Whale grief: Episodes I + II

In this piece, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca offers two stories that approach the experience of grief and loss from an interspecies perspective with a particular focus on whales. Whilst much mainstream debate and academic literature continues to frame grief as exclusively human, or to position human grief as the standard for grieving per se, Cull Ó Maoilearca follows the work of anthropologist Barbara King (2013) amongst others to attend to whales as both the subjects and objects of grief. Mapping entanglements of oppressions stemming from speciesism, colonialism, capitalism and racism, the first story mourns the loss of animals including two beluga whales in the 1865 fire at P. T. Barnum's American Museum. The second story attends to the specific case of Tahlequah: the orca who in 2018 pushed the body of her newborn, which died shortly after birth, with her snout for 17 days, in what whale biologists called ‘a show of grief’.