It took SeaWorld hundreds of injuries, three human deaths and 163 orca deaths to realize it was time to put the orca performances to rest. It’s true that SeaWorld will never be the same once the famous orca performances cease, but no amount of entertainment is worth the danger and death of any human or animal.
For over 30 years, SeaWorld has defended their treatment of the orcas in their facilities, but the truth is, movies such as “Blackfish” are not too far from what really goes on in SeaWorld’s tanks. If you type “SeaWorld” into your search engine, hundreds of pictures and articles showing the mistreatment of the animals in SeaWorld, especially the orcas, appear. SeaWorld not only kidnaps many of their orcas from the wild, but they often kill the parents of the offspring they kidnap in the process. Author John Hargrove former orca trainer at SeaWorld, told Simon Worrall in an interview for National Geographic that he does not believe it is acceptable for people to rip these animals from their natural families in the wild, killing some of their family members in the process, then put them in concrete pools, for a corporation to make enormous profits and for people to be entertained.
Many researchers and critics say that the tanks at SeaWorld are not wide or deep enough to correctly hold a 22-foot, 12,000-pound orca. This is why the orcas often have completely collapsed dorsal fins. And, although SeaWorld performers try to justify that as being normal, performers are not scientists. Any well-educated marine biologist would tell you that collapsed dorsal fins are a direct result of captivity and improper care. For example, research done by Dr. John Jett and Dr. Jeffery Ventre, mammal specialists and former killer ocra trainers, suggests that while abnormality in ocra dorsal fins is found 23 percent of the time in orcas in the wild, a collapsed dorsal fin is not normal and is almost always a direct result of human activity.
The orcas at SeaWorld have been subject to starvation and incest by way of artificial insemination. SeaWorld trainers often withhold food from the orcas as a training technique, and, due to the lack of male orcas in captivity, female orcas are often artificially inseminated with their own son’s sperm. Hargrove also admitted that it would make his life so much easier if he could say that the orca in SeaWorld’s facilities were thriving in captivity, living happy and enriched lives. But unfortunately, after all the years of experience that he has had, he has witnessed the psychological and physical trauma that results from captivity.
With all of the neglect going on within the small confined tanks of these orcas, it’s only normal for them to have built-up aggression. You cannot neglect an animal and expect it to be obedient. Moreover, animals that are naturally supposed to be out in the wild do not do well with confinement, especially if their confined area does not exactly mimic the way in which they would actually live in the wild. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the ocean covers 72 percent of our planet’s surface and is approximately 36,200 feet deep. How that even remotely equates to 100 feet wide and 40 feet deep is incomprehensible, especially when considering the fact that ocras swim at least 100 miles a day, according to us.whales.org.
At first, the thought of SeaWorld putting its orca performances to rest was disheartening because a part of me thought about innocent children sitting in the front row, begging Shamu to splash them and not knowing what cruel treatment Shamu went through just to learn how to do so.
The U.S. exploits everything. There’s this curiosity and greed that makes Americans want to capture nature and bottle it up so they can manipulate it for profit. The problem with that is we disrupt nature when we remove it and the inevitable cause of that is turmoil.
I’ll admit that the idea of live orca performances is great. I’ll commend SeaWorld for such an idea, but the minute it started to create unhappiness, injury and death, SeaWorld should have stopped the performances. Instead, they let it get as bad as possible and only then realized that there’s no coming back from that. You can’t tank happiness.
Photo credit: pixabay.com
