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The Current Transcript for December 27, 2016

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

And the ingredients are togetherness, good lighting, relaxation, indulgence, savouring simple pleasures, gratefulness.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: The CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Denmark likely knows a thing or two about the recipe for being happy. But he says the most important ingredient is a distinctly Danish one. It's called hygge and it's kind of hard to translate, but everyone seems to want a piece of it. First up today, why the Danish art of coziness has become an almost worldwide lifestyle goal that some argue is just too good to be true. Also today—

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Defibrillator]

PC: It's been the site of countless medical miracles and miseries. The Hospital for Sick Children is one of the best children's hospitals in the world. But it began in a Toronto slum out of a rented house with only a handful of beds. The year was 1875, a time when hospitals were considered places that only the poor would dare to go. In half an hour from now, we're diving deep into the history of the Hospital for Sick Children, one marked by both achievement and by scandal. And finally today—

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Killer whale]

PC: He was the orca that changed the way we look at so-called “killer whales.” Moby Doll was captured over 50 years ago off the coast of Saturna Island in BC. He didn't leave live long in captivity but his life disrupted our understanding of a misunderstood species. In an hour, the story of the orca that inspired a generation of scientists to take up whale research. Hi, I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and this is The Current.

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In troubled times, Danish art of 'coziness' sparks international trend

Guests: Louisa Thomsen Brits, Michael Booth

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hi, I just arrived here in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. And ever since I got here, people are talking about this hygge. It's pronounced HIG-yeah. And if you look it up in the dictionary, it says something like “good social atmosphere, coziness” and I'm going to try to find out what it actually is. Yo get as much hygge as I possibly can in just one day, I'm going to do what the Copenhageners do and I'm going to get me a bike. What's the most hygge bike here?

VOICE 2: Definitely this one. You can throw your friend in the front. Take your children to and from school and it’s got a good ring to it.

[Sound: Bike bell]

VOICE 1: What would you rate this bike in hygge from one to 10?

VOICE 2: Ten.

[Sound: Bike bell]

VOICE 2: Definitely.

PC: Well, that's a quick primer on the art of hygge from Visit Denmark, Denmark's official tourism website. Anyone who speaks Danish will tell you that hygge is a word that's hard to translate, and for those of us who don't speak Danish, hard to pronounce. Think of it as the art of nesting, of seeking coziness, comfort and connection. It's a centuries-old part of Danish culture, but hygge has also become trendy. Social media platforms are teeming with pictures of falling leaves and bowls of pumpkin soup, woolly socks and intimate gatherings around the fireplace. There are more than a million hygge-related posts on Instagram, and Pinterest has seen an exponential increase in hygge-themed pins over the last few years. The surge in hygge hype has some enthusiasts worried that its popularity is taking away from its emotional and spiritual meaning. Well, with chilly temperatures outside and warm holiday gatherings inside, there really is no better time to talk about hygge. Today we're asking what it means and what it can teach us. Louisa Thomsen Brits is the author of The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well and she joins us from the village of Ripe in East Sussex, England. Hello.

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: Hello, Piya.

PC: First of all, how do you pronounce this word?

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: HOU-ga.

PC: HOU-ga. Not HIG-ah. It’s very difficult.

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: Well, you know I don’t think it really matters so much how you pronounce it as how we engage with the sentiment behind it.

PC: Fair enough. Well, explain to me then, what it means.

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: To me, hygge is a feeling of contentment and ease, an experience of relatedness. Just a feeling of belonging to the moment and to each other. Brief restorative pause. You can hygge alone. You can hygge with others. Really, hygge happens anywhere that we feel warm and safe, comforted and sheltered.

PC: And so how is it part of your day to day life? Give me some examples.

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: We hygge when we eat together. Of course, sharing food is the epitome of hygge—when you share food and thoughts and ideas and laughter. Those are the times when rich connections are made. Shared silence as well. I like to sit outside around the fire with my family in winter and summer and I love to hygge alone in bed with a book or lying spoons in the dark with my husband.

PC: I don't mean to be too skeptical because this is a Danish phenomenon. I want you to explain it beyond what I’m kind of hearing from you, which is this is just about being mindful and taking a breath or a pause in your day. What's the difference?

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: It is a brief restorative pause, but I think that's probably where the similarity to mindfulness ends. And I think it's a mindfulness that’s more akin to noticing and to paying attention than it is to navel gazing or contemplation.

PC: And when you do this, you can do this by yourself or you can do this with a group of friends or your family. When you're with others, what are the rules of hygge? How do you make everyone pause and take comfort?

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: Essentially, hygge is about creating a circle of warmth. It's an uncomplicated moment of relatedness and contentment and ease. And to a degree, it's articulated by contrast, by the sense that you are engaged in this wonderful experience of belonging togetherness and engaged lovingly and intimately with each other and with the world around you. And I suppose it's about putting distractions and cares aside and making time for yourself and each other, creating a welcoming atmosphere. Establishing a point of focus is an easy way to hygge—make tea or share a meal or make conversation. Open a book or play cards or put on a movie and create the circle of warmth by dimming the lights or lighting a candle or articulating your desire to be together by pulling the furniture closer together and kind of coming to your senses. You're aware of everything around you and you know the materiality of our lives comes into the fore of our awareness when we hygge—natural fabrics and scents and comfort that is a vernacular that's calming to us all.

PC: So no arguing about politics or religion when you're doing this with others.

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: [laughs] No, ideally not. The idea when we hygge is to put our cares and our distractions and possibly our differences aside and engage wholeheartedly and inclusively with each other for that brief period of time.

PC: Where does this all begin for the Danes? How did this become a concept? Do you know?

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: I think hygge is associated with smallness and Denmark used to be a very broad empire but lost much of its territory in the 18th and 19th century. And the Danes at that point were encouraged to identify with smallness—to look inwards, to not to see the outward loss as a disaster, but as an inward gain and begin to identify with smallness and a distinct Danish identity and paying attention to each other and to the possibilities of the moment. It's facilitated by small means. So good company and shelter and warmth.

PC: And nowadays, when you go about your business in Denmark, do people say hey, what did you do for your hygge time today or what did you do today? Is it a conversation point amongst people?

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: No, I don’t think it’s a conversation point. I think it's so deeply embedded in Danish life and Danish vocabulary. So I think people often, if you come across somebody on the street and you stop and you talk for five minutes together and you give each other a hug and you go your separate ways, you often end that moment of intimacy and relatedness by saying you know that was hygge-ish. That was a moment of hygge. So it's something that's acknowledged regularly throughout the day and also something that's sought to a degree. Quite often you’ll say well, now let's go home and hygge. Let’s have a hygge-ish moment. Let's have a hygge-ish evening. So it is part of intention. Definitely.

