Thanks for sharing! I believe the saying is 'an enemy of my enemy is my friend'.
Just to share my understanding in turn - orcas are indeed cetaceans, a type of marine mammal called a toothed whale, which also includes dolphins! We're not too small to be considered prey, they eat penguins and seals lol. it's just...we're not like in their typical diet and they're intelligent enough to recognise that. Our ecological system do not naturally overlap, we're on land and they're in the sea. We don't kill cows because we hate them, it's just a recognisable food source. Re captive orcas, 100%, it's cruel, unethical and totally unsustainable - I believe China and Japan have the only programs left in the world.
I can understand why the MC is mixing things up. The concept of adding human morals and thoughts to animal is called "anthropomorphising"....and well, that's sort of easy to do when the animal in front of you has literally transformed into an adult human with fully fledged language and cognitive abilities. But yeah I agree, he needs to realise that there are all these social rules that an orcas not going to care about.
You love orcas and yet you never realised their cruelty? They are beautiful creatures and under normal circumstances, they won’t consider humans worthy of being killed and they do actually help us out in the wild. They don’t like squids and all manners of whales including dolphins so they tend to be on our side against those creatures. “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” BUT the reasons why orcas don’t consider us a threat is because 1. They are so much bigger than us that we don’t register as a predator and we are too small to be adequate prey for them and 2. We have surprisingly never killed them enough to put them close to endangered or extinction so they have no biological need to hate us on sight.
Also, all manner of whales and orcas (half-whale because it’s a dolphin) have been captured and put into captivity where they die. All whales are migratory and they NEED the open ocean so when you place a massive sea creature into an enclosure with no space to swim and no enrichment activities and no actual hunting abilities, they die. There’s nothing for them there. There are some that survive but it’s so stressful to the animals that they stopped capturing them in the wild and now are trying to captive breed them to replenish the endangered breeds. That being said, stressed animals are aggressive animals. I have 3 cats. One of them had an uti. He has never once bitten me in the 5 years I’ve had him. He bit me and scratched me during his uti. He hasn’t bitten or scratched me since. Even during bath time. Anyone who loves animals and specifically orcas would know these facts. This is basic animals and orca 101.
I don’t know if the author wants us to believe that the son of an orca researcher is stupid and has no idea about the nature of these animals or if the author themselves are dumb and can’t figure out how to add human morals to their animal character that just so happens to have a human form. It’s not like he’s a wolf shifter where he’s human and turns into a wolf. He’s a human shifter. He’s an orca that turns into a human. Human laws don’t apply to him because he’s not a human. That’s like holding a monkey to human standards just because they stand up on 2 legs like us or hold parrots to our laws regarding speech because they do in fact speak. It’s so stupid.