Date: Sat, 6 Jan 1996
Keiko (Free Willy) to Start Trek to Freedom

Mexico City, (Reuter) - Keiko, star of the blockbuster WHALE movie 'Free Willy', starts his own personal odyssey toward freedom on Sunday as he leaves capitivity in Mexico for a new life in Oregon. The 6m Killer Whale, who for 11 years has been star attraction in an amusement park in Mexico City, will be airlifted in a Hercules tranport plane early on Sunday to a specially built aquarium in Newport, Oregon. There, experts hope, they can coax him back to full health and weight in a large salt water tank, end his role as a stunt performer and eventually take the unprecedented step of returning him to the ocean to find his family and a mate.

Keiko leapt to stardom in his role as ``Willy'' in the 1993 Warner Brothers movie about a WHALE released from grim capitivity and released at sea with the help of a small boy. In a case of life imitating art, a US group known as the Free Willy foundation, backed with $US2 million from Warner Brothers, pulled together funds to build him a better aquarium in Newport, and arranged his transfer.
"The movie ended beautifully but (Warner Brothers worried) that the star of the movie was in a facility that didn't meet his needs,"David Phillips, director of the foundation, told reporters here on Friday. To offset criticism about a mammal that quickly became the most famous WHALE in the world, Phillips said the movie studio joined Mexico's Reino Aventura amusement park in planning his rehabilitation. Experts deny that Keiko is in bad health but he suffers a skin irritation, is about a ton underweight and has now reached sexual maturity at the age of 15. With cash-strapped Reino Aventura unable to afford him a female companion, Phillips said it became the first amusement park ever to give away a killer (ORCA) WHALE.
"It was almost impossible to find him a mate. We did it out of concern for Keiko, not because of pressure,'' said the park's director general Antonio Quevedo.

Starting early on Sunday, Keiko will be lifted into a portable water tank, trucked to the airport and flown in a sling inside the tank aboard a C-130 Hercules for a nine-hour, $US500,000 flight to Oregon. His new home will be a two million gallon salt water pool, built with donations at a cost of around $US8 million. The pool is five times larger than his current one. Phillips said he would be taught to eat live fish and gradually trained to return to sea. Biologists would perform DNA tests to try to trace his family off the Iceland coast.

No captive Orca has ever been returned to the wild, and success is not guaranteed.

For Keiko, the gamble may be worth it. If he returns to sea his lifespan could increase to around 40 years because of the natural environment, Phillips said, and there was still a chance he could find a mate and start a family of his own.



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