PC: And outside of Denmark, as I said in the introduction, there's a lot of interest and strong marketing aspect nowadays to hygge, including you know cozy socks in these images that we have of a quaint Denmark that we want to you know import into our own lives. And it means different things as you say to different people in Denmark. But what do you think about the marketing aspect of all of this?

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: I think hygge has been hijacked by the marketeers and by the politicians. I think anything that appeals to our emotions in the way that hygge does, is likely to be taken on by ad men and by politicians in order to appeal to our emotions and steer our desires to meet their own ends.

PC: Louisa Thomsen Brits, just hold on a bit. I want to bring someone else into our conversation who has a different view on this. Michael Booth is a journalist and author who says don't believe the hygge hype. His latest book is called The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of The Scandinavian Utopia. Michael's a British ex-pat living in Denmark, but today he is with us from the south of France. Hello to you.

MICHAEL BOOTH: Hi, hello. Good to talk to you.

PC: Are you hygge-ing in the south of France?

MICHAEL BOOTH: Umm… I’m having a very nice time and it's a lovely sunny day with blue skies, which you don't get often in Denmark in December. So maybe not hygge. I don't know.

PC: What has been your experience? As I said, you live in Denmark most of the year. What has been your experience with the hygge?

MICHAEL BOOTH: Well, you always hear that hygge is untranslatable but it's not. It's very easy to translate. It just really does mean conviviality or coziness and we all know how to do that. You do it in Canada. We do it in the UK. Everyone does it. But the difference is the Danes talk about it all the time and they have this word for it. So it's a core element of their culture. And as your previous speaker correctly pointed out, it's a historical thing that goes back to their loss of empire, to their withdrawal into themselves. It's very much about head in the sand. It's a kind of hibernation, a permanent state of hibernation the Danes are in. But the difference is they talk about it all the time and it is the ultimate goal of every moment of every day. In every situation, the Dane will be attempting to make hygge-ly, whether it’s a visit to the dentist or if they're filling in their tax returns. They can make anything hygge-ly or cozy.

PC: I'm guessing you're not a fan of this from what you're saying. It annoys you a little bit.

MICHAEL BOOTH: Well, no. It doesn’t annoy me at all. You know hygge’s a fantastic thing. It's lovely. You know it's like you can't hate hygge. That would be like hating puppies or kittens or something. But I have grown a little bit frustrated with the recent hype about it. I'm a little bit befuddled by it really and I've watched it being kind of turned often by ex-pat authors into something that it's not, into something commercial about selling candles and socks—and I'm afraid to say books as well—but we’re all a little bit guilty of that. So it's been a little bit twisted and it's been elevated into something aspirational but it's not that. It’s just having a cozy time and that's great. And we all like to nest particularly this time of year and the Danes are experts at it, but sometimes it can be a little bit boring, a little bit suffocating, a little bit stultifying when everyone tries to seek—like [unintelligible] missile—this middle ground where everything is kind of cozy and non-confrontational and non-controversial. And you basically spend most of the time talking about what you did in your holidays last year, what you're going to do on your holidays next year, how much this bottle of wine cost, whether it’s better than the bottle one you just opened—and that kind of conversational spiraling can be a little bit just boring sometimes.

PC: Okay. So you don't like the marketing aspect, the export of it, as we see of many cultural things around the world, where they’re exported, they’re you know torqued up by the marketing thing and they lose their authenticity and what they really come from. But how does Michael—how does hygge fit into the national identity of Denmark? You know when we think of Denmark, you know they're making happiness indexes, they got all these wonderful things. It's the kind of country that many people around the world look up to. Talk to us about the national identity of Denmark and how hygge fits into that.

MICHAEL BOOTH: Well, it is a core element of how they see themselves. They see themselves as hygge-ly people and a hygge-ly tribe, if you like, although this has been a bit challenged in recent years by the rise of the right wing and the attitudes to immigration and the kind of nationalistic fervor that some parts of aspects of the political spectrum have been whipping up. And so there's a dark side to hygge in that sense, in that it has been slightly appropriated by the right to reinforce a sense of Danish-ness or what they see as the correct type of Danish-ness, and by that, they just mean you know people who are ethnically Danish. And actually hygge can in that way be a little bit excluding because like all rituals, it has its rules and regulations and to foreigners, they can actually be quite difficult to navigate early on.

PC: Like what?

MICHAEL BOOTH: Well, again, around the dinner table, when the candles are lit and you’re drinking the red wine, you just need to be aware not to talk too much about politics or religion or money or the kind of things that can cause difference between people. If it was in the UK, you’d try and avoid Brexit, for example. If you were an American, you might try and avoid talking about Trump and those kind of things. And if you do, as a foreigner, like a little bit of a ding dong discussion about things, they won't shut you down but they'll just gently guide the conversation back to what you do in your holidays, and that Netflix series you were watching last week and that kind of thing.

PC: Right. So it’s polite conversation.

MICHAEL BOOTH: Yeah. Yeah. Polite but cozy conversation, really. Safe subjects.

PC: I would suggest that in 2016, when you know a lot of people—there's a lot of turmoil and anxiety in the world right now—that doesn't just make sense for so many of us to want to adopt something like hygge that gives us you know more warmth and fuzziness in our lives?

MICHAEL BOOTH: Absolutely. You are absolutely right. There's no coincidence why the world is going crazy—or at least North America and Britain are going crazy for this concept of hygge right now. What an awful year we've had. You know. Not just that, but what a troubling year and what an unpredictable future we're staring down the barrel of at the moment. What is more natural than to shut the curtains and stick your head in the sand? And that's what hygge invites you to do and it almost kind of legitimizes it by saying this is the latest thing to be doing. This is the new thing. You know last week it was the Zika virus, this week it's hygge, next week it will probably be the Swedish habit of fika. Have you heard about that? That’s having coffee and cake in the afternoon. And probably next year, the books will be all about sisu, which is a Finnish kind of concept of machismo. So it will move on, but right now we're in the midst of this and I'm just trying to guide people through it and say look, hygge is nothing new to the Danes. We all do it. In North America you often call it hominess, I guess. It's homemaking. It is kind of being mindful and appreciating the small things in life. There’s nothing new about it but it is being used right now to sell newspapers and magazines and books and candles and socks and all these other things that we already have but didn't know they had to be labelled as hygge-ly.

PC: And have conversations on the radio.

MICHAEL BOOTH: Yeah. I've been having lots of those recently about hygge. I never expected I would find myself [inaudible].

PC: [laughs] Well, we will keep it at that. Michael Booth, thank you for your time.

MICHAEL BOOTH: You're welcome. Bye.

PC: Michael Booth is the author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia. He joined me from the south of France. Louisa Thomsen Brits, let's bring you back into the conversation. What do you make of Michael Booth’s thoughts on hygge?

