The Truth About Sea World In A 30 Second Video

The list ranges from industrial toxic waste in our water, to increasing awareness about pesticides, to GMOs and much more. One of the biggest and most recent success stories has been animal captivity, in this case, killer whale captivity. Thanks to recent documentaries like Blackfish and organizations like PETA as well as other animal rights groups, the world is falling out of its deep sleep and is starting to see that something is clearly wrong here. Below is a brief and heartbreaking 30 second video that sheds light on killer whale captivity. How can we take such an intelligent, majestic and extremely emotional being and put them in a little tank? A whale would have to swim around their current Sea World tanks approximately three thousand times in order to mimic just one day they would travel on average in the wild.

These are social animals, with families, friends and more. What have we done? Many of these whales are clearly broken, what right do we have to do this to them? It’s no secret that Sea World’s stock is continuing to drop rapidly. In fact, it’s almost down by fifty percent since its beginnings. This is great news, as Southwest Airlines also severed a partnership with them that lasted over twenty years. “By buying more stock in Sea World, we can continue to push executives toward the only humane solution for the orcas captive and that is relocating them to the coastal sanctuaries,” said Lindsay Rajt, PETA activist. Sea World’s stock has hit an all-time low. You can read more about this story here. This is a very informative article. It was written by PETA, and you can view the original with sources HERE. At aquariums around the country, orcas leap through the air for a handful of fish, and tourists flock to facilities that offer them the opportunity to swim or have their pictures taken with dolphins.

These parks and zoos are part of a billion-dollar industry built on the suffering of intelligent, social beings who are denied everything that is natural and important to them.1 Ric O’Barry, who was a dolphin trainer for the Flipper television series in the 1960s, says that parks and zoos “want you to think that God put [dolphins] there or [that] they rescued them. ... If people knew the truth, they wouldn’t buy a ticket.”2 Killer whales, or orcas, are members of the dolphin family.

They are also the largest animals held in captivity. In the wild, orcas stay with their mothers for life. Family groups, or “pods,” consist of a mother, her adult sons and daughters, and her daughters’ offspring. Members of the pod communicate in a “dialect” specific to that pod. Dolphins swim together in family pods or tribes of hundreds. Capturing even one wild orca or dolphin disrupts the entire pod. To obtain a female dolphin of breeding age, for example, boats are used to chase the pod into shallow waters, where the animals are surrounded with nets that are gradually closed and lifted onto the boats. Unwanted dolphins are thrown back. Some die from shock or stress, and others slowly succumb to pneumonia when water enters their lungs through their blowholes. Pregnant females may spontaneously abort babies. In one instance, more than 200 panicked dolphins who had been corralled into a Japanese fishing port crashed into boat hulls and each other, becoming hopelessly entangled in nets during their attempt to find an escape route. Many became exhausted and drowned.3 Orcas and dolphins who escape the ordeal of capture become frantic upon seeing their captured companions and may even try to save them. When Namu, a wild orca captured off the coast of Canada, was towed to the Seattle Marine Aquarium (then the Seattle Public Aquarium), he was insured by Lloyd’s of London, according to the BBC, for “various contingencies including rescue attempts by other whales.”4 In the wild, orcas and dolphins swim up to 100 miles per day.5,6 But captured dolphins are confined to tanks that may be only 24 feet long, 24 feet wide and 6 feet deep.7 They navigate by echolocation—bouncing sonar waves off other objects to determine their shape, density, distance and location—but in tanks, the reverberations from their own sonar bounce off the walls, driving some dolphins insane. Jacques Cousteau said that life for a captive dolphin “leads to a confusion of the entire sensory apparatus, which in turn causes -in such a sensitive creature -a derangement of mental balance and behaviour.”8 Tanks are kept clean with chemicals that have unknown side effects. Because of high chlorine levels in their tanks, dolphins at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida were unable to open their eyes and their skin began to peel off.9 A tank at the North Carolina Zoological Park didn’t provide enough shade, causing a sea lion’s eyes to develop blisters and rupture. Oklahoma City Zoo closed its dolphin exhibit after four dolphins died within two years from bacterial infections.10 Sea lions at Pennsylvania’s Hersheypark won’t come out of their pen because they fear the noise made by the nearby rollercoasters.11 Newly captured dolphins and orcas are forced to learn tricks. Former trainers say that withholding food and isolating animals who refuse to perform are two common training methods. According to O’Barry, “positive reward” training is a euphemism for “food deprivation.”12 Former dolphin trainer Doug Cartlidge maintains that highly social dolphins are punished by being isolated from other animals: “You put them in a pen and ignore them. It’s like psychological torture.”13 If life for captive orcas and dolphins were as tranquil as marine parks would have us believe, the animals would live longer than their wild counterparts. However, while captive marine mammals are not subject to predators or ocean pollution, their captivity is nevertheless a death sentence. In the wild, dolphins can live into their 40s and 50s―some have been documented to be more than 90 years old.14 But more than 80 percent of captive dolphins whose ages could be determined died before they turned 20,15 and those at SeaWorld and other marine parks rarely survive for more than 10 years.16 Florida’s Sun-Sentinel examined 30 years of federal documents pertaining to marine animals and found that nearly 4,000 sea lions, seals, dolphins and whales have died in captivity, and of the 2,400 cases in which a cause of death was listed, one in five animals died “of uniquely human hazards or seemingly avoidable causes.”17 Captive marine mammals have died from swallowing coins, succumbing to heatstroke, and swimming in contaminated water. A former trainer at Hersheypark quit because she saw “a lot of frustrated animals that would die from ulcers.”18 A marine-mammal behavioral biologist in Seattle says that “dolphins in captivity can exhibit self-inflicted trauma” and that some drift at the surface of the water and chew on concrete until they’ve destroyed their teeth.19 Others have reportedly taken their own lives by hitting their heads against the sides of pools or by not coming up for air.20 Many aquariums are now offering touch tanks and “swim-with” programs, giving visitors carte blanche to invade these animals’ already diminished worlds. When the Georgia Aquarium announced that it was going to start allowing a dozen swimmers in the tank with its whale sharks every day, George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told the Los Angeles Times that subjecting animals to these programs is like “being in a bedroom for the rest of your life after having had the ability to walk around freely .... And then having 20 people come join you in your personal space every so often.”21 At least 14 dolphins housed at The Mirage’s Dolphin Habitat in Las Vegas, where patrons can pay to be a “trainer” for a day, have died since the facility opened in 1990.22 Thirty-year-old Sharky died of head injuries when she collided in mid-air with another dolphin while forced to perform tricks as part of SeaWorld’s Discovery Cove, where tourists participate in the “swim with dolphins” program.23 Even dolphin-assisted therapy can be dangerous—not only for the animals but also for the mentally or physically disabled patients hoping to get some kind of “healing” experience. “Dolphin-assisted therapy is not a valid treatment for any disorder,” says Lori Marino, a dolphin and whale researcher from Emory University. She adds that “injury is a very real possibility when you place a child in a tank with a 400-pound wild animal that may be traumatized from being captured.”24 Touch tanks are also death traps for animals. Forty stingrays died from an unknown toxin in the Calgary Zoo’s touch tank within three months after the exhibit opened.25 This mass death was not an isolated incident: 21 stingrays died in the tank at Fresno Chaffee Zoo in California, and 16 died at Illinois’ Brookfield Zoo.26,27 Animals kept in aquariums have little federal protection, and the few laws that do exist are often ignored.

