She was inserted into this social group with five other whales that she doesn’t get along with,” Ventre said in an interview with Sky News. “It looks like she jumped up on that stage area to get away from the other whales...I think that that was a way for her to prevent from getting beat up further.” (Hear from another former trainer.)
The press release from Loro Parque states that the whales are trained to jump onto the ledge for various reasons like check-ups, and sometimes for fun they spontaneously do the jumps they were trained to do. “To speculate that this [behavior by Morgan] represents a sign of stress demonstrates utter ignorance about the natural behavior of this species,” their blog post states.
However, Visser says that the behavior was anything but normal. In the wild, orcas have never been observed beaching themselves intentionally for long periods of time, only sometimes for a moment while hunting in shallow water.
“They phrase these things so that they’re like fairy tales, but they’re really nightmares,” she says.