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: I think he's absolutely right. I think it can seem solipsistic and somewhat ethnocentric. But I think that hygge is essentially a desire to be sheltered and warm and safe. And I think that it's true when we wish to shelter each other and shelter ourselves, we also shelter each other from some differences and some discomfort. But really hygge isn't the total absence of challenge or discomfort. It's such a way of dealing with them, not a way of hiding from them but simply a way of taking time out to restore ourselves. A moment of respite and then we face life with equanimity afterwards.

PC: Louisa Thomsen Brits, thank you for your time as well. Appreciate it.

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: Not at all. It’s been a pleasure to speak to you.

PC: Bye-bye.

LOUISA THOMSEN BRITS: Bye.

PC: Louisa Thomsen Brits is the author of The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well and we reached her today in the village of Ripe in East Sussex, England. Well, if you want to hygge and you need a little help relaxing, then you're in luck. If the news in 2016 has left you feeling stressed or anxious, we have something for you. Earlier this year, British psychologist Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson set out to determine a list of the most relaxing songs in the world. His top 10 list of songs clinically proven to lower your anxiety level include titles by Coldplay, Enya and All Saints. Now, his number one most relaxing song is by an artist called Marconi Union. But we're not going to play that. We don't want to lull anyone into deep relaxation or to sleep. But here's number nine from his list. This is an excerpt from Mozart's “The Marriage of Figaro”.

[Music: “The Marriage of Figaro” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]

PC: Well, we hope we got you all relaxed. And if you want to pick up a pen and paper or start typing on your keyboard and write to us and tell us what you think of hygge-ing and if you adopt some of its practices into your own lifestyle or about anything else here on The Current, you can get in touch with us. You can e-mail us by going to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent, and once you're there, click on the contact us link. On Twitter, our handle is @thecurrentCBC and you can find us on Facebook: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Alright, the CBC News is next. Then if you've ever lived in Toronto, chances are that you or somebody you know has been treated at the Hospital for Sick Children. But before it became a world-renowned multimillion-dollar facility, it was seen as a place of death and despair. We'll bring you a history of Sick Kids Hospital in our next half hour. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay you're listening to The Current.

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History of SickKids hospital marked by achievements and scandal

Guests: David Wright

PC: Hi, I'm Piya Chattopadhyay you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

PC: Still to come, killer whales used to be seen as dangerous predators to be feared. Then half a century ago, an orca named Moby Doll captured off the coast of British Columbia changed everything we knew about a misunderstood species. That story is heading your way in a half an hour. But first, the humble beginnings of the Hospital for Sick Children.

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VOICE 1: Today in Toronto, the new Hospital for Sick Children was officially open. The 11-storey building has cost 12 and a half million dollars. It is the largest hospital in its field in North America and one of the most modern in the world. [Unintelligible] of the CBC visited it today and here he is to give you some of his impressions.

VOICE 2: Briefly, this new building has just about everything. It's a [unintelligible] place, and the furniture, the wall colouring, the sound-deadening tile in the ceiling, the nursery rhyme murals on the wall—make it a pleasant place to help do the job of making sick children into well children.

PC: Well, that's a dip into the CBC archives from 1951 when the Hospital for Sick Children, or Sick Kids, opened its new building in downtown Toronto. The hospital's beginning dates back to 1875 when it was in a rented house with only six beds. But today, if you've ever lived in Toronto or you know someone who has, then you probably know someone who's been treated at Sick Kids. Hospitals are often the backdrop to intense emotional experiences. Many who have been there feel a personal connection to Sick Kids. Meghan Skinner is a teacher in Toronto and her connection to Sick Kids runs generations deep in her family.

SOUNDCLIP

When my son Henry was born in June 2015, the nurses immediately realized that there was something wrong. And after a few tests, we were sent over to Sick Kids Hospital where they discovered that he had duodenum atresia, which was a narrowing of his duodenum. And it was deja vu for my mom who had actually gone through the same thing with me at birth. I had the same surgery done two weeks after birth, whereas Henry was just two days old when he had the surgery. And 62 years ago, my mother spent several weeks in Sick Kids for something similar.

PC: Well, the personal stories around Sick Kids Hospital are ones of hope, of recovery and of sorrow. But the hospital's long and sometimes troubled history had never been written down in one place until now. David Wright is a hospital historian. He's the Canada Research Chair in the history of health policy at McGill University and he is the author of Sick Kids: The History of the Hospital for Sick Children. He's in our Montreal studio. Hello.

DAVID WRIGHT: Good morning.

PC: Let me just start at the beginning. Where did the idea for a children's hospital in Toronto first come from?

DAVID WRIGHT: Oh my goodness. It's a long history. More or less, Toronto inherited the British tradition of medical charity. And by that, I mean in the 18th century across Britain, many cities began to create civic infirmaries, sort of general hospitals, if you were. These were funded by local communities and welcomed a whole range of patients. And by the 19th century, for a whole range of reasons including increasing medical knowledge and medical specialization, in Britain there were more specialist hospitals that emerged—maternity hospitals for example, eye hospitals. And in the mid-Victorian period, there was a famous institution supported by—amongst others—Charles Dickens, that was entitled The Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street. And that was really the inspiration for other types of hospitals for sick children throughout the British Empire. And so was is one of many sort of British colonial cities that took up that initiative and established their own very modest hospitals for sick children.

PC: So they were essentially a new idea back then. We didn't have hospitals specifically for children.

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, my goodness, no. And they were controversial as well. You know there was a sense that hospitals were for the very poor. They were sort of places of death and despair. Many people within the medical profession resisted and resented medical specialization, thought that hospitals and medicine should remain generalist in orientation. And so they were by no means sort of inevitable. There were supporters of hospitals specifically for children but there were also people who looked at them with a great deal of suspicion at the time.

PC: And so when the doors first opened, as I said, it was you know a rented house, only six beds. What was the Hospital for Sick Children—the one in Toronto—like in the early days?

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, there was a series of rented homes in the 1870s and eighties before its first sort of permanent institution was built. And these were just literally—it was a row house—a three-storey row house with about six to eight cots in it with middle-class women volunteers who were sort of religiously motivated to dedicate their time and to care for the children. And there were local doctors. Many of them were attached to the University of Toronto, who would drop by perhaps an afternoon a week or two afternoons a week just to provide free medical attention.

PC: And David Wright, you know in the hospital's early days, you said it was row housing in Toronto.

DAVID WRIGHT: Yeah.

PC: You know it’s almost hard—even though I’ve lived in Toronto for many years—to imagine the Toronto of the time, the neighbourhood of the time. So kind of paint that picture for us.

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, it is fascinating. You know I don't really consider myself a historian of Toronto. I'm a medical historian. But one of the very, very interesting aspects was the sort of urban geography of late 19th century Toronto. So you know if you can draw yourself a picture of the streets from sort of College Street the north, you know Yonge Street to the east, Avenue Road in the west and say Queen Street in the south, you know that area, that square area was basically the Toronto slums.

