What if we had a central command?

Whether or not it is morally acceptable to keep cetaceans in captivity is the battle being waged.  On one side are organizations like ours, along with a significant number of individuals, of course possessing varying degrees of commitment, but still constituting an impressive base of support.  Among our organizations are some truly exceptional ones – Sea Shepherd, Dolphin Project, Action for Dolphins, and many others. 

On the other side is the marine park entertainment industry.  These are the people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.  The 3,600+ captive cetaceans in the world right now generate as much as $5.5 billion USD for their captors each year.  The industry’s revenues, and thus their ability to spend money on this war, dramatically exceeds ours.  But as we discussed last time, that doesn’t mean this fight is even close to being over.

Unlike us, they’ve been on the defensive for a long time now, and their options have become more limited with every passing year.  We described to you a number of instances and examples which illustrate this quite well.  Nevertheless, they’ve been persistently able to keep those of us who work in cetacean advocacy marginalized.  To maintain just enough plausibility in the minds of the public that we may be just another bunch of crazy animal rights nuts.  As a result,  we have frequently been unable to have policy-makers feel the weight of our true numbers.  

This can be true even in the most egregious cases of injustice experienced by cetaceans in captivity.  And even when such cases have been well documented and widely accessed by the public (Honey, Kiska, Lolita, and so many others).  The net effect, as our colleague Anna stated in a previous post, is that even in such cases “we, humanity in the aggregate, [are] OK with what is going on”.  

If we can reach enough individuals with the straight goods on what takes place to make dolphin captivity possible, what we know to be the usual response to these facts will create that critical mass we need.  The average person, when confronted with the reality of how live captures take place, along with what life in captivity is like for a being of a dolphin’s nature, most assuredly ceases to be a potential patron of a dolphin show.  That is, once he or she knows what many of us already know.  It’s a simple matter of education and raising awareness.  That is how we get the job done.  But this is also what the SeaWorlds and Marinelands of the world know they need to prevent happening, at all costs.

And to the extent they can keep us divided and marginalized, so much the better for them.  Lawmakers may not fear the numbers we can generally bring to bear in this case or that.  But they would fear the true numbers we represent on a global basis.  There are more of us than it would seem, and if only we could speak as one.

We are not saying that we need to unite our movement under one guiding hand.  We will, and should remain a collection of independent organizations, each focused on our particular pieces of the problem.  Nevertheless, it can be a useful mental exercise to ask ourselves, “How would we fight this war if we were somehow united under one central command?”  We’re not saying this will happen, and not saying that it should.  There would be no way to determine whom to put in charge without doing a lot of damage to our movement.  Still, what would a central command in this war look to make happen?  How would it guide the conduct of the war?  We believe that answers to these questions will give us some insight into what we really need to get accomplished to be successful in bringing whale and dolphin captivity to a universal and permanent end.

