The Length of a Football Field
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The Length of a Football Field
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Since January of 2025, every vessel in Washington waters has had to stay 1,000 yards from a Southern Resident killer whale. That is more than half a mile, it applies to kayaks and paddleboards, and the fine is $500. Federal law in the same water still says 200 yards. Canada, as of this June, says 1,000 metres. This episode asks where those numbers came from and finds that nobody ever solved for one. The oldest was chosen in 1995 because prosecutors found it a useful line, and the rest are copies, roundings, and a nautical unit that was already the working radius of the whole system before it was ever a rule. Then it finds the harder problem underneath: the rule turns on telling a Southern Resident from a Bigg's killer whale at half a mile, which the state's own advisory group calls very difficult and which the federal government declared flatly infeasible back in 2011.
Go look at: two photographs, a Bigg's and a Southern Resident, both taken at distance in ordinary grey light. Decide honestly whether you could tell them apart from a moving boat. That judgment is what the whole rule rests on.