PC: This is downtown Toronto for people.

DAVID WRIGHT: Yeah.

PC: You know we’ll get yelled at because “You’re talking about Toronto.”

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, you know but people can—anyone who sort of knows Queen’s Park and knows where these major institutions are, you know this was all tenement slum areas of Toronto.

PC: And there was a specific area. I think it was a neighbourhood called The Ward, which the hospital did some early outreach into. Tell me about that.

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, The Ward—it's a fascinating situation. So historically, the first permanent building was 67 College Street which is now Canadian Blood Services. The building is still there and that was the—as it were—the old Hospital for Sick Children. And that was really on the edge of this—I don't know—five by five block slums called The Ward, which was about two-thirds you know Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe and had settled in downtown Toronto and some of them worked in the Eaton’s factories amongst other places. But they were very poor and it was very much a shanty town and the local medical officer of health thought it was basically a public health disaster because many of the homes were inhabitable and didn't have running water and it would pose a real public health problem. And so Sick Kids, at that time the Hospital for Sick Children, engaged in quite a considerable system of outreach, including the establishment of what was reputedly the first pasteurization plan in Canada and distributed clean milk and outpatient care to you know the slum area of Toronto.

PC: And I want you to tell us another story. This is the one—and I'm going to get you to tell a lot of stories. From the time around the turn of the century, there was this annual summer tradition of going to the Toronto Islands. And again, for people who aren't familiar with Toronto, the Toronto Islands are essentially—they still exist and we take a boat over. It takes five minutes to get there so they're just off downtown Toronto. But there was this annual summer tradition of sick kids going out to the Toronto Islands.

DAVID WRIGHT: Yes. Well, in the late 19th century, there was obviously a great deal of urbanization, both from immigration and from rural depopulation in Canada and the United States, in Western Europe. And yet there was a sort of sense that this urban concentration, this urban living was leading to ill health, right, and a lot of the diseases the children had was a function of living in the slums in the city. So the sort of corollary of that was you know it was good to get the children out of the city and into the countryside. You know we still have a lot of that today, you know going to Muskoka or what have you. Get the children out of the city. And so there was a movement to create what was called a lakeside home during the summer, which was finally established on one of the Toronto Islands. And what happened is that for about 30 years, between the mid-1880s and the mid-19 teens, the children, you know about 80 per cent of the in-patient population would be paraded through Toronto down to the docks and ferried to the Toronto Island home, where they would sort of convalesce and you know play on the beach and sit outside in the verandas and spend the summer. And you know the nurses went there and the doctors went there and the administrators of the hospital turned this into a sort of major social event. And so politicians would parade with them and photographers would be there and be captured by local newspapers and so they would go down in the spring and they’d come back in the fall and they would more or less sort of vacate the main hospital site, at least those who could. And it became sort of part of the social and cultural history of Toronto and it's a sort of a lovely, sort of a chapter in the history of the hospital that I think many people don't know about.

PC: As you know writing this book, it's such a storied hospital and it's you know been around for 140 years. And so let's keep talking about a few of them. So many milestones. And on the research side and the treatment side, so many different milestones. But let's talk about one and this is about the development of Pablum. It's not a word we hear very much anymore.

DAVID WRIGHT: No, no. Well, probably you know my parents’ generation, it was very important. I don't think I was fed Pablum perhaps.

[Crosstalk]

PC: I don’t even know what it is.

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, you know there was a great interest in fortified foods, in vitamin-enriched foods in the interwar period, that is in the 1920s and thirties. There was a lot of research going on in Toronto and elsewhere. And you know the goal was quite simple. You know how can you provide basic foodstuffs to poor families to counteract nutritional deficiencies? And so you know the Hospital of Sick Children had established what they called the research laboratories in which they sort of engaged in trying to fortify all sorts of different types of foodstuffs, everything from chewing gum to bread. And eventually, they sort of stumbled upon fortifying cereal with a whole range of vitamins. And it was sort of precooked and you'd be able to buy a container of Pablum and then you'd either pour hot water or hot milk on it and it was a breakfast cereal, right? But it proved to be hugely popular all across North America and in Britain and literally made the hospital millions. And the patent for Pablum then created millions, which were then ploughed back into research at the hospital and funded research for practically a generation.

PC: And then later on, I want you tell me one more thing that happened at the hospital in sort of you know historical times. Later the hospital’s involved in the development of something called the Mustard procedure. What's that?

DAVID WRIGHT: Yes. Well, after the Second World War, there was a remarkable decline in infant and childhood mortality. Many of the major infectious diseases were being fought by the new sort of the bacteriological revolution by various antibiotics. And so there's a new focus on congenital problems in the hospital and particularly an interest in trying to solve issues of cardiac abnormalities in infants. These would be various issues of improperly formed hearts and holes in the heart and you know babies would become cyanotic and die within the first year. And so William Mustard and other surgeons at the hospital experimented with you know effectively trying to repair infant hearts. But you can imagine how incredibly difficult that is, right? You know first of all, the heart is incredibly small in infants, right? You're trying to do surgery on a live infant with you know a tiny, tiny heart and repair cardiac abnormalities. That is remarkably, remarkably challenging. And so what it involved is trying to create all sorts of what were called extra-corporeal devices, of having blood flow and blood circulate outside the body and stop the heart at a certain point and quickly do surgery. And they also experimented with trying to sort of cool the heart so it was beating at very, very, very slow rate, again to assist in surgery. And you know over time and after a great you know a number of effectively experimental failures of children who had terminal conditions, Mustard and his colleagues you know perfected a procedure to patch up effectively some of the most common cardiac abnormalities in infants. And that became known as the Mustard procedure and you know quite frankly probably led to the saving of tens of thousands of infant lives in the next generation.

PC: What’s Mustard? Is he a cardiologist?

DAVID WRIGHT: Yeah. He was a cardiac surgeon.

PC: What’s his first name?

DAVID WRIGHT: William Mustard.

PC: William Mustard. It’s good to know who these people are in our history. That’s why I asked. Okay, so you said you know it probably went on to save thousands of lives. So just in terms of medical procedures, how significant was the Mustard procedure?

DAVID WRIGHT: Oh. Well, it's very significant. It’s sort of hard, you know as a historian, to sort of say this was in the top—I try to resist you know “This was the number three of the top surgical innovations of the last 200 years.” It was immensely, immensely important, and you know represented a new era of you know of infant cardiac surgery, which you know would go in different directions of the next generation. But you know it was tremendously important.

PC: Okay. So you know, again, 140 years—a lot happens at any institution. So we've been talking about development and progress. That's not the only story of Sick Kids. So if we jump ahead to the 1980s, a dark cloud starts hanging over the hospital and this happens because of accusations of an elevated number of deaths of babies that happened in the cardiac ward at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. And I just want to play a bit of the CBC's coverage of that story back in 1981.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The World at Six. Good evening. From CBC News, this is Colin Parker with Bob Oxley. A Toronto nurse who's charged with the deaths of three more infants. Dale Johnson has a report.

