I read your objections to retiring Lolita and there's a lot of history there, and in some cases an aversion to facilitating transfer to a marine park, but I can't see the connection with Lolita. Unless the theory is that this campaign is all about bashing marine parks. It's not. There is a whale in Miami that belongs with her family out here, or at least to have the chance to immerse in the waters she was born and raised in, with human care and attention indefinitely if necessary. Nobody can say for sure what might happen when that first contact is made. We can assume some vocalizing and some tentative approaches. If the go-ahead is given and she is allowed to go out to meet them, there might be some time of transition and trust-building, and there might even be some aggressive moves in the worst case, although hostile contact is unknown among Lolita's family.
Through it all there should be people observing from a distance, and the feed and care station stays open 24/7. It may take a week, or a month or a year. Lolita could get to California and back in a week or two after she regains her metabolic and cardiovascular strength, so if she's missing for a few days that's not a huge problem.
She will teach us, and the world will be watching, and they will see whatever happens, and I am pretty sure that any of the potential possibilities will be a revelation for most people. She will teach us about her abilities and about the social bonds that hold her family together, however events unfold.
Your rendition of Luna's story is accurate as to facts, but you see a completely different way that his death could have been prevented. You seem to feel that if all the players had allowed these whales to have gone to a marine park they would have done much better. Well, they probably would have lived a while longer, but captivity kills orcas before their time, and when you can appreciate the awareness and consciousness of the species you can see that the captive environment is extremely stressful.
A better answer to Luna's tragedies, and to Keiko's, would have been to give them all the companionship they wanted, without the standard fear that they would become habituated and imprint on humans like baby geese and become unable to ever rejoin their natural families. In the absence of their families, human companionship is the next best thing, and to deprive them of that in the theory that it will somehow spoil them, which happened with both Keiko and Luna, just puts them into high stress and leads them to do dangerous things. The conventional wisdom that handlers needed to turn their backs on the whales is widespread, so I'm not going after the industry or anyone in particular here, just the acceptance of that antiquated bit of folk wisdom parading as science. When we're talking about orcas especially, we need to rethink what we think we know.
One more point. you can release orcas even after long-term captivity. That's another obsolete assumption that doesn't consider an orca's 12-18 pound brain, their extreme memory retention, and the relationships all that intelligence is dedicated to building. The message signed "Dr. Lanny Cornell" is exactly right.
That's the kind of thing Lolita can teach us.
