Which is the greater injustice? To have lived free and one day to have it cruelly and permanently denied? Or to have never known it at all? Which do you find more heartbreaking? For the overwhelming majority of captive dolphins, one or the other of these is their reality. If you had to choose between such options for yourself, which would it be? Most likely, you wouldn’t consider it any kind of a choice at all.

When you visit any one of hundreds of captive facilities around the world, what the marine park wants you to see are happy, healthy dolphins who just happen to reside there. What you’re actually seeing are prisoners, held against their will. The stress and boredom of their routine existence will lead most of them to die well before they normally would in the wild. Home is a memory, as are family members – neither of which they’re likely to ever see again.

No one would ever choose this. It’s a servitude one species has chosen to force upon another. That dolphin looking back at you doesn’t belong where he is. Somewhere in the world is a place that, to him, is home. This isn’t it.

So where did that dolphin come from, and how did he come to be here?

Depending on where you are in the world, the answer mostly depends on when that dolphin came to be here. In a number of countries, growing awareness has brought about enormous changes in public attitudes. This is turn has meant that sources of dolphins once available to marine parks no longer are. In Europe, North America, and many other places, aquariums have had to adapt.

Many have relied on a strategy misinformation and deception. One of these is to perpetuate the myth that most of ‘their’ dolphins are rescues. Animals that were saved after being injured or entangled, and now aren’t fit for a return to the wild. This is true only with individual dolphins here and there, such as the last cetacean resident at a facility in Vancouver, Canada. But in the vast majority of cases, this is simply untrue – the marine park is lying to you.

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of captive dolphins were either intentionally live-captured from the wild, or were born into captivity. In the West that largely depends on when the animal was acquired. To take Canada as an example, there were some 56 individuals held at Marineland Canada at the moment that captivity was banned in the country in 2019.
• Kiska, the only orca remaining at the facility, was captured in Icelandic waters in 1979.
• Five bottlenose dolphins were captures from the Russian region of the Black Sea.
• Of approximately fifty beluga whales, the longest held was captured in the Barents Sea in 1988. Since then the majority of captures were in the Sea of Okhotsk (which is in the Russian far east).
• The first born at the Niagara Falls facility was in 2007. Since 2009 there have been no new live-captures added to Marineland’s stock of whales. ALL new acquisitions were born there.
So in total we’re looking at about 29 live-captures from the wild, all prior to 2009, and about 27 born into captivity since.

In other places which are much less particular about things like the conditions of drive-hunts, it’s a different story. For example, dolphins in Chinese marine parks, to this day, are every bit as likely to be captured as to have been born there.

So what are the remaining sources? Tokitae (Lolita) has spent over 53 of her estimated 56 years of life at the Miami Seaquarium, the last remaining survivor of a series of captures that took place in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970’s. These so horrified local resident that the practice was banned there. The people of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia are unlikely to ever develop a tolerance for such obvious cruelty to ever permit it again. The orcas of that region face enough challenges to their survival but, thankfully, never again that one.

Kiska’s freedom was stolen from the waters off Iceland in 1979, when she was about three years old. She lives a miserable, solitary existence at Marineland Canada, but thanks to legislation there will be no fellow Icelanders coming to replace her after she dies. Even without the new laws against captivity in Canada, the people of Iceland are no longer prepared to let this take place off their shores.

One after another, the options available to marine parks have been removed.

Today, orcas are most likely to come from China, Japan or Russia, with the latter having been by far the largest source over the last few years. While it appeared that the practice may be banned by the Russians themselves, it’s of course impossible to say what will happen given the chaos that reigns in that part of the world now.

As options have dwindled, aquariums have found it increasingly necessary to rely on breeding from their existing stock. Which means that over time an increasingly large percentage of captive orcas (as well as other dolphin species) are animals that have never known a day of freedom in their lives. Born a slave, probably to die a slave.

So when captive breeding is banned, as it was for orcas in California, that essentially means the end of orca captivity is in sight. The same process will play out for other species as well, given enough time. There simply aren’t enough rescues to replenish inventories at anywhere close to what the industry’s business models require. The demand for this kind of entertainment requires many more ‘workers’ than that.

The long-term problem for marine parks is that, sooner or later, the public becomes aware that the very process of forcibly removing a dolphin from its natural environment and transporting it hundreds or even thousands of miles is inherently cruel, even sadistic. In time this will lead to a drop in demand for captive dolphins, thus making the supply side effectively irrelevant.

We were especially heartened by the announcement earlier this year that Tokyo’s Sinagawa Aquarium will be discontinuing dolphin shows. After offering such shows for 30 years, the decision to end them was made to keep up with changing community sentiment. Coming out of Japan, such a development many suggest that a tectonic shift is coming.

Unfortunately, the notorious drive-hunts of Taiji continue. Dolphins are still being torn from their pods, often after seeing members of their families murdered, and are exported to marine parks in other nations. Sadly, this can be so for one reason only. The demand for live-captured dolphins still exists.

In the meantime, noteworthy efforts are underway to try to get a handle on where these dolphins are going. Taiji officials have not been forthcoming with information they are legally obligated to provide to citizens on demand (thus prompting a lawsuit by LIA which is still ongoing). Also, Action for Dolphins has an initiative underway, with “a dedicated research team working to expose the aquariums taking dolphins from Taiji”. This is very useful information to have, as pressure can then be brought to bear on those facilities.

At this point, we know that China appears to be the main destination, though other countries are also complicit. According to AFD these would include both Koreas, the Philippines, and Turkey. But the purveyors of this trade have so far been able to shroud much of their activity in secrecy, so a great deal of information about where these dolphins go is still unreported and unknown to the public.

Let’s keep up the pressure on this immoral industry by continuing to attack it on both fronts – the supply and the demand side. As the sources dry up one by one, let’s also make sure we keep raising public awareness. In time they will have nowhere to go to find new dolphins, and evil men will have no financial incentive to do anything but leave them in the sea. Which is, after all, exactly where they belong.

For The Orca’s Voice,
Dani, Canadian Cetacean Alliance