Keiko was buried along the shoreline of Taknes Bay, Norway, on Sunday, December 14, in a small ceremony designed to let the animal truly rest in peace, rather than face yet another media horde before being placed in the ground.

But while Keiko's burial may have been private, his passing has been a very public event. People from across the globe have expressed sympathy and paid tribute to the orca who first gained international attention after starring in Free Willy in 1993. Others have used Keiko's death to examine the value of his reintroduction campaign.

It would be coy of us to ignore the fact that Keiko's freedom campaign has had its critics, but few if any of these critics have been aligned with the long-term project. One man, however, has been intimately involved in Keiko's journey and he could find only good in the project. His name is Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of the famous oceanic explorer, whose Ocean Futures Society has worked closely with the project team.

Here's what Cousteau had to say on Keiko's passing in a column on the Ocean Futures Society web site:

"The success is that Keiko swam through that gate to freedom over three years ago, met wild whales, fed himself, traveled his own route through the northern seas where he was born, and every day exercised the freedom of choice that we worked so hard to restore to him," Cousteau writes.

"But what have we learned? The need to better understand Keiko and his consorts led to an investigation of wild orca populations that were previously unknown," Cousteau adds. "Hundreds of hours of North Atlantic whale calls are being analyzed in Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute along with an entirely new library of photos to identify individuals and add specific numbers to the population of these orcas. Every aspect of killer whale physiology has been studied and documented with Keiko, from physical measurements to DNA profiles...Keiko has offered us an encyclopedia of information that will serve the wild populations of orcas we need to better understand."

Those sentiments were echoed by David Phillips, executive director of the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation, which oversaw Keiko's freedom campaign.

"I think it was the most spectacular effort launched on behalf of an animal," Phillips told the The News-Times, the newspaper for Newport, Oregon, where Keiko lived for nearly three years at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

"I really don't think there's anything that matches Keiko in terms of effort and in terms of worldwide response." he added. "There is something about Keiko's persona and something about his odyssey that touched people all around the world in a very fundamental way, in a way that nobody foresaw."

No matter where Keiko lived, he seemed to touch people, whether it was Newport or Norway. Of course, Keiko touched some communities not only with his friendly persona but also with his financial clout—a trait that was not lost on a few Oregon officials at the time of Keiko's passing.

Newport mayor Mark Jones was fairly blunt with his statement to a reporter with Salem's Statesman-Journal: "He brought people from all over the world to experience Newport," he said. "Keiko was really able to give our economy a big spurt while he was here, and he's been missed ever since."

Likewise, Mark Collson, a member of the Oregon Coast Aquarium's board of directors and a former Newport mayor, told The News-Times that Keiko "put us on the map. There is no question about that. The Oregon Coast Aquarium, the City of Newport, and this region benefited greatly from his presence here. We were happy to be one of the instruments in his rehabilitation and the opportunity and attempt to try to return him to the wild."

Those more aligned with animals than business also had kind words for Keiko.

Stephen Claussen worked with Keiko for six years in Oregon and Iceland. He told The Oregonian that "Keiko was an excellent ambassador, not only for his species but for all the creatures in the marine environment...He really brought human awareness to a new level."

Peter Noah, who also worked with Keiko at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, accompanied the killer whale to Iceland during the lengthy ride in a C-17 in 1998. Noah told a reporter for The News-Times that Keiko would have likely died earlier if he had stayed in Newport.

"He's a social animal in a tank by himself with only a limited amount of stimulation," Noah said. "I think that would have been horribly unfair to him. I think it was a wonderful effort...[In Iceland], he really became much stronger, much different, a much healthier animal in almost all respects, at least from a physical standpoint."

Charles Vinick, the executive vice president of Oceans Futures Society who worked with Keiko in Iceland, offered some perspective to a reporter with The Seattle Times.

"Sure, the hope and the dream was that he would swim off with the wild whales, he'd mate, we'd all have that perfect picture in our minds," Vinick told the paper. "In reality, he was not truly a wild whale. He was not truly a captive whale. He was somewhere in between."

The Oregonian in Portland neatly summarized Keiko's freedom ride in a December 17 editorial: "Keiko's lasting importance is not the gentle, sappy Free Willy movies or the sparkling aquarium his celebrity built in Newport. The lovable orca's real legacy is what he demonstrated about the complexity and coolness of killer whales, and what it means for an animal to be truly wild and free."

On the other side of the Atlantic, Keiko left behind a host of admirers as well. One of Keiko's handlers, Torbjoerg Valdis Kristiansdottir, told the Norwegian news agency NTB that "this is like losing a good friend. We've been together every day for more than a year, and we didn't expect it to end like this now."

Lars Olav Lilleboe of Halsa Township, where Taknes Bay is located, told a reporter that it was a sad day for the town of 1,750 people.

"He is one of the biggest things to ever happen to Halsa," said Lilleboe. "There is no doubt that he has been a tourist attraction."

But perhaps the best tribute to Keiko came from Norwegian authorities who broke with tradition to give the famous orca a fitting burial. In Norway, dead whales are typically towed out to sea and sunk, but officials gave Keiko's handlers special permission to bury him on land, near Taknes Bay.

No doubt, even in death, Keiko will continue to attract fans by the hundreds.