Orca And Dolphin

There have been very few confirmed attacks on humans by wild killer whales, none of which has been fatal. In one instance, killer whales tried to tip ice floes on which a dog team and photographer of the Terra Nova Expedition was standing. There is speculation that the sled dogs' barking may have sounded enough like seal calls to trigger the killer whale's hunting curiosity. In the 1970s, a surfer in California was bitten, and in 2005 a boy in Alaska who was splashing in a region frequented by harbor seals was bumped by a killer whale that apparently misidentified him as prey. Unlike wild killer whales, captive killer whales are reported to have made nearly two dozen attacks on humans since the 1970s, some of which have been fatal.
Competition with fishermen also led to killer whales being regarded as pests. In the waters of the Pacific Northwest and Iceland, the shooting of killer whales was accepted and even encouraged by governments. As an indication of the intensity of shooting that occurred until fairly recently, about 25% of the killer whales captured in Puget Sound for aquaria through 1970 bore bullet scars. The U.S. Navy claimed to have deliberately killed hundreds of killer whales in Icelandic waters in 1956.
• Modern Western attitudes
Western attitudes towards killer whales have changed dramatically in recent decades. In the mid 1960s and early 1970s, killer whales came to much greater public and scientific awareness, starting with the first live-capture and display of a killer whale known as Moby Doll, a resident that had been harpooned off Saturna Island in 1964. So little was known at the time that it was nearly two months before the whale's keepers discovered what food (fish) it was willing to eat. To the surprise of those who saw him, Moby Doll was a docile, non-aggressive whale that made no attempts to attack humans.