Whether or not it is morally acceptable to keep cetaceans in captivity is the battle being waged.  What the majority of people think within any given jurisdiction or geographical area will (eventually) drive a number of things.  Whether new facilities are built.  Whether existing ones continue to ‘replenish their inventories’ with new dolphins.  And, in time, whether governments continue to allow this practice.  Aligned on our side is a number of organizations and individuals actively working to raise awareness among the public.  On the other side are the investors and agents of the marine park entertainment industry.

At first glance, it hardly looks like a fair fight.  But in the end it the outcome will be decided by the humanity of all the people in the middle – individuals much like ourselves only a few short years ago.   Unaware of the horrors that underlie whale and dolphin captivity.  Potential patrons for the dolphin show.  For now, but hopefully not for long.

Captive dolphins in the tourism industry generate as much as $5.5 billion USD for their captors.  Our adversary is an industry that has access to resources that make ours look paltry and insignificant by comparison.  Their revenues exceed, many times over, all of the combined fundraising efforts of all of our respective organizations working to stop them.  On paper, it doesn’t seem like we should be able to beat them.  Yet, we believe that if we remain engaged for the long haul, we will eventually succeed in bringing captivity to an end.  We think it will take at least a couple of decades – possibly closer to three.  And we’re going to continue to suffer more losses than wins for a while yet.  

Now it’s true that, unlike us, the marine park industry has been under assault from many sides.  There’s no question they‘ve taken a few serious blows, and felt them!  The commercial and  legislative tides are running against them, and have been for several decades now.  

Live orca captures in the Pacific Northwest so horrified residents that the state of Washington banned the practice in the 1970s.  So SeaWorld next turned to Iceland (Tilikum’s birth place).  That source has long since become unavailable, so they moved on to the next.  In time the number of places from which they could purchase live orcas shrank.  Now Russia has temporarily banned live captures and may make this ban permanent.  Most living captive orcas today weren’t taken from the wild – they were born into captivity.  This is also true of other dolphin species, in a growing number of countries.  A great many horrors continue to be committed by the marine park industry, but as time passes they have increasingly fewer options.

You can still buy dolphins from Cuba, or from Taiji, Japan.  But if you want to keep your membership in WAZA (World Association of Zoos and Aquariums), you won’t be able to purchase those taken in drive hunts like Taiji’s much longer.  You may also run into problems with CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) when you want to move them across international borders, if campaigns currently being waged to effect this are successful. 

Now, with captive breeding being seriously questioned in many places, some jurisdictions have already passed legislation against it.  The industry really has to wonder where replenishment of their dolphins is going to come from.  It’s a problem, isn’t it, when the majority of the public begins to realize that your ‘inventory’ is really sentient beings you have no right to kidnap from the wild, or to have born into permanent servitude at one of your facilities.

Over time, the breeding of these animals is being recognized for what it is.  California banned captive breeding of orcas in 2016, and a bill was recently introduced which would extend this to other dolphin species in that state.  New South Wales in Australia banned it in 2021.  Belugas recently ‘exported’ from Marineland to Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut were subjected by US regulators to a prohibition on their being bred there.  And so on.

More evidence that our campaigns to raise public awareness are gaining traction…

In September, 2018 the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that SeaWorld Entertainment would pay $5 million in fines to settle charges that they’d committed fraud by misleading investors about just how much impact the film Blackfish had on their reputation and business operations.  That’s good news for us insofar as it establishes the principle that a general rise in public awareness is very bad news for this industry.  However, it needs to be noted that with the exception of early 2020, when entertainment stocks as a whole were especially hard hit because of the COVID-19 pandemic, SeaWorld’s share price has rebounded very well since then.  Part of that is due to changes in their business model towards more ethical forms of entertainment.  But widespread exploitation of cetaceans by SeaWorld continues, so all this tells us that we have much more work to do.  

OK, so we’ve sometimes been successful in putting this industry on the defensive.  But so far they’ve also been able to keep our side divided, and thus have been able to limit our impact.  It’s not so much a case of us fighting one another.  We normally tend to hold very similar positions, though at times it’s necessary to take a stand against someone who may otherwise be an ally much of the time.   The best example that comes to mind is that Ric O’Barry was right to make the stand he did, resulting in conflict with the Earth Island Institute a few years ago.  But all things considered, we don’t tend to spend much energy or resources fighting one another.  With is happening, however, is that because we’re not yet very good at working together, we have not been able to make politicians and corporations feel the true weight of our numbers.  

Consider what our colleague Anna wrote in one of her earlier posts about the utterly heartbreaking case of Honey, a bottlenose dolphin held in complete isolation at the Inubosaki Marine Park Aquarium, in the city of Choshi, Japan.   She died there, completely alone, more than two years after the facility was closed.

So here’s the take away from this.  We owe it to ourselves to reflect on her death, an event which finally put an end to the awful circumstances of her life…  we should take stock of where we are – as stewards of the rest of the natural world in the year 2020.  And the fact is that we, humanity in the aggregate, are OK with this.

Many of us are outraged, of course, and will continue to fight to put an end to the outrageous and immoral practice of dolphin captivity.  We will continue to fight for an end to dolphin drive hunts, like those in Taiji, for as long as it takes.  Enormous effort and resources were poured into the attempt to secure Honey’s release – to liberate her from this hell-on-Earth that had become her life.  A great many people cared very deeply about her, and will continue to care about others of her kind.  ….

But here’s the thing.  Change comes about when sufficient numbers of people have spoken up, and done so forcefully enough, that politicians become afraid not to act.  …. [and]

…  When you take the cumulative results of all our efforts to date, all our donations, and our voices and our research, our volunteer hours and our legal battles – an insufficient number of Japan’s politicians feel it prudent to move against the fact that what happened to Honey is perfectly legal under Japanese law.

Bottom line, there still aren’t enough of us to move the needle when it really matters in cases such as Honey’s.  Or, as we suspect and alluded to above, we aren’t yet able to make the true weight of our numbers felt.

So, what would look different if we could somehow wage this war with a united, central command?  We’re not saying this will happen, or even that it should happen – after all whom would we put in charge?  There’s no way to even make such a determination without doing a lot of damage to our movement.  Nevertheless, this can be a useful mental exercise.  In next week’s post we’ll dive deeper into this.  At the end, we’ll have some suggestions for what we actually can, and should be doing with a united front.

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Chris & Phil, Canadian Cetacean Alliance