In a sense, yes, but not a prohibitive one. Boats and fishing equipment are obviously tools that orcas are familiar with. They would basically see fishing equipment in particular as weapons already. These are things that orcas know they can't build. They're weird and scary in at least the sense that bats and aliens are weird to us. It's not a huge abstract leap from that to "let's not mess with these guys".

Think about how you feel approaching a very large animal, like a horse you don't know. You don't need to know how or even if it can hurt you, but it's worth being careful. If you know the animal has sharp points (like a large dog), even more so. I think sparrows avoid cars by similar logic.

I really think non-verbal, subconscious intelligence is capable of a lot more abstraction than people think. We need language to describe it, but not to do it. "Threat" is an abstraction that lots of simple animals handle just fine. It's not so much that we need to give animals more credit than that we give ourselves too much. Our actual motivations are usually much simpler than the stories we tell ourselves.