The Sun-Sentinel reported that the federal government “has allowed violators to continue operating for years even after documenting contaminated water, starvation or deaths.”28 The executive director of the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission told the paper that inspectors are too few and too overworked and that “[t]here are very few who are trained in marine mammal veterinary sciences.”29 Even more disturbing, although federal law requires that facilities keep records of mammals’ births, deaths and transfers, many don’t turn over reports of stillborns or newborn deaths. In one instance, a California sea lion named Nemo died in 2000 at the Seneca Park Zoo in New York, yet three years later, government records indicated that he was still alive.30 Richard Donner, co-producer of the film Free Willy, said, “Removal of these majestic mammals from the wild for commercial purposes is obscene. ...

These horrendous captures absolutely must become a thing of the past.”31 People around the world are recognizing that dolphins, orcas and other cetaceans do not belong in captivity. In 2013, India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests announced that the country would no longer permit dolphins to be kept in captivity for entertainment, stating that to do so would be “morally unacceptable.”32 Canada does not allow beluga whales to be captured and exported.33 Israel prohibits the importation of dolphins for use as entertainment.34 Australia also prohibits the importation of dolphins.35 Don’t visit parks or zoos that have captive marine mammals unless you’re doing so to monitor the animals as part of a campaign. Encourage your local aquarium to stop breeding animals in order to make space for rehabilitating (and releasing) injured wildlife. Report poor conditions to the U.S. Department of Agriculture via leaflets at the park, write letters to the editors of local publications, and pressure officials to avoid subsidizing these facilities with taxpayer money. Support legislation that prohibits the capture or restricts the display of marine mammals. .

Read the full article at the original website

References:

• http://blackfishmovie.com/
• http://www.peta.org/
• http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/PETA-buys-SeaWorld-stock-in-an-attempt-to-end-Orca-captivity-for-good--271931691.html
• http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-in-entertainment/animals-used-entertainment-factsheets/marine-animal-exhibits-chlorinated-prisons/