And we want to love them and be loved by them. We want to establish control and to know everything about them.

We want to tame the orcas-we want to exploit them, use them for gain. The history of white Americans and Europeans with orcas sometimes feels like a microcosm of the relationship between those groups of people and nature more broadly. Orcas are fully alien, yet their intelligence, their pod dynamics, and their curiosity seem to render them recognisable to humans in a way that, say, the blue whale could never be. But even there they didn’t seem real (and, of course, to an extent they aren’t-the artificiality of their environment renders the whales themselves unnatural, if not unreal). As a child, I was taken to SeaWorld, saw them leaping up and out, splashing and seeming to play-I put my hand up to the glass like any other kid and marvelled at their sheer size.

In some ways, orcas seem like a metaphor. Apex predators as they are, any poisons eaten by the fish which make up the majority of the diet of resident pods (as opposed to itinerant orca) inevitably create a toxic buildup in their hunters. As I was preparing to write this review a piece of news surfaced, suggesting that up to half of the current living orca population might be dying off, poisoned by all the waste products, poisons, and plastics dumped in the sea.

Blackfish city review