VOICE 2: The Hospital for Sick Children is famous for treating heart patients. About 400 patients in the hospital die each year. About 40 die in the cardiac unit. That's where Susan Nelles worked. The four children died of drug overdoses.

PC: Okay, David Wright. What essentially happened? What led to Susan Nelles, the nurse’s arrest?

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, this is a very long and complicated story so I’ll try to be as brief as possible. You know there was—as the reporter suggested—there was an elevated rate of child deaths on a particular ward and you know the problem is you're dealing with very fragile infants and children, so children die. Children die all the time in the hospital, right? So the question is you know was this an unusual number of deaths? And many of the nurses who were working there thought it was and you know they reported to the hospital authorities and there was a coroner's inquest on a few of them, which detected the high levels of a drug that wasn't supposed to be in the child's system, dioxin, which is a cardiac drug. And so this led to a criminal investigation and the Toronto Homicide Squad effectively investigated a range of suspicious, “suspicious murders” and concluded that there was sort of one nurse who linked them all, and that was Susan Nelles, and arrested her. And this led to just a media sensation, right? You can imagine like the Hospital for Sick Children, you know the preeminent pediatric institution in the country and there is perhaps a nurse killer out there, right? You know you can imagine how that would be received by the press. And that led to a criminal investigation which fairly quickly fell apart because of a somewhat suspect police investigation. The main problem was that she'd been charged with four of perhaps a larger number of suspicious deaths, but it turned out she actually wasn't in the hospital for all four deaths. She had actually swapped shifts with somebody else. And I guess this was done sort of regularly between nurses but no one had sort of informed properly the police of this. And there were other aspects of the case, so she was acquitted. But the problem was that there was still this sense that a number of children had died under suspicious circumstances, perhaps had been murdered but then who was the murderer, right? And this dragged on for years. There was a closed inquiry called the Dubin Inquiry and the general public was not happy about that. Many politicians called for a public commission so that led to the Grange Commission, which ended up investigating both the nature of the deaths of as many as three dozen children in a hospital at the time but also was there to investigate the police action because by that time, there's a sense that the police had acted hastily. And so this stretched on for most of the 1980s quite frankly, right? It was practically a decade from the beginning of the eighties to the end of the eighties. And yet at the end of all of this, one of the largest public commissions—the first one that was ever televised live in Canadian history—people still didn't really have any answers.

PC: And now in 2016, some 30-odd years later, is it any clearer what had happened to those infants?

DAVID WRIGHT: Not really. You know I talk about the—because it is obviously very important for the history of the hospital, it has all sorts of interesting implications with the history of criminal law. But I don't draw any conclusions myself and in fact, it would seem that the only conclusion you can draw is that the facts seem less clear 30 years later than they were at the time. And there has been many books written about it and suggested that in fact, the actual test to determine the higher levels of this drug in the children were faulty tests. We've seen this happened in the history of criminal activity, where tests that we thought were you know really sound, 20, 30 years later turn out to be quite faulty. So there’s various hypotheses and arguments out there and what I try to do is look at it historically and say you know why was this an important chapter in the history of the hospital and the history of Canadian health care?

PC: And so looking through it through that lens, you know any hospital—this is 1981—any hospital is just freaking out with this spotlight being put on them and they're worried about reputational damage essentially. And this is not any old hospital. This is the Hospital for Sick Children. And these kinds of allegations swirling around, their PR department’s going crazy at that point. [laughs] How does the hospital recover from its reputational damage during that incident and afterwards?

DAVID WRIGHT: You know what? It's a good question and you know absolutely. You can imagine being a hospital that is there to provide clinical care for thousands and thousands and thousands of children but it's also very dependent on the public's attitude towards you, right, through fundraising, right, and your reputation of your hospital both within the local community and internationally. So I think it was a real point of crisis for the hospital and I don't think there was any particular event where suddenly there was a sea change of attitudes. But you know I think you know concurrent to these years of public inquiries, there were still thousands of children who were being treated in the hospital, right, thousands of families who were receiving treatment. And you know there was a lot of goodwill that had built up and continued towards the hospital, towards clinicians, towards you know, towards people who volunteered in the hospital that persisted. And you know I think slowly over time, the hospital effectively rebuilt its reputation. And you know if one wanted to look at one sort of signal event, I think sort of the fundraising for the new atrium—which is still quite sort of marvelous to walk into, right—the extension of the hospital, sort of in some respects, that reflected the beginning of a new chapter for the hospital, I think.

PC: Yeah and arguably—and I would say from my experience, anecdotally—I mean people who have had their children in that hospital whom I know, you know this hospital still has a very good reputation in this city and in this country. But let me ask you this. You know we've been talking for some time now about the history of the Hospital for Sick Children and the discoveries, the research, the treatment, the impact it's had on the city and our country. When you look at Sick Kids today, what is the role of this hospital in pediatric medicine?

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, I think it's huge. You know I think the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto must be considered one of the top—I don't know—top three pediatric institutions in the world for the last three generations.

PC: Really?

DAVID WRIGHT: Yeah. No, absolutely.

PC: Top three?

DAVID WRIGHT: Absolutely. It has had not only an immense impact in terms of you know scientific discovery—like we haven't talked about the discovery of you know genetic discoveries of the 1980s, such as the cystic fibrosis gene for example, you know these are sort of landmark scientific discoveries. So there's the scientific side. You know I think one thing we have to remember is that Sick Kids trained literally hundreds of postgraduates of fellows in various areas of pediatric medicine who then returned to their home countries and you know became the heads of their own pediatric hospitals. And so the influence of Sick Kids internationally through their training programs is huge, right? It's really, really, really quite extraordinary. And so in terms of its influence internationally—quite apart from the literally tens, if not hundreds of thousands of patients that it actually treated you know who were Canadians—it had a huge sort of international, sort of influence in the last 30 and 40 years in particular.

PC: It’s always surprising when you drive down a building and you don't know its history. I’m going to go down, I’m going to look at that hospital and I’m going to think of it differently.

DAVID WRIGHT: Well, yeah. I would encourage people to—you know there's just a wonderful entrance from the University side, right, where—I know I'm speaking as a historian—but if you enter 555 University and there's just a wonderful photographic collection of the hospital that's drawn from the early 20th century that is just beautiful to look at and quite arresting in the images they portray.

PC: David Wright, good to talk to you. Thank you so much.

DAVID WRIGHT: My pleasure.

