MakoMania
TS Member
Mistreatment and abuse does not just mean physical acts of cruelty by trainers, but psychological and physical effects of being confined in literally a goldfish bowl. Orca and all cetaceans can travel over 100km per day in the wild, so being enclosed in these small concrete tanks is indeed cruel.
They use echo location in the wild all the time, but when they are in captivity, they are relatively quiet as when they do echo-locate, it literally bounces off the walls and can cause pain and discomfort.
SeaWorld have split families apart by separating young from their mothers and moving them to different parks. In the wild, pods of orcas have very strong family ties and stay together. Yes, the males do go off for periods to reproduce with other pods females (they are intelligent enough to not breed with their immediate family !!), but they do come back. This separation causes pain and anguish to the mother and is cruel.
I have also witnessed with my own eyes at SeaWorld, Orca being held in very small holding tanks for very long periods. These holding tanks are tiny to the point where the Orca cant really do anything. Is this cruelty? In my eyes, yes it is.
I could go on all day with this !!!SeaWorld and their trainers do care about their cetaceans, but the artificial conditions that they have to live in have a massive effect on their health and mental stability which is very very cruel.
SeaWorld has to move on from living off the name of Orca, so I predict that the ride offerings at their parks will increase (if the parks aren't sold). They have got to start to diversify and moving into installing more rides is what I think will happen. There is a lot of fake news about SeaWorlds attendance, in that BlackFish started it. It didn't, it was in decline before that, check out the attendance figures from 10 years ago to today. It was declining when the parks didn't install new rides, as soon as they installed a coaster, the attendance rose, before declining again.
Personally, I am torn with regards to SeaWorld. If it hadn't been for a captive Orca, my wife would probably have never developed a deep love for them, which eventually saw her study Marine Biology and now sees her conduct Whale and dolphin surveys to study the numbers of animals in certain areas. However, from a very young age, she knew it was wrong to keep cetaceans in captivity and she still does to this day and she is very vocal with regards to it and I agree with her. They are ambassadors, but its not fair to them to keep them in the conditions they are.
The below image shows why Orca (and other cetaceans), should not be in captivity. This is not SeaWorld, I hasten to add, but is Lolitta at Miami Seaquarium. Is it really fair for an animal which swims many miles each day in the wild to be held in a goldfish bowl like this? This is literally all the space that Lolitta has....
Sorry for the long post, but cetaceans are very important in my life now, due to learning this from my wife. Would I go to SeaWorld again? No, I would much rather spend time in the wild looking at them through binoculars or on a non evasive whale watching boat.
I actually agree with more of this post than you might expect. I agree completely that Lolita's conditions are unacceptable, I really do feel for her. Her habitat and social grouping are clearly not anywhere near satisfactory.
Cetaceans can travel hundereds of km in the wild, very true. However, the primary reason for this is to find food. The Orcas at SeaWorld don't have to travel to find food, but excercise is important, so they make up for this through high energy behaviours (such as breaching) that are beneficial both mentally and physically. I'm not trying to pretend that the habitats at SeaWorld are the same as the ocean, they clearly aren't and they will never be. As a result, life is different for SeaWorld's animals, but different doesn't always equate to worse.
There is no evidence that SeaWorld's Orcas are psychologically damaged, quite the opposite. Key indicators of mental health in any animal include reproductive drive, animation and of course, longevity. SeaWorld's Orcas reproduce (well, they used to), they are animated and whilst lifespan is a widely debated topic, research by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center shows that the Orcas at SeaWorld have lifespans relatively equal to those in the wild. With this said, it is extremely difficult to quantify the average lifespan of wild Orcas because we haven't been studying populations for long enough but more importantly, there appear to be significant differences between ecotypes.
I agree with you on the direction of the parks as well, there are definitely more rides being installed and this will continue until the park has a more balanced ride & animal offering like what is currently seen at Busch Gardens Tampa.
I have to say that your wife has chosen an absolutely fascinating career path and it is heart warming to learn that places like SeaWorld are affecting people as they have affected me. The CEOs may be all about the money but inspiring people is what drives the passion of the staff that care for these animals every day, after all, the bigger picture is that the oceans are in crisis and if we don't do anything about it, there will be a day when there are no Orcas at all.
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