Sarano's mistake and what it tells us

Charismatic pundit claims non-humans don't do vengeance. Elephants and orcas beg to differ. (25/02/2025)

A recent article(1) on Reporterre in french, interviewing famous oceanographist François Sarano on the complex matter of the cause of the Gibraltar orcas attack on rudders ("François Sarano : « Orca's vengeance ? It's utterly fantasized»") appears to me as a perfect symptom of everything which is wrong with the esoterist or "New Age" take on cetaceans, as more broadly with our current understanding of the issue as a rule, even among much of the people who believe themselves to be progressive on the subject. Sarano, a complex figure known for for having worked alongside Cousteau on the Calypso, as well as for his current work on sperm whales(3), is part of a broader roster of people in France I could widely consider as "charismatic" wise guys in relation to cetacean ; neoprene-clad elders which often murk the frontier between science and esoterism and which are popular in France(4) . I won't go over their case here : suffise to say that I believe him to be part of a broader trend which must be analyzed and properly criticized, especially because of their role as authority figures on interpreting cetacean matters, which often appear to reinforce the statu quo rather than to challenge it. 

My point here is not to hypothesize on why the orcas there are doing what they do : I have no idea and the data on the matter is indeed confusing, and, as Sarano points out correctly, does not appear to particularly lean in the direction of vengeance as we understand it, at the very least from what appears to me to constitute the current understanding of the situation as I type these words(5). My interrogation rather stems from his wider, metaphysical interpretation of the subject : Sarano states not only that cetaceans do not do vengeance, but that they would be incapable of doing so  ("Nous avons saccagé le monde vivant, ça nous donnerait une bonne leçon. Mais le monde vivant est plus sage que nous. Il ne connaît pas la vengeance, et il ne connaît pas la rébellion, malheureusement.")(6). 

When Sarano makes such a claim, isn't he forgetting well known, well reported cases of cetacean doing things that, contextually and behaviorally speaking, can hardly be denied to constitute vengeance ? Starting, none the less, with the now well known reported cases of captive orcas attacking their trainers(7), and exemplarily Tilikum, which everyone today is well aware of because of the release of Blackfish ? Isn't he forgetting about the case of Tiao, a solitary Tursiops which accidentally killed a diver after being severely harassed ; and in fact more broadly, beyond vengeance as such, the fact that retaliation as a more immediate phenomenon is well reported in harassed solitaries ? We may not yet have anything comparable to a rebellion ; an organized conjunction of attacks at a larger scale, from given populations, but the fact that Sarano has to refuse this ability to other species, including ones that would easily fall into the idea of cognitive equality, should speak by itself on how the issue is broadly understood today : even for apparent "progressive" figures upholding their sentience, cetaceans are still nothing but depoliticized, agencyless "animals". 

Even more broadly, there appears to be a plethora of reported cases that match what we would call vengeance in elephants(8), if we are to interpret vengeance as planned retaliations by individuals or groups. This isn't surprising :  both elephants and cetacean appear to share a bundle of cognitive capabilities that broadly fit what Lilly would call "cognitive equality", something I seek to show and discuss on this website through a number of specific cases, theories, and broader reflexions on epistemology. 

In fact, Sarano contradicts himself. In a case of weird epistemological banana peel sleeping, he mentions... the case of vengeance in sperm whales, which were reported during the whaling era, particularly the well known case of Mocha Dick(9) . One could in fact also mention the one of Porphyrios during roman times, which attacked ships for no apparent reason for years : beyond the fact that their behavior didn't necessarily stemmed from retaliation, it doesn't fit Sarano's interpretation of cetacean behavior as a rule.  

Sarano clearly appears to be mistaken ; or at the very least data he doesn't mention directly challenges his dogmaticism on the matter, but the problem lies deeper. Sarano's explanation of course is scientifically ridiculous : he posits a sort of "hard ontology" that clearly roots itself in esoterism ("nature" understood as a sort of unified block opposed to "humanity" endowed sui generis with a form of "wisdom"), where cetaceans would somehow function as collective ant-like creatures, devoid of independence of mind and intentionality in their actions (as they would be defined by being part of "nature" as a coherent collective). This is even more surprising by the fact that the article supposedly denounces that (Sarano, according to the article, would seek to deconstruct the idea that the orcas attack represent a "vengeance of nature"... but he never questions the very idea of "nature" as a coherent acting whole and an ontology, as if it was Eywa from the Avatar Franchise). The point here merely being to to retort that "nature is good" instead of questioning the metastructure behind said belief : the very existence of an unified "nature" functioning as a coherent entity that must be opposed to how humans operates. 

Left (from Bottlenose Dolphin Gang Rumble | National Geographic) : so called female herding among some Tursiops populations is often used as a pretext to demonize Tursiops behavior as a rule, which negates nuances and realities that contradicts such a negative portrayal. But outright negating them the capability for such behavior arguably also constitutes a way to maintain the statu quo by denying them sapiency as such. Right : Tilikum attacking Brancheau, a solid counterargument against Sarano's claim. 

Of course, his point is to fight negative perception of cetaceans that could lead to retaliations against them. He is not mistaken in and on itself in such a approach : I did the same thing by denouncing the constant discourse since a decade or so of "dolphins" as "rapists" or sex pests in the broader discourse, especially regarding solitary Tursiops. But there is a big difference between nuancing a demonizing discourse that ontologizes cetaceans under a negative light, or particular populations (in his case, the Iberian orcas, in my case, solitaries such as Randy), and outright denying a practice or capability to cetaceans that evidences their sapiency, especially in the name of a naive take on "nature" as a coherent acting "block", which is precisely what Sarano should have questioned instead, had he genuinely thought about the issue at hand (the attacks interpreted not merely as "vengeance" of the orcas themselves but also by some as "vengeance of nature itself" as an entity, denying as such their capability for free will and "wildheit" as a broader concept). 

The issue nonetheless here is double : he not only denies an important behavioral hallmark of sapiency to cetaceans ; one that is easy to observe and conclude as such from context and which has been reported and studied for centuries, but he also continues cultivating the old myth of a hard divide between "humans" and what is understood as "nature" or "wilderness" within our culture ; a divide which, as I will explain elsewhere on the website through the work of Descola and others, remains far from a scientific given and can be easily shown as a product of our western, agrarian, industrial culture, and as a way to justify domination in more than one way.

Sarano appears, despite his apparent progressivism(10), to just be another figure who's job is to maintain the integrity of a frontier between human and non-humans, humanity and what is classified as animality and wilderness,  another priest in the church that prevents the stirring of the pot. I believe this to be a progressively more common occurence as time passes by : because it becomes harder to defend the divide on traditional grounds (by denying consciousness or intelligence to non-humans, or dismissing issues pertaining to ecology), public figures and intellectuals must rely on a "woke" defense of the Maginot line of anthropological exceptionalism by appealing to humans as ontologically evil, or as endowed by uniquely cognitive elements for wrongdoing and domination(11). I believe I have identified various occurrences of this, from Franz De Waal as a rule, which never accepted cetacean sapiency nor language and human/non human linguistic communication as important over what he perceived as progressive grounds(12), to what paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga states where he claims in an article that only Homo Sapiens can do art despite abundant evidence on the contrary in both paleanthropology and ethology(13), in order to articulate it with the idea of humans as uniquely destructive. 

Another brick in the wall, however transparent.