys at the White House. Two of them will be selected to go to Washington and be officially pardoned by the president. It's an annual tradition going back decades, organized by the Turkey Lobby. The person showing me around today is John Zimmerman, who's raising these birds, with the help of his shy nine-year-old son, Grant.

To decide which turkeys make it to the White House, John is basically selecting for the ones that act least like a turkey. He needs two that can stand politely on a special stage while voices boom out over loudspeakers, all in front of hundreds of people-- schoolchildren, photographers, military band. Most commercial turkeys would freak out in this noisy, unfamiliar, unbarn-like environment.

Diane Wu

John's an industry lifer. He grew up on a turkey farm and took over the family business 25 years ago when his dad passed away. Each year, John raises around 140,000 birds in many giant barns.

These presidential turkeys are a brand new thing for him, though. He's the chairman of the National Turkey Federation. And the way it works is that every year, that's the person who's in charge of raising these presidential turkeys and taking them to the White House.

But being chairman is only a one-year gig. So every chairman is in the situation of being a total novice at training turkeys to be on television, something turkeys have no interest in or talent for at all. And they get exactly one shot to get it right, right in front of the president of the United States.

Diane Wu

He's been watching lots of YouTube videos of previous White House turkey pardonings, trying to anticipate everything that can go wrong. The birds that don't get taken to the White House get put back in with the regular turkeys and then slaughtered. It's an avian Hunger Games in here. And whoever wins will be basically the only two commercial turkeys in America, out of over 200 million raised each year, who get to live.

Diane Wu

Apparently female turkeys share the same problem as female women in this country, in terms of getting to the White House. The males are the only ones anyone considers because they strut, which, in a turkey, means they puff up their chests, their snoods and waddles turn bright red, and their tail feathers spread out like a peacock's.

By the way, I was surprised to see that all of these turkeys are white, not brown. John tells me it's because brown feathers left dark spots in the skin, which people didn't like. He points over at a turkey with big snood energy.

Diane Wu

We both glance at the nine-year-old.

Diane Wu

This kind of strut is exactly what John is hoping two exceptional turkeys can bring to the White House. So he's outfitted the barn into a sort of South Lawn boot camp. He and Grant give me a tour. First, to get the turkeys used to noise and random human voices, John plays the radio for them every day, from dawn to dusk. This is a tip he got from previous chairmen.

Diane Wu

Grant corrects his dad. Power 96 radio, he's saying.

[POP MUSIC PLAYING]

[TURKEYS GOBBLING]

Diane Wu

Next, John got this special light off of Amazon, the kind that projects colored patterns onto your house at Christmas.

Diane Wu

Grant marches in with a kid-sized picnic chair and plops it down in the middle of the flock.

Diane Wu

This is to get them used to being around people. John's also enlisted the neighbor kids to come by regularly to sit with the birds and pick them up a lot. At this point, a few weeks out from Thanksgiving, it all comes down to who's hot. The next culling will be for beauty.

Diane Wu

But none of them are jumping out to him yet. There's a test John's going to run on the birds soon. He and Grant have built a box to mimic the ones that the turkeys stand on at the South Lawn. And he plans to put each of these birds on the box and see who stays on it the longest. He wants them to hit at least a minute. They did a trial run back in September. He shows me the notes.

John goes to get a turkey, and Grant explains how his dad picks it up.

Diane Wu

We watched the bird hunch kind of nervously for 48 seconds. He doesn't strut.

Diane Wu

The whole time I'm talking to John, Grant is quietly running around us, inventing chores for himself. He brings in a pumpkin, feeds it to the turkeys, tries to turn on the Christmas lights, keeps picking up different birds, gets a random medal and puts it on one of them, climbs up onto the makeshift stage and squats down, posing as a turkey.

I get the feeling that he really wants to show me all of this. He's excited to share his turkey project, but is too shy to say much or directly get my attention. John's going to be bringing Grant to the White House, too, later this month.

Diane Wu

Part of that training is watching past pardoning ceremonies on YouTube together. Part of it is getting him to talk to strangers, like me.

Diane Wu

John's hoping that at the big press conference, when it's time to announce the turkeys' names, Grant will say them. The week of Thanksgiving, when I watch all of this, that's the part I'm going to be leaning in for-- not to see whether or not the turkey flaps on the box, but Grant's moment to take the stage and strut, if he wants.

Ira Glass

Diane Wu is one of the producers of our show.

["WHALE" BY YELLOW OSTRICH]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Sean Cole. The people put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Jendayi Bonds, Michael Comite, Henry Larson, Miki Meek, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Ryan Rumery, Lilly Sullivan, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks to Jessica Lussenhop, Michelle Kromm, Peter Gruhl, Marisa Erasmus, and Jason Fields. Serial's new series about Keiko, The Good Whale, was co-reported by Daniel Alarcón and Katie Mingle, produced by Katie and Alissa Shipp. It was edited by Jen Guerra, with help from Julie Snyder, Carlos Lopez Estrada, and myself. Sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

Original score from La Chica and Hausmane. The song "Las Golondrinas" was performed by Mariachi Hidalgo NYC. Research and fact-checking by Jane Ackermann, with help from Ben Phelan. Other people who put together The Good Whale include Ndeye Thiobou, Mack Miller, Liz Davis Moorer, Susan Wessling, Al-Amyn Sumar, and Simone Procas.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. A note to our This American Life Partners-- We just released a bonus episode that is a conversation about some very fun, very old stories with producer Zoe Chace. So check your feeds for that.

To everybody else, to become a Life Partner and get bonus content, ad-free listening, AMAs, and other stuff, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. The link is also in the show notes of this episode.

Thanks, as always, to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He knows his name pops up in my cell phone every time he calls, but still, he opens every single conversation the same way every single time--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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