PC: David Wright is a hospital historian and he's also the author of Sick Kids: The History of Hospital for Sick Children. We reached him in Montreal. We do want to hear from you on this. Do you have memories of being at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and how has Sick Kids been part of you or your family's history? Do tell us. You can share your stories on Facebook and you can find us there: www.facebook.com/cbcthecurrent. You can tweet us. Our handle is @thecurrentCBc or you can e-mail us by going to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And once you're there, you can click on the contact link. Alright. Coming up next, 50 years ago, an orca named Moby Doll was harpooned off the coast of British Columbia. That captive whale ended up showing scientists and the world that it wasn't a monster. We'll bring you that story in just a bit. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and you’re listening to The Current.

[Music: Sting]

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ENCORE: How Moby Doll changed the worldview of 'monster' orca whales

Guests: Mark Leiren-Young, Pat McGeer, Jason Colby

PC: Hi. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay and you’re listening to The Current. Over the holidays, we’re revisiting some of our favourite stories from our season. And one of them is a killer story about a killer whale, as they were known back then. Moby Doll was captured half a century ago, and the up-close view of that orca fundamentally changed our view of what we once thought was a fearsome predator. As part of our season-long project, The Disruptors, Anna Maria Tremonti spoke with one of the people involved in the whale’s capture, as well as two people who have studied the orca. Here’s a reprise of that segment which first aired here on The Current in September.

SOUNDCLIP

Next to Vancouver where the first killer whale ever captured alive continues to evoke interest.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, it is July of 1964 and newscasts were all abuzz with word that a killer whale had been captured off the coast of Saturna Island in British Columbia.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Killer whale]

That’s the sound of the world’s only live killer whale in captivity—a mammal that has in the past five days been the subject of more headlines, theories and protests than anything else in Vancouver for some time. The latest word from scientists who've been flocking around the whale, is that she may be pregnant, in which case the happy event would take place next May at the end of the year-long gestation period from this spring’s mating.

AMT: Well, it turns out that the scientists and the journalists were jumping the gun when it came to planning for a little whale because the whale in captivity was he, not a she. And sadly, he would not live for anywhere near one more year. But while that whale's legacy has a very long tail indeed. Mark Leiren-Young has just written a book about the whale that came to be known as Moby Doll. The book is called The Killer Whale Who Changed the World. As part of our year-long project, The Disruptors, Mark Leiren-Young argues that Moby Doll was a disruptor, changing forever the way we view the orca whale. He joins us from Vancouver. Hello.

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Hi Anna Maria. This is great.

AMT: I'm really interested in this story. Take us back to the beginning of the story of Moby Doll. How did this whale come to be captured in the first place?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Well, the Vancouver aquarium wanted to have a display in their new foyer, so they thought what they needed was to represent the most impressive species in the coastal waters. And of course, everyone knew at the time that killer whales were far too dangerous to ever capture alive. So what they were going to do was harpoon one, and then use the dead whale to create the first-ever anatomically correct life-sized replica of a killer whale.

AMT: So they basically said let's go kill a whale, so we can make a nice statue?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: So that we can make an accurate statue.

AMT: Yeah, yeah.

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Which was unheard of at the time. There was nothing like that.

AMT: Extraordinary. How were whales viewed at the time?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Monsters. I mean, if you saw a whale at the time, the standard response was to break out the rifle in your boat and start shooting. And there was a sense that these creatures were going to do you what they did to seals and that they were going to just eat you at the first opportunity.

AMT: So they wanted to go out to kill a whale. What went wrong with the operation?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: They missed. What went wrong was that, well, first, they ended up waiting and waiting and waiting off the coast of Saturna Island, which is one of the few places in the world where killer whales swim so close to shore you can practically touch them. And so they set up a harpoon gun on Saturna and the harpoonist, who was also the artist, Samuel Burich, was waiting for a whale with Joe Bauer, who was there as the assistant. And they had actually called the mission off. They'd been waiting for so long that they decided the whales just weren't coming this year. And they were packing up their gear when Joe Bauer spotted a whale. And they raced down, set up the harpoon gun, fired and the harpoon hit the whale but didn't kill it, and hooked the whale like a giant bait fish.

AMT: And what did they do?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Well, they went after it and they called for backup. They called for Murray Newman, who ran the aquarium and Dr. Pat McGeer, who I know you've got with us.

AMT: That's right. Pat McGeer is waiting to join this conversation. Pat McGeer is a physician and scientist and Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. He was one of the first scientists to come in contact with the whale after it was captured. And we have reached him in his lab today. Hello, Pat McGeer.

PAT MCGEER: Good morning.

AMT: You arrived shortly after that whale was harpooned. What was your first impression?

PAT MCGEER: Well, the lighthouse keeper was going to row me out to the boat which held the harpoon tie line. He said it was too dangerous but I said to hell with the risks, row me out there. They were shooting at the killer whale and I managed to persuade them to stop shooting because they weren't going to kill it anyway and it looked like the whale was just swimming peacefully behind the boat. Then shortly after that, Murray Newman arrived and had this marvelous idea: let's tow it into the dry dock. So it was Murray's enterprise and genius that got this killer whale moved into captivity, where it could be studied.

AMT: Now, this is a time when the killer whale is seen as a monster. What made you want to make sure that it stayed alive?

PAT MCGEER: Just common sense. Look, the whale was swimming peacefully behind the boat. Why try and kill it?

AMT: Okay. Mark Leiren-Young then, the whale comes back to Vancouver. What happens?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Well, it's a bit of a circus on the way in. CBC TV, one of my favourite things that I dug up was from the archives here at CBC in Vancouver. And CBC Television reported that the Vancouver aquarium had captured a monster.

AMT: They actually used the word?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: They actually used the word monster, which I love. What happened was, people sort of gathered to see the monster arriving. Sam Burich and Joe Bauer basically led the whale back to Vancouver on the end of the harpoon line, and they were leading it as carefully as possible, trying to match the rhythms of the whales, so it took 17 hours, 18 hours to cross over from Saturna to Vancouver to get it to the dry dock. Then they had to lead the whale into the dry dock, and crowds gathered to check out the whale. And their response was, well, like, the circus arrived. I mean, it really was like they captured King Kong. The whale was displayed publicly for one day in the dry dock right after it arrived.

AMT: How many people showed up?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: The number that I've heard is up to 20,000, which was the same number that showed up for The Beatles at Empire Stadium that summer.

AMT: Pat McGeer, do you remember the curiosity of the public?

PAT MCGEER: Absolutely. It was very dramatic. The most feared creature on Earth was being towed into captivity. Nobody had seen a killer whale. All they knew was that it was appropriately named “killer.” So this was a chance to look at the most dangerous creature alive. So of course that spurned curiosity, and they allowed people to enter the grounds of the dry dock and just huge mobs of them gathered around the wharf on the outside, gawking at this killer whale which was just swimming peacefully around in circles.

