By now you’ve probably heard about Tilikum the killer whale who killed his trainer last week in Sea World, Orlando.  This tragedy, of course sensationalized in the media, is at least raising some important questions about captive marine mammals like dolphins and killer whales.  These are not new questions; these questions were raised in the 1993 film Free Willy, the 2009 film The Cove, and after each news event of an accident involving a captive show Orca.  I’d like to say it’s nice that people are talking about this, but we’ve talked about it before.

Personally, I am not necessarily against having a wild animal captive.  However, when it comes to marine mammals like Orca whales and dolphins, it is tough to justify their jumping through hoops for thousands of audience members daily in the name of conservation.

Here are a few at-a-glance concerns:

• Whales, dolphins, and porpoises are extremely intelligent.  We don’t know just how smart they are or what their linguistic abilities are in large part because the data scientists have gathered is so complex.  It’s hard to justify capturing a wild animal we suspect to be as intelligent as we are, putting them in a pool, and expecting them to stay content.
• Marine mammals live in three-dimensional environments.  While you and I can only go forwards, backwards, and side-to-side in our environment (planes don’t count), marine mammals do all this and also swim up and down – that is, in the wild.  A pool at a marine park is not deep enough to give wildlife this third dimension they experience naturally.  In fact, it is thought that the collapsed dorsal fin so common in captive Orca whales results from spending too much time (virtually all their time) at the surface of the water.
• In the wild, many cetaceans travel miles each day and form strong social ties.  Contrast this to the last time you saw a killer whale at Sea World, swimming laps around a monotonous pool without stimuli.
• Marine parks argue that they do valuable research on the marine mammals in their possession.  Because these animals are not in natural environments, they display many unnatural behaviors and thus don’t make ideal research candidates.  The research at these facilities usually focuses on breeding programs.  These bred offspring are used for more shows.  While understanding how to breed an animal may aid conservation efforts in the future, without research on how to release captive-bred marine mammals our progress seems to have been haulted.
• Marine parks also argue that they raise public consciousness of these megafauna.  This poses another question: How we can respect a large, intelligent mammal’s individual right to live in the open ocean without lowering environmental consciousness, which is already low enough?  I may have found an answer in a study published in 2005 titled, Assessing Knowledge, Attitudes, and Behavior Toward Charismatic Megafauna: The Case of Dolphins.  Since marine parks do not usually emphasize education and instead rely on theatrics, jokes, and personification of their “stars,” I was not surprised to read of megafauna education:

“[Aquaria, marine stations, and aquatic ecotourist centers] are generally not designed to facilitate change in “generic behaviors” [of people] or in the conceptual and attitudinal domains that are critical to environmentally responsible stewardship.  The formal classroom is the environment for encouraging critical thinking skills and is best reserved for addressing local environmental issues and empowering learners to engage in ‘pro-environmental action.’”

We mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that these show stars are tame.  An animal born in the wild will always be wild, even if we call it “tame.”  Many whales and dolphins continue to be captured from the ocean and put into display tanks for tourists.  In the case of the ones born in captivity, we still must question whether a small, shallow, noisy tank is an appropriate home.

It looks like, once again, we need to