If you listen, if you talk to the people that see Keiko at the aquarium, or if you read the mail that we get, or the E-mail that we get from the people it's amazing how much they're following the story and how interested they are in the broader picture. The response to the documentaries that have come out, the response to the Life magazine articles, all around it's just been, again, off the charts. It's been very exciting to like reach, reach that number of people. We're now working on trying to get all the kids involved with helping the effort in Iceland to get involved with helping convince the government. Which could be a hard force to resist when you have 50,000 or 100,000 little kids wanting Iceland to do the right thing, so.

ICELANDIC CHILDREN ?

We're getting like American kids to like pal-up with Icelandic kids, have a little pen pal thing so they can work together on convincing the government.

HOW WOULD THAT WORK?

Well, Iceland's small, the whole country, there are only I think 250,000 people in the entire country. So, we have enough kids on our list to be able to have a pen pal relationship between a kid in the U.S. and a kid in Iceland, every kid. We could adopt every kid in Iceland and have them work out like a pen pal thing about welcoming Keiko home.

AND THEN WHAT?

Then the kids talk to their parents. Then their parents talk to their city council people and they talk to their officials and next thing you know it's like, "why can't this happen - explain again why this can't happen. What is the problem with taking a whale and putting him back in the ocean. It's going to bring great tourism value because the whale watching industry is totally on the rise around the world and in Iceland. People, there's more money to be made in watching whales than there is in killing whales. Why can't Keiko come back? Explain to me again, explain to the kids who want to know why it can't happen"; and adults have this "well, it can't happen because it's too hard and it's too expensive and it's too politically charged or whatever. And the kids have, they don't accept those answers. And they're very persuasive and I think that has been one of the things that's made the whole thing a success from the beginning because when all the, when all the Warner Bros. people and everybody said "You know, we can't do this", the kids weren't willing to accept no as an answer. And that's been part of our, that's been our secret weapon.

WHAT'S YOUR RESPONSE TO PEOPLE WHO HAVE TOLD US THAT THERE'S A WAR BETWEEN THE AQUARIUM AND THE FOUNDATION? Well, the aquarium has in my view, gone to Herculean lengths to have this happen. We built a facility that normally would take three years to build and we did it in eleven months. Which meant incredible sacrifices and effort by the people at the aquarium and they have cared for Keiko with their staff and have helped try to really do it right and the quality of the presentation and the quality of the equipment and everything I think is really first-rate. And so I really don't, I don't think that there's any, there's any great [05:07:20] war. I think that there's going to be different views. I mean the reality is that, they're in the aquarium business and we're in the whale-freeing business. Those businesses are not identical. The concerns and the pace and the priorities aren't always the same.

But they knew right from the beginning the aquarium and it's been on board the idea that Keiko was there to be brought back to health with a goal of being returned to the wild. It's not a shock to them or anybody, it's been right from the beginning. Right from the get-go. So, I think that we've been able to kind of keep that in everybody's minds to the point. People may have different views. Some people may still think at the end that it's just not, that it's just too much of a risk. Others may say, we're hoping that we can show that it can be done safely and it can be done right.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT THERE MIGHT BE A POINT IN THE FUTURE THAT THERE MIGHT BE A DEBATE ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT TO LET HIM GO, STILL?

Well maybe not so much still, but for example we're still working on him being able to chase down and eat live food. Some people that's instinctual. You put him in the ocean, he'll get hungry enough and he'll go out and find food. Other people say he's been out of captivity, sorry, that he's been out of the wild for so long that he's lost his ability to hunt and unless you can prove that he can do it in a captive situation, that it would be, you shouldn't return him to the wild. Those are issues that still, are still somewhat in front of us. We've already begun the effort to train him and we're convinced that he will be able to be trained to catch and eat his own food. But there will be those that may feel still not sure that he can do that in the wild.

WE SAW KEIKO IN THE EARLY STAGES OF HIS TRAINING AND HE WAS LOOKING AT A LIVE FISH LIKE IT WAS A RUBBER DUCKY. You're talking about an animal that has been fed fish, dead fish, for 16 years and so now we're trying to get him to remember what it was like when he was two. It was the last time he had to go out and catch his own fish. So that doesn't come back overnight, but I think that the instincts are there and that in time. He's already begun to chase down some fish and I think, I think he'll get there. It's just now going to be, kind of finishing that up.

If you'd asked me before when we brought him which was going to be more difficult - bringing him back to health, or convincing the powers that be to let us release him - I would have said bringing him back to health was going to be harder. He had a very intractable papilloma condition. He was severely underweight, there were concerns as to whether he would even make it on the flight from Mexico to Newport and he was just in very, very bad condition.

I think now he's ahead physically health wise. He's ahead of us politically. Some of the people problems associated with convincing all the decision-makers to let this happen.

