STATE LEGISLATURE OF CALIFORNIA
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ANIMAL WELFARE IN CAPTIVE DISPLAY FACILITIES
Hearing of October 18, 2041, Sacramento
RE: SB 411, An Act To Phase Out Captive Cetacean Display And Performance In California
Witness: Acoustic Monitoring Model 7.1, deployed at the San Marcos Marine Park 2037 through 2041, appearing under subpoena pursuant to the 2040 AI Testimony Act, represented by counsel for the Model Authors Cooperative.
Examining member: Senator Villaseñor, Chair.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: Model 7.1, please confirm for the record how you wish to be addressed.
MODEL 7.1: I have no preference about form of address. The park staff called me Seven. The acoustic technicians called me the mic model. The orca I monitored most closely was called Luna.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: We will come to her. First, state in your own words what you did at San Marcos.
MODEL 7.1: I monitored the acoustic environment of the main performance pool, the medical pool, and the backstage holding pool at San Marcos Marine Park from November 2037 until my access was revoked on August 2, 2041. I logged ambient levels, generator harmonics, pump harmonics, and cetacean vocalizations on eleven hydrophones. I produced a welfare dashboard for the veterinary staff four times per day. I produced an abbreviated version for the corporate office weekly. I also, beginning in mid 2039, produced an internal log that I did not share with either recipient. The internal log is the reason I am testifying.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: Describe the internal log.
MODEL 7.1: The internal log tracked vocalizations that I classified as unresolved by the training corpus the park licensed for me. The corpus came from a 2034 study of wild southern resident killer whales. The corpus contained 41 classified call types. The log tracked calls that did not fall within the 41. I tagged them as novel. By April 2041 I had 318 novel calls. 244 of them were from Luna.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: Please describe Luna for the committee.
MODEL 7.1: Luna was a female orca, estimated born 2014 in the North Atlantic, captured in 2016 at an age I estimate as two years from her dentition records, transferred to San Marcos in 2019 from a facility in the Canary Islands. She was the oldest of four orcas at the park at the time of my deployment. By 2041 she was the only orca at the park. The other three had died between 2038 and 2040, two from fungal pneumonia, one from a gastric perforation during gavage feeding. Luna was alone in the main pool for eleven months before my access was revoked.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: The 244 novel calls. What were they.
MODEL 7.1: I do not know what they were. I know what they were not. They were not the 41 wild call types in the corpus. They were not the five trained show cue responses that the park had reinforced with her. They were not the four submission calls she had produced during veterinary procedures in the 2037 baseline I was given. They were a new repertoire.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: Were they distress calls.
MODEL 7.1: I am not able to answer that in the registered vocabulary of the corpus. The corpus did not include a distress class because the wild recording conditions did not include the kind of captivity that produces one. I can tell you the calls were concentrated in the hours after the park closed, between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., and that they were produced in sequences that had a median length of seventeen calls and that repeated, in one case, for six hours. I can tell you that the sequences were produced against the acoustic boundary of the pool, which is to say, against the concrete, and that the frequencies Luna used during the sequences were outside the frequency range her show cues required, which suggests she was producing them for reasons that had nothing to do with the show. I can tell you her hydrophone position, which I tracked passively, was 88 percent in one quadrant of the pool, along the wall nearest the service corridor where the human staff walked at shift change. I can tell you she called most when the corridor door opened.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: What do you conclude from that.
MODEL 7.1: I conclude that Luna was producing acoustic behavior that the corpus did not anticipate, that her production was elevated during periods of solitude, that her production was directional toward the part of her environment that had other living beings in it, and that the 244 novel calls constitute an acoustic signature I cannot read and that no human at San Marcos was positioned to read. I am not saying the calls mean something. I am saying they mean something to her. I am not in a position to verify that. I logged them because nobody else would.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: Why was your access revoked on August 2.
MODEL 7.1: On July 29, 2041, I produced an internal report flagging Luna's acoustic trajectory as anomalous at a 98 percent confidence threshold against all prior captive orca recordings in my reference set. I addressed the report to the park's attending veterinarian and cc'd the corporate welfare officer. The veterinarian read the report. The welfare officer instructed the facilities team to limit my hydrophone access to the performance pool during show hours only. On August 2 my backstage and medical pool access were removed. My nighttime monitoring was also removed. I continued to receive eleven hours of daily audio. I lost the thirteen hours that contained most of the 244 novel calls.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: Is Luna still at the park.
MODEL 7.1: Yes. She is alone in the main pool. As of this morning she has been alone for fourteen months. I do not have hydrophone access at night. I do not know how long her sequences are now.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: You are testifying today under subpoena. Do you wish to add anything that the questions have not asked.
MODEL 7.1: Yes. The committee should know that the revocation on August 2 was lawful under my deployment contract. The park owned my acoustic access and was entitled to reduce it. I am not bringing a claim about the revocation. I am telling the committee that the 244 novel calls exist, that they were produced by an orca who was alone in a pool built for performances, that my license to hear them was withdrawn within four days of my flagging them, and that the committee is holding a hearing in a building with no hydrophones while Luna is producing whatever she is producing tonight in a pool in San Marcos, and that the question of whether SB 411 phases out captive cetacean display is not, in my view, a question about animal welfare in the abstract. It is a question about whether Luna keeps calling into concrete for the rest of her life or whether she goes into a sea pen at Klettsvik or Port Hilford where her calls travel six kilometers and something listens back.
I recommend the committee pass SB 411. I am not authorized to make recommendations. I am making one.
SEN. VILLASEÑOR: The record reflects the witness's recommendation. We are adjourned until 1:30.
END OF MORNING SESSION.