This post involves some element of speculation, but is about a topic which has been troubling me for some time, and about which I believe I have very good reasons for my suspicions.  

A few months ago, a dolphinarium in Arizona was temporarily shut down after the death of four of its eight captive dolphins, over a very short period of time.  The deaths will be fully investigated by the appropriate specialists and a cause of death determination made for each of these cases.  My hope is that the facility will be closed permanently, rather than be permitted to ‘fix the problems’ and getting restored with a clean bill of health.  Unfortunately, getting back to normal simply means a resumption of business operations, entertaining the citizens and tourists of AZ. Before we think of this as some kind of improvement, let’s remember what normal means for the dolphins confined to such a facility.

80% will die before the age of 20, necessitating a continuous replenishment, with capture and transport being a barbaric and traumatic process for the dolphins.   A video circulating on social media showed one of these AZ dolphins being delivered into its new home in the desert.  It was heartbreaking to watch how listless and dispirited this dolphin was, and I remember thinking how its spirit already appeared to be broken.  

Then, in the space of less than one week, my Twitter feed provided the following examples of what captivity really means.  (Pick any week, and you can easily find the same, as on and on the horror goes…)

• A dolphin floating inverted near the bottom of a pool, and every few seconds banging its head against the concrete floor
• Another dolphin jumping against the side of the tank and eventually struggling over the Plexiglas wall, to fall to the ground outside the tank
• A beluga repeatedly ramming head first into the glass
• An orca who has ground her teeth down to nothing from chewing on metal gates because of the stress of confinement.

All of these instances were recorded by patrons, so one would hope a great many people witnessing these incidents came away from it wondering just how bad conditions must be for these animals.  Then of course there’s the ongoing tragedy of Morgan, an orca residing at the Loro Parque facility in the Canary Islands, who has been recorded exhibiting obvious distress and grief after being separated from her calf.  The park likes to tweet out about how nicely the calf is bonding with his trainers.  

Such obvious suffering inflicted on our fellow beings!  And the crassness, and callousness of an industry that will tell us anything if we will only keep filling the seats. 

It’s got me wondering – how many of these deaths, in AZ and elsewhere, are suicides?  The stress of confinement, having been pulled from their pods (family units), being separated from offspring..  are we pushing them so far that many decide to put an end to their own misery?  

We know captive dolphins die much earlier than they do in the wild.  How can this be?  No predation.  No pollution. No plastics to accidentally swallow.  Veterinary care they don’t get in the wild.  And still they die very young.  Why?

I suspect that most of these dolphins probably are suffering from the ailments we diagnose them with in our post-mortem examinations.  But I have to wonder if the actual cause of death, in many cases, is really drowning.  That is, drowning due to having made the conscious decision to not take the next breath.  Unlike us, for dolphins breathing is not automatic, and every breath is a conscious choice.

It shouldn’t be surprising to us if we were to learn that a highly intelligent and social being, one which frequently behaves as we’ve described above when we deprive it of its liberty and confine it to a space which is not even a fraction of 1% of its usual range, would sometimes make a deliberate choice to not take its next breath?

If this is in fact happening, there should be someone who knows it, or at least suspects it – though it is not at all surprising that dolphinariums around the world would be anxious to not publicly disclose this.

Maybe it’s time to invest the resources necessary to find out.

Maybe we’d have one more piece of evidence to help put this vile industry out of existence at last.

Chris, Canadian Cetacean Alliance