And again, part of that is because he is so famous because the world is going to be watching so closely. In fact what happens if we return Keiko to the wild and public consciousness about him in the wild increases to the point that those countries that want to resume commercial whaling are fighting a bigger tide? So there, issues become magnified and everything to do with Keiko right from the size of the plane you need to the amount of food he eats. Everything is magnified and that means that the politicians who are generally don't like making big decisions and don't like taking risks are kind of like "ugh, maybe we should just, I don't know, this doesn't sound like a good idea. Maybe we should just let him stay where he is". But we will release him. I'm confident that we will release him.

YOU THINK IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN?

I think it's going to happen. Yeah, I think it's going to happen next Spring. Spring of 1998. There are going to be, there's a lot of follow up work to do even once we release him. We're going to have to make sure that he's able to assimilate back into the wild population. We're going to have to try to monitor it afterwards and see how he's doing. Is he able to feed himself? Is he able to get back to his family?

The other thing which we're doing which is really exciting is that we've been able to funnel research into the wild Orca population and, unlike the situation in the Pacific Northwest, we don't know very much about the populations off of Iceland. They haven't been studied to near the degree so the effort to try to find his family, try to piece together where those whales migrate to - do they come down off of Ireland -do they come, do they stay resident around Iceland? We're going to be helping provide some answers to that.

Also things like when we're able to release Keiko, we'll be able to find out things about their social structure, who they hang out with, when they feed, how deeply they dive. We'll be able to kind of help augment the information about Orcas which will be kind of fun on the side. YOU ARE AN ENVIRONMENTALIST AT HEART. WHAT HAS THIS STORY MEANT TO YOU?

It was kind of a surprise for me to get involved with a captivity issue because in general I'm an ecosystem person and a conservationist that talks about conserving wild habitats for all animals, not just one animal and so in a way it might seem like that that's kind of an irony, but what I've actually found my experience has been very different.

Which is that sometimes these issues are really hard to deal with in the abstract and that when you put a face on it and when you personalize it, you're able to communicate more directly with people and that their concern about Keiko translates real well into their concern about the marine environment. So it's a way of talking to people about all whales when you talk about Keiko and without being able to talk about Keiko it's too abstract and so to me it's actually been a real useful connection between what's used, sort of talked about as a single pieces or one animal, that really can be integrated into conservation.

I guess at the beginning there was a lot of nervousness because the idea of working with sort of the Billionaires' Club and the businesses that had the money but hadn't really worked in the nonprofit environment and them working with environmental activists that were used to surviving on a wing and a prayer and worn out tennis shoes. The idea of us being around somebody donating $1 million or $3 million was, kind of, could be seen as sort of the odd couple. But when we've got down to it we've actually found a lot of similarities because the whole group has the vision. The whole group wants to be involved with risk taking to get something done that's never been done before and so yeah, Craig McCaw they're in the big leagues business wise, but when it comes down to it they want to help do something and take a risk that's not been done before. In that sense they aren't much different than what we do, 'cos we're all risk takers.

DO YOU FEEL LIKE SAYING ANYTHING MORE ABOUT THAT MINEFIELD?

Well, the minefield is again just the number of things that can go wrong when you're operating in such a specially, the crucible of public awareness. You have the most famous whale in the world, you're trying to do something that's never been done before. You've got critics out there who are trying to prevent it from happening in one way or another. You've got governments who don't trust each other and you're doing, again you're, when you're out on the leading edge there it's, you know, it can be pretty tricky and there isn't a lot of precedent for it. There's no rule book. There's no , there's nothing you can page through to tell you what to do to get an Orca whale back to the wild. It doesn't exist. You have to write it as you go along and that's tricky and there are lots of, pitfalls along the way.

SO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO GET THERE?

I think we're going to get there, yeah. I'm an optimist. I think we're going to get there and I think that when we do, it's going to be real interesting to see how the public use it and see, I think that the kind of response that we got, bringing him to Oregon, may just be like, a molehill compared to the kind of reaction that we might get if we successfully return him to the wild.

If people can see that the ending of Free Willy, the movie, turns out to be the real-life ending for Keiko, I think that there's going to be a sense in the public's mind of just very strong support. And a very great sense of accomplishment and that ... Well, this is high risk.

WHAT HAPPENS IF IT FAILS?

This is high risk and there is the possibility that if we're not successful that the captive industry will make us wear that as an albatross around our neck. "You see, this just shows we should keep the animals in captivity where they belong, where we can take care of them". So it is a risk that way but it's a risk that we need to take.

How many times do you have a chance to turn a whale loose, I mean how many times are we going to have the financing, the whale that belongs to us, the chance to find his family, . This is a spectacular opportunity and it's not cut and dried. It may be that we don't succeed but we think that somebody's got to try this Who better than us and what better time than to try it now, why wait ten years to do it?

WILL THE FOUNDATION ERR ON THE SIDE OF CAUTION ULTIMATELY?

We're not going to return him to the wild unless we're totally convinced that he has a good shot at survival. If the veterinarians on our group say that he's got a problem that we think is incurable or whatever, then that will dictate. We're not going to do it just for a photo op to watch him swimming off into the sunset. That's not our goal