The Covid pandemic of 2020 gave us all an insight into what it means to live in a captive world. A world were our civil liberties were severely restricted as our scientists, medical teams and governments scrambled to find a solution to the highly infectious SARS virus.
The impact of these lockdowns on people’s mental, as well as physical health and well being is well documented as we have all experienced unprecedented disruption to our daily lives.
At the same time, around 3000 individual, sentient, whales and dolphins, collectively known as Cetaceans were in captivity around the world.
In total, 63 countries have captive Cetaceans with the highest number of marine parks being in Japan (57), China (44), the USA (34) whilst Russia and Mexico, both have 24.
These ‘marine parks’ are particularly common in tourist destinations, such as Florida, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, the Canary Islands and in the coastal resorts of Turkey. It seems then, that when we go on our holidays we forget to pack our morals and respect for our fellow animals.
How can anyone support a lifetime of captivity for these sentient animals – for a few hours of so-called ‘entertainment’ for their family? We don’t believe that most people who attend these shows know the sickening cruelty and exploitation they are funding with their holiday money.
Education is the answer. But how can you deliver the vital message to the millions of people who travel around the world every year for their holidays?
We want to the world’s airports to step up and provide the facilities to local NGO’s who can get the message out to the tourists before and after they have been on the plane journey. A vital part of this messaging should be that any country that has Captive cetaceans, Dolphin shows or experiences with captive animals should be required to display the messaging in an effect similar to that of the warnings displayed on cigarette packaging.
There is encouraging news from countries, such as Croatia, Cyprus, Hungary, Slovenia and Switzerland that have all banned the keeping of dolphins in captivity, following the lead set by Chile and Costa Rica who banned captivity for cetaceans in 2005.
Greece has banned all animal performances, including marine animals and India, the world’s largest democracy, passed legislation prohibiting the development of dolphinaria, referring to dolphins as “non-human persons”.
The United Kingdom has no captive dolphin facilities but does not have a legal ban. Instead, the British government has set conditions that make the establishing a dolphinarium commercially unviable.
The problem of captive cetaceans is way bigger than many people realise. The USA alone has a shocking 556 Dolphins in captivity, with SeaWorld the largest individual keeper, holding around 160 individual cetaceans across its three marine parks. SeaWorld also holds captive, the highest number of Orcas with 24 of the total 56 currently in captivity worldwide. China holds 315 cetaceans, whilst the European Union has around300 whales and dolphins in captivity.
Most of these sentient individuals are used to perform in Marine Parks, purely for human entertainment. Many are used as unwilling partners in “swim-with” and in “petting” activities, or as a prop for someone’s holiday souvenir ‘selfie’. We understand the attraction of interacting with Dolphins who are curious, intelligent animals, but surely, by understanding this, surely, we should be able to understand that keeping them captive for life, so we can have a few minutes interaction with them is wrong.
Both orcas, commonly called killer whales, and dolphins are members of the dolphin family Delphinidae. Orcas are the largest member of the family.
In the USA, before the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), around 1133 dolphins were ‘wild captured’ in U.S. waters. Between 1964 and 1989, 138 orcas were captured worldwide with each one destined to a life of captivity in aquariums. While the US MMPA makes it more difficult to capture marine mammals from the wild in American waters, the aquariums can and do, still apply for permits that allows the capture of wild dolphins and if refused, they can still import wild animals caught in other countries waters.
Although marine parks claim to conserve marine mammals through breeding programs, these programs are not very effective in reality. Many of the marine mammals commonly bred in captivity are not considered threatened or endangered. Furthermore, some aquariums have no intention of returning captive-bred marine animals to the wild. They often argue that the success of such endeavours would be unlikely and oppose any release efforts.
Captive marine mammals live in small, sterile enclosures and are deprived of their natural activity level, social groups and interactions with their natural environment, and many captive marine mammals develop stereotypic behaviour, such as aggression or depression, not known to occur in the wild.
What has been learned from captive animals is that orcas and dolphins are more intelligent than we previously understood, providing further evidence that a life in captivity is inhumane.
We don’t believe that people need to see captive orcas and dolphins performing ‘tricks’ to understand the beauty and intelligence of these sentient animals. Keeping wild animals in captivity simply for human amusement is wrong.
If you enjoyed this blog, please check out more of our wildlife blogs here, or you may prefer to listen to the Wildlife Matters Podcast here.
If you want to support our work
Please click on the Wildlife Matters Patreon Community.
Please click to join the Wildlife Matters Substack Community.
You can donate here.