1. We would continue to raise awareness but our efforts may be more targeted, and we would be focused less on our own donor pool (which is of course vital to our continued operation) and more on growing the overall size of the total potential donor pool – extending our reach in a more strategic way, by successive iterations.  The corollary effect being to reduce the potential number of butts in the seats at dolphin shows around the world as quickly as possible.
2. By speeding up the reduction in demand in this way we’d reduce the number of opportunities world wide to profit from the lucrative trade in live-captured dolphins.
3. We’d consistently remind potential patrons in established markets that live captures have been banned in many of the places these dolphins are on display – and for good reason given the cruelty involved – but that these dolphins have to come from somewhere.  We believe that the public will easily recognize that places that have less of a problem with inflicting cruelty should not be rewarded financially.  It’s just letting someone else do our dirty work for us, and most people will easily be able to see that.
4. Focus on emerging markets to try to prevent a flood of new facilities from coming on line.  It’s very expensive and labor-intensive to rehabilitate formerly-captive cetaceans for reintroduction to the wild, or to build new sanctuaries for those who can’t be.  Much better if we can prevent the next case from happening altogether.  As ‘emerging’ economies become more affluent, new forms of entertainment become affordable, and the demand for new aquaria grows.  Right now, the majority of the industry’s growth is in China.  A lot of damage we’ll one day need to undo.  Much better if we can repeat the experience of India, where lawmakers listened to experts and did the right thing.  It really matters what happens in many other places in the world where there presently aren’t any captive facilities, but one day may see a demand for them.
5. Put as much money as is needed into researching cetacean behaviour, intelligence, and brain physiology so that we can establish with data and expert observation the true nature of these extraordinary beings.  Build consensus within the scientific community of what we already know anecdotally.  As we improve our knowledge and bolster the case for marine mammal intelligence, it becomes that much easier to  get the message out to the public that the experience of confinement and captivity is truly horrific for such a being.  
6. We would coordinate our campaigns so that all of our organizations speak with one voice when attempting to persuade corporate entities to cease activities that enable harm.  Whether it’s travel companies who sell tickets to dolphin shows (or a number of other tourist attractions which abuse and exploit animals).  Or airlines that participate in transporting captive dolphins.  Or cruise lines deciding whether to include a stop in the Faroe Islands.  And so on.  It’s good business to respond to the collective power of consumer demand that’s sure to follow when everyone speaking into your ear is saying the same thing.  
7. We would provide the platforms that would make it easier for the public to access information about things like which resorts do or do not have captive dolphins, so that an informed choice can be made when making travel plans.
8. Absolutely continue efforts on the legal front, but with a somewhat different overriding ethos.  These include ongoing suits to end the sale of whale and dolphin meat which exceeds the legal limits for mercury and methyl mercury contamination.  Also, the present attempt to dissuade CITES from granting licenses to transport cetaceans across international borders, on the grounds that these activities are entirely unsustainable from a conservation standpoint.  However, we never want to let ourselves forget that, when it comes to cetacean rights – or at least the rights that they should one day have – things like sustainability and food safety are entirely peripheral issues.  To state it another way, the killing or capture of an animal possessing these characteristics would be morally wrong  even if the ocean were filled with an abundance of dolphins, and we had an unlimited supply of them for our aquaria or our dinner tables.  Which we do not.  Even if their flesh were safe to eat.  Which it is not.  Even if we could kill, capture or transport them ‘humanely’.  Taking such an animal away from it’s family and depriving it of it’s liberty can never be ‘humane’.  It doesn’t matter which sophisticated means you’ve developed to accomplish the task.  It is still dead wrong.
9. Make sure the public understands that, when we’re talking about cetacean captivity, we’re not talking about the general issue of ‘captivity’.  That is an entirely different discussion, one worth having, and humane treatment of all species needs to be the goal.  But let’s be clear.  A dolphin is not a fish, it’s not a chicken, or a cow.  It’s not even a dog or a pig (both among the smartest animals).  It’s part of a very select group of species (the great apes, whales, dolphins and elephants) who are arguably deserving of legal standing in our societies.  And even then we’re talking about a special case.  Unlike those others, a number of species of cetaceans could well turn out to be as intelligent as we are – and even more so is not outside the realm of possibility.  If we were all to stick to this message, we would avoid the risk of conflating issues around the term ‘captivity’ which unfortunately  happens often now, and simply doesn’t do justice to these very special creatures.
10. Bring forth the voices of experts to make it abundantly clear that cetacean conservation needs to take place in the wild.  This means curbing the destruction of their habitats and decimation of their food supplies.  Conservation cannot take place in a captive environment, where the interests of the dolphins is not considered in entertaining the public.   Where they die much younger than they do in the wild.  And where they lose the skills to survive in the wild, or to pass on these skills to their young.
11. We need to get really good at building sanctuaries, and to establish a decent number of them in suitable locations around the world.  As we learn how to do this, to share the knowledge widely, as the Whale Sanctuary Project is doing, so that what we learn can be quickly replicated.  The demand will presumably be huge a few years into the future, after we’ve managed to liberate increasingly greater numbers of individuals from their nightmare of captivity.  Many of these whales and dolphins will be unsuited for a return to the wild, and will need a place to go.
12. Use the best available science and engage legal scholars in the question of rights of nonhuman animals.   And whether confinement and loss of liberty is, for a cetacean, a deprivation and violation of those rights.  As the research referenced above proceeds as we expect it will, and we’ve taken the necessary steps to properly understand cetacean intelligence, we’ll want to give an appropriate hearing to the question of whether they ought to be granted personhood rights in our society.
13. Once public awareness in any given geographical area reaches critical mass, to use the combined weight of our voices to bring pressure to bear on lawmakers and policy analysts there.  The goal is to effect a comprehensive ban on cetacean captivity in one country after another.  A good number of nations have already taken this step, and the process is well under way in others.  We need to keep going until the number of holdout nations is zero.

OK, so those are some ideas regarding what we might do.  You can probably think of a few more, as there would no doubt be tremendous advantages to being able to coordinate our activities at a high level.  However, the reality is that we don’t operate as one well-integrated fighting force.  And again, nor should we be.  But these are nonetheless things that we’ll need to get done, one way or another.  And how is that to come about, either sooner but more likely later?  Well, it turns out we have something that may be even better than a unified, central command – at least in the long run.  It works something like this… 

I’m paraphrasing here from Thomas Friedman’s Thank You for Being Late.  Tom is a thoughtful, actually awesome person who presently works for the New York Times.  The basic structure of the idea that follows is his.  It certainly applies very nicely to our cause, and to what we need to get done.

“The best way to evolve and advance the best ideas is to have a large pool of them, and see which ones can adapt to which niches and also serve the whole.”  We benefit from being very pluralistic, and understanding that nothing enhances the resilience of our movement and healthy interdependencies among our organizations, more than a “richly diverse cornucopia” of ideas and project initiatives.  We can effectively “nest [our] communities within a flexible framework that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts”.

What we’re doing is building on large numbers of small scale networks, starting with individuals taking small actions (sending a tweet or making a $10 donation), and building into larger and larger ecosystems.  As in any successful enterprise, individual ideas, projects and programs must be allowed to fail for the whole ecosystem to succeed.  Each is a little community “adapting and evolving in order to survive and thrive”.  When you have many of these smaller-scale networks woven together into ecosystems – which in our case is our movement – the “overall system is resilient and hard to break”.  

Tom also points out the virtue of patience.  Nothing strong comes from rushing it into existence.  Our movement will be resilient precisely because we build its vital components patiently, persistently, with the larger end goal in mind.

OK, so let’s practice these strategies and continue to take the fight to the marine park industry!  We don’t stop until cetacean captivity has become one more awful feature of our history, but forever a thing of the past.  Let’s embrace our diversity, welcome new ideas, and let each of our organizations seek to thrive while being “nourished by the whole”.  We can assume ownership of this problem,  and together mix and coevolve ideas into real solutions that will work on behalf of all those whales and dolphins who are currently deserving of so much better from us.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Chris & Phil, Canadian Cetacean Alliance