AMT: Mark, how did naming the whale “Moby Doll” affect how people view this whale?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: I find that really fascinating, because I think naming the whale Moby Doll really changed everything. Instead of envisioning Moby Dick, who was the stuff of nightmares and horror movies, you were picturing Moby Doll who was this cute, cuddly creature. And I think when Murray Newman chose the name Moby Doll for the whale, he really shifted everything. If you want a disruptor moment, it was naming that whale Moby Doll.

AMT: I've got a little more tape. This is from that same newscast in 1964. Keep listening.

SOUNDCLIP

Dr. Murray Newman, a curator of the Vancouver Aquarium, is worried about the wound from last week's harpooning. Although it wasn't serious, it now appears to be puffy and festering. A needle with antibiotics was fired at the whale, but it bounced off her tough hide. The drugs could be included in food, but since her capture, Moby Doll has eaten only a few pounds of fish. Her appetite seems to be improving, however. The scientists have just one problem, what's the best way to approach a live killer whale?

AMT: Pat McGeer, how did you and the others working with Moby Doll know how to take care of a live killer whale?

PAT MCGEER: We didn't. But we thought it best to give the whale a shot of penicillin, because it was a rusty harpoon that had gone through the nape of the neck. So we just used a long tube and I injected the killer whale with a shot of penicillin. Eventually, it died of course, of an aspergillus infection, but that was down the road a few weeks.

AMT: And so, right after that penicillin shot, what like, did his health improve a little bit?

PAT MCGEER: Well, eventually a skin infection developed, but all of this happened because the killer whale was moved from the dry dock into very unsanitary waters off Jericho Beach. So the whale was exposed to all of the detritus that comes down the Fraser River. And really, that's why the whale died. It was where it was moved into very impure water.

AMT: And what were you learning from the whale at this point, Pat?

PAT MCGEER: Well, that it was not a ferocious creature looking for a human being to eat. [laughs] So, everything we did was new and actually the only authentic paper on the physiology of the killer whales is the one that we wrote at that time, 1964 and 1965. There never really been any scientific studies since.

AMT: It's so fascinating. And you were very interested in the brain were you not, the brain of the whale?

PAT MCGEER: Yeah, because we were doing some assays on brain metabolism and our methods were so crude, we needed a larger brain. And I reckoned that the killer whale brain would be one of the largest we would ever get. And it turned out to be quite true. I have a model of the killer whale’s brain actually at home. It’s much larger than the human brain, very complex brain. So this is an extremely intelligent creature.

AMT: And Mark Leiren-Young, how long was it before Moby Doll died then?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Just under three months.

AMT: How did the public react?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: The response was pretty much mourning. I mean, there was a sense that the monster was now referred to as Vancouver's beloved whale.

AMT: Hmm.

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: And Vancouver’s beloved pet whale.

AMT: So, there would have been ongoing coverage of this whale and the new pen, it just would have been, stayed in the news?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Everything, the whale was pretty much in the news nonstop from the day that it was captured. Everything was news. I mean, to me the most compelling story that really came out of it was that the sculptor, Sam Burich was also the world's first whale sitter. He began to worry that the whale was lonely and since the whale communicated in squeaks, Sam would sit by the side of the pool playing his harmonica in the hopes that that would somehow communicate with the whale. So the guy who had been terrified of whales was suddenly trying to become the whale’s friend. And I've always found that quite haunting and beautiful.

AMT: And what else did you find as you went back and looked at that time, Mark, and sort of the reaction of people?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Just the phenomenal shift in attitudes and how quickly those attitudes shifted. Pat was just talking about giving the whale the first shot. He came up with the idea of using a 10 or 12 foot pole, depending on which newspaper you read, to use the penicillin. So initially, they literally would not touch this thing without a ten foot pole, and to go from that to hand-feeding the whale and from fearing it to loving it. It was just astonishing.

AMT: And Pat, was that the same for you? Did you think they were more fearsome than they are?

PAT MCGEER: I had no knowledge one way or another, but there had been reports from [unintelligible] that they had tilted the ice flows in the Antarctic so that they could eat the men, tip them off the ice flows and eat them. So the stories were bizarre. But as a scientist, you always reject your theories and believe your observations. So the observations didn't coincide at all with what was being held as theories, so you just immediately reject it.

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: One of the things that I thought was really interesting about Pat's perspective, you are the only one without any preconceptions, who hadn't read all about killer whales. You were the scientist who'd been drafted to study the brain. So I always thought you came in with such a unique perspective on the story.

PAT MCGEER: Yeah. And then, of course, immediately people learned about this. It turned out to be that killer whales could be captured and taught and before long, 32 aquariums around the world had killer whales on display, and people were learning about the amazing behaviour of these creatures. It transformed the world, not just about killer whales but about the attitudes towards whales in general. And of course now, it's considered politically incorrect to have a killer whale in captivity. So learning about them has become artificially arrested. They're now a protected species instead of a hunted species. So for complete reversal, this is what the result of Moby Doll was.

AMT: Mmm. Mark Leiren-Young, you think he was a disruptor, huh?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Oh, Absolutely. I stand by the whale changed the world. If you look at what Moby Doll lead to, it's not a coincidence that Greenpeace started in Vancouver. The first person to count the whales wasn't studying killer whales until he met Moby Doll. So scientist Michael Bigg was the first person to realize how few orcas were out there. And that was the result of becoming interested in Moby while working for Dr. McGeer. John Ford is now really the leading linguist in studying orcas and their dialects—first saw Moby Doll at age nine in the pool. And Paul Spong, who was the scientist responsible for convincing Greenpeace they should try and save the whales, his first encounter with an orca was seeing Moby Doll's brain in Dr. McGeer's laboratory.

AMT: Well, let's bring someone else into this conversation to talk a little bit more about all of that then. Jason Colby is with us. Jason is an associate professor in the department of history at the University of Victoria. He's working on a book about how our impressions of killer whales have changed since they have been taken into captivity. He is also in our Victoria studio. Hello, Jason Colby.

JASON COLBY: Great to be with you.

AMT: So as we listen to the story of Moby Doll, what other captive whales are influential at around the same time?

JASON COLBY: I'm going to push back a little bit on Mark's argument and title, even though I think Moby Doll’s extraordinarily important. I would actually make the argument—you could make the argument— that two other whales that were taken into captivity maybe have a better claim as being whales that changed the world.

AMT: And who were they?

JASON COLBY: The first one I would note was captured in BC and was purchased by the Seattle Marine Aquarium and came to be known as Namu. And Namu was the first to be truly on public display, doing shows. And the owner of the Seattle Marine Aquarium, Ted Griffin, became the first person in the world that we know of to swim with a killer whale, and that was a really transformative moment in the sense that he got in the water and thousands and thousands people saw that this animal not only wouldn't eat people, but would actually perform with and even befriend a person. And the other one is actually one that Mark kind of alluded to, that I actually think was the most important whale ever kept in captivity, most important killer whale, most influential, and that’s Skana, who was at the Vancouver Aquarium.

AMT: What year is Skana?

JASON COLBY: Skana is captured by Griffin in Puget Sound in February of 1967, and sold to the Vancouver Aquarium the following year.

AMT: OK, so after Moby Doll, but keep going.

JASON COLBY: After Moby Doll, yup. And Skana is there for 13 years. And, you know, among other things, really affects the political transformation and intellectual transformation of Paul Spong, who becomes a very influential orca scientist but also influential member of Greenpeace. I wouldn't say that Skana is more important than Moby Doll for transforming the views of killer whales. But for the broader picture that Dr. McGeer hinted at, of the way people view whales and ocean life around the world, she was profound, in the sense that you can't imagine Greenpeace turning toward the issue of whaling and the extraordinary change that that brought without Skana’s influence.

AMT: And Skana was playful. Skana could have hurt Paul Spong but she played with him, essentially.

JASON COLBY: Yeah, I mean, the thing that's important about Skana is that she showed that, you know, the joke scientists often have, you know, under carefully controlled conditions animals behave as they damn well please. You know, one very famous instance, intentionally got all of her responses in one of his experiments wrong, you know, which was statistically impossible unless she was attempting to do so.

AMT: What was it about having them in captivity that moved our understanding forward?

JASON COLBY: But when Moby Doll was taken, the argument was not between whale watching and whale catching. It was between whale catching and whale killing. Killer whales are being taken, you know, killed by scientists by fishermen by, you know, by whaling ships around the world, and what bringing them into captivity did, is it enabled people to see this animal close up, especially once they become performing, to develop a sort of respect and empathy and understanding for this as a, you know, a complex animal. Now, this also eventually really leads to the misgivings about having such a large social intelligent animal in captivity, but you have to appreciate the impact that that has on millions of people that are able to see this animal for the first time and for the only time in their lives. Not just in BC and Washington State where they're first displayed, but all over the world, in places like, you know, San Antonio, Ohio, you know, Niagara Falls, where people around would never have seen these animals.

AMT: What would have happened to whales on the West Coast if they hadn't been taken into captivity, Jason?

JASON COLBY: I think you can make a very strong argument that they may have gone toward extinction. And in fact, you know, the Southern residents we may be watching sort of a long slide toward extinction now. There are pretty good indications that throughout the 20th century their numbers were in free fall, partly because of food decline but more likely because of human violence. Most that were taken into captivity in the sixties and seventies actually had bullet holes in them and so it's very likely that they were on a decline.

AMT: Mark Leiren-Young, what do you make of the debate today over whales in captivity?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: What’s really hitting me right now is that the whales in captivity debate sort of takes away from the fact that we're worrying more about 30 whales in captivity than the 82 Southern residents that are incredibly endangered right now.

AMT: Take us through that Mark. Why is that? Why are they so endangered now?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: Well, as Jason said, food supply—the Southern resident orcas really only eat salmon. There aren't enough salmon right now. And we're ruining their environment acoustically, pollution, ocean acidification. And right now the biggest threat is the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline, which would increase the traffic to the point where it will have significant effects on these Southern resident orcas.

AMT: Pat McGeer, what do you think?

PAT MCGEER: I think a lot of that is simply nonsense. There's all kinds of killer whales all around the world. First of all, you couldn't have them in captivity because they were too dangerous. Once we got over that hump, then aquariums around the world began to house them and learn about killer whales. Then it became politically incorrect to have them in captivity. So now learning about killer whales has become arrested. They're very intelligent, you know, they have their own language. We should be learning how killer whales talk with one another through their clicks. Now killer whales are being used as a symbol or an excuse to shut down all other sorts of things. And as a scientist, I just dismiss ridiculous notions of this kind and I consider them to be ridiculous. Before, people used to shoot at killer whales. Now if a boat goes within 100 yards of a pod of killer whales the boat owner gets fined. So you go from one preposterous extreme to another.

AMT: Jason, how do you respond to what Pat’s saying?

JASON COLBY: I totally agree with him that captivity has and actually continues to play a really important part in the study of killer whales. On the other hand, if those that had been involved in the capture of killer whales are going to make the argument that this has made people appreciate them more and appreciate the environment more, than they have to come to terms with the political outcome of that, which is that people will care more about this population and want to sustain it. We do have to understand that there's a balance between, you know, economic health and environmental health, and the environment cannot take unlimited strain.

AMT: Mark Leiren-Young, after all your research into this story about Moby Doll, what is it that you take away from the experience with this whale?

MARK LEIREN-YOUNG: That the world can change. To me, what I came away with was a sense of hope. That this whale really gave a sense of hope that we could change, that we could learn things, we could change.

AMT: And Pat McGeer, as one of the people who was out there with the whale at the very beginning, what do you want us to remember now?

PAT MCGEER: Well, I hope that people will continue to learn about killer whales. And if you now can't go near them in the wild, if you can't have them in captivity, you're going to arrest all learning and people aren't going to know, and then they'll become indifferent and go to sleep about whales and killer whales in particular. So each generation has to learn and you have to keep the knowledge and culture alive. If there is no more knowledge, then it's all going to die.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. Thank you, all of you, for this discussion today.

MANY VOICES: Thank you so much.

PC: That was Anna Maria Tremonti’s conversation about the continuing impact of Moby Doll—the first live orca captured off the coast of British Columbia. She was talking to Mark Leiren-Young, the author of The Killer Whale Who Changed the World. He was in Vancouver. Pat McGeer was one of the scientists who worked with Moby Doll. He’s now a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. And Jason Colby is an associate professor in the department of history at the University of Victoria working on a book about orcas in captivity. That conversation with Anna Maria Tremonti first aired here on The Current in September. To see archival photos and video of Moby Doll, you can go to our website: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And while you’re there, you can check out all the other stories in our year-long project. It’s called The Disruptors. Well, that is The Current for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Remember, you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds. You can search for stories you missed or if you want to hear them again, you can listen live to your local CBC station. All of that right from your smartphone or tablet. Hear the day’s top stories, even make your own playlist of your favourite stuff to listen to later. It is free from the App Store or from Google Play. Now, I hope you have been indulging in some hygge over the holidays, whether sharing nice meals with friends and families or in the peacefulness of your own solitude. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should go back and listen to our conversation about the Danish hygge at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Now, I’d like to think that right now, you are listening to us curled up with a good cup of coffee in hand. And so we will leave you today with a final ode to all of that: a Danish Christmas celebration of indulgence, warmth and pleasure. Our last word today is a song called—yep, you guessed it—“Hygge”. I’m Piya Chattopadhyay. Thank you so very much for lending us your ear here on The Current.

[Music: Danish Christmas song]

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December 27, 2016 full episode transcript

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