Exactly - have you heard about the Spy in the Pod documentaries being run by BBC? These incredibly educational films, showing dolphins and orcas behaving normally in the wild are shot with small underwater cameras - no animal forced into captivity. These are the most educational things because we learn about the animals *as they should be* rather than in an artificial environment, in artificial "pods" with other animals that they can't even understand, performing trained behaviors to get a meal.
We aren't learning anything from captivity that we hadn't already learned from wild studies. You can watch live webcams from Monterey Bay right in your living room. The information age has made the idea that we can ONLY learn to appreciate these animals if we have them locked up completely obsolete. It makes no sense in a modern, progressive world.
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If you are really in a "listening" mode, please read some of these articles.
"If you look at, say, the brain of an orca [and] the brain of a human, it would be difficult to say that the human brain was capable of more emotional depth than the orca brain, because — again — what you see in the orca brain is an elaboration on the limbic area that the human brain doesn’t have.
So if that part of the orca brain is doing what it should be doing, as it does in all mammals — that is, processing emotions — it suggests [that] these animals are doing something very sophisticated or complex while they’re processing emotions. And I think also when you look at behavior of dolphins and whales, especially in the wild, you see a level of social cohesion that is really unmatched in other mammals including the humans."
http://theraptorlab.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/inside-the-mind-of-a-killer-whale-a-qa-with-the-neuroscientist-from-blackfish/
"Professor Thomas I White argues that dolphins are non-human persons. Like humans, then, they have moral rights appropriate to their nature. White argues that the scientific data of the last thirty years makes it quite clear that the slaughter and captivity of dolphins are ethically indefensible. He argues further that anyone who doesn't recognize this is either unfamiliar with the full body of relevant scientific literature or doesn't understand the ethical significance of the data."
http://us.whales.org/issues/primer-on-non-human-personhood-and-cetacean-rights
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SeaWorld only donates 0.06% of their profits to conservation efforts. They are not a world leader in marine mammal conservation, unless you consider keeping animals in tanks and withholding food unless they perform tricks "conservation." Sorry, but it's not.
The concept of keeping these large, socially sophisticated, and incredibly intelligent creatures captive has been an experiment carried out over the last 50 years, and all that it has taught us was, ironically, that these animals *do not* belong in captivity. 159 orcas have died in 50 years - in the wild, an orca would live around 50 years. Ocean Sun, mother of Lolita at Miami SeaQuarium, is around 80 years old, and "Granny," the oldest orca in the world, first seen in 1911, is estimated at 102. However in captivity, they continue to die in their teens and early 20s, and we are told that this is normal.
SeaWorld's research mostly amounts to artificial insemination and reproduction, since some states, like Washington State for example, flat out forbid them from "collecting" whales from state waters, and after wild capture was prohibited in the United States, they had to get their whales from somewhere.
Did you know that wild killer whales, who never leave their families for their entire lives, will specifically listen for a "foreign" sounding dialect in order to choose a breeding partner? They naturally do everything they can to avoid inbreeding. Do you know how inbred the animals are at SeaWorld? Mothers impregnated by sons, daughters by fathers, and neices by uncles (for example Kohana, who lives at Loro Parque, rejected both of her calves fathered by her uncle Keto).
Females don't even begin breeding in the wild until their teen years, however in captivity, they are routinely pregnant by 5 years old. The SeaWorld orca called "Corky" gave birth 7 times - each one ended in death before 47 days.
This isn't conservation; this is keeping animals in a way that *they* know is wrong. SeaWorld will hopefully soon be a thing of the past and we will look back on this and say "what on earth were we thinking?"
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SeaWorld does not preserve the natural world. If they did, would Morgan, a wild orca, still be held captive at Loro Parque? (Regardless of what SeaWorld says, their relationship with that park is well documented and, frankly, quite obvious.)
I almost exclusively flew Southwest for flights to visit my friends and family around the country, but I will be reconsidering that move until Southwest is a company I can put my money behind.
I hope you are seriously in a listening mode - Blackfish and the issues it has raised are only the beginning; independent scientists have been saying these things for years, and this film is only helping to raise public awareness.
SeaWorld and parks like them will soon become a thing of the past - considering getting out in front on the right side of history. Because no one ever really makes up for being on the wrong side.
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