If you've been following the news, you are likely aware of the tragic attack by a performing whale at Sea World Orlando that killed an experienced trainer. Here's just One Link to a news story about the episode.
Suzanne was interviewed by Mega TV, a Spanish language station in Los Angeles.
Listen to the brief audio of that interview below.
As Suzanne mentioned, it's hard to know why this whale attacked at that particular moment. The whale had been involved in two other incidents resulting in death, although it isn't clear from the news stories exactly what happened in either case and what the whale actually did.
Anytime we can't identify a clear reason or motivation for an animal's behavior, it makes the animal inherently more dangerous because we can't predict how it is going to behave. This goes for dogs and cats as well.
When we work with aggressive animals, and do a risk assessment of the animal, one of the factors we consider is predictability. If we know a dog or cat is going to bite everytime we try to take something away from them, for example, then it is much easier to avoid being bitten. But if an animal bites unpredictably, we don't have any way of avoiding the bite because we don't know when it is likely to happen.
If you would like to learn much more about risk assessment, take our On Demand tele-web-course, Risk Assessment of Aggressive Animals.
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