Beware promotional content such as the following.  This example comes from Marineland Canada’s website.  If you don’t think about it too much, it sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  

MARINE MAMMALS

Become inspired at Marineland®! 

The marine mammals that call Marineland^® home play an important role in protecting our oceans by inspiring generations of Canadians to care about marine life. Through Marineland’s commitment to education, conservation and research, our marine mammals positively contribute to humanity’s knowledge and concern for the diverse marine mammal species that live at Marineland^®. Come visit them to see for yourself what makes them so inspiring.

 

Here’s another…

MARINELAND’S BELUGAS OFFER UNIQUE EXPERIENCE FOR ALL 

Marineland® is the best place to learn from and be inspired by beluga whales. Visit our belugas at Friendship Cove®, or Arctic Cove®, where our beluga moms and babies live. Visit Marineland® today and get inspired by these friendly giants. Come see us soon!

And perhaps most offensive of all…

Visit Kiska Our Friendly Ocean Giant

With views from above and below,  you can enter the enchanting world of the killer whale!

In addition to Kiska, you can view many of our beluga whales. Watch their amazing interactions in the underwater viewing area to learn more about this amazing species.

The reality, of course, is quite different.  These whales don’t choose to make Marineland their “home”.  Life in a concrete tank bears no resemblance to life in the wild.  You will learn precisely nothing about their behaviors in a natural environment by observing their “amazing interactions in Marineland’s underwater viewing area”.  If you’re going to be “inspired” at all, it will be when you take note of the obvious intelligence of these creatures.  At some point you may even come to realize that you’re in the presence of something extraordinary.  They are self-aware and cognitively sophisticated beings.  And yes, it’s inspiring to realize that we humans are not alone in that sense.  But if you’ve happened to come this far, the next step is that a little voice in your head may start to warn you that you’ve just spent the price of admission to unwittingly support something awful.

If you think about it a little more, you have to wonder, what is it like for such a being to be so constrained, never again to know the freedoms that come with life in the wild?  What we now know, and research makes abundantly clear, is that life in captivity for whales and dolphins is an unbearable hell.  It’s why they die so quickly in captivity compared to their wild counterparts.  This despite receiving veterinary care, never having to worry about predation, and not being at risk of swallowing any of our plastic pollution or getting entangled in all of that fishing gear we’ve littered their natural environment with.  I believe that dramatically reduced life expectancy in captivity is entirely driven by the disillusionment, despair and loss of hope that comes with this life.  A fish may be happy enough in captivity (assuming it’s fed and well cared for), but a whale or dolphin experiences it much as you are I would.   

So, if Marineland wants to “inspire generations of Canadians to care about marine life”, how about we start by caring about that?  Depriving a dolphin of his or her freedom is morally indefensible.  If we’re to become a society that cares about protecting them – and as time passes we have thankfully been moving in that direction – we need to care about protecting them in the wild, where they belong.

As far as using Marineland’s viewing area to “enter the enchanting world of the killer whale”…  The audacity of such a statement is so offensive as to make me want to scream.  Orcas don’t live in complete isolation from other marine mammals in featureless concrete tanks.  No stimulation, no companionship, nothing.  This is as far from the actual world of the killer whale as it’s possible to get.  The fact that we still allow this to go on in Canada is unconscionable.   

Kiska is an Icelandic orca who was captured from the wild in 1979 when she was only three years old.  She has been alone since her last companion, Ikaika, was moved to SeaWorld San Diego after a long legal battle between SeaWorld and Marineland.  She is the last captive orca in Canada, and in the entire world there are no other orcas forced to live without any other marine mammals for company.  Her behaviour has been described as “repetitive, disinterested and lethargic”.   Recently, Phil Demers, a former trainer at Marineland, but today one of the most forceful and effective advocates for the animals confined there, brought Kiska back into the news with reports that she’s been showing signs of extreme distress, and crying out for other orcas. 

If you learn anything at all about marine mammals from the Marineland experience, it’s that we urgently need to improve our treatment of them, and that captivity is a moral abomination that needs to end now!

What an admission of our failure as stewards of this planet if the last place we can save cetaceans is in concrete tanks!  The conservation argument for captivity is ridiculous on it’s face.  If our concern was conservation, we certainly wouldn’t be exploiting them for our entertainment – in every case using food deprivation to compel performance.  If the needs of the whales really was to come first, they would be in large sea pens or sanctuaries.  They would not be performing in shows, or interacting with the public in swim-with-the-dolphin programs.  

At a sanctuary, such as the one being established by the Whale Sanctuary Project at Port Hilford Bay in Nova Scotia, there is a chance to provide a true educational component.  Here, formerly captive whales could be retired and given a new life.  Of paramount importance is that in this facility the needs of the whales will come first.  It’s people like Charles Vinick and Dr. Lori Marino that we should be looking to when the subject is marine mammal conservation or public education.

When organizations like Marineland or SeaWorld use these arguments, it’s nothing but a smokescreen by an immoral industry seeking to cover up exploitation-for-profit of our fellow sentient beings.  As a smart consumer, don’t let them get away with that.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Dakota, Canadian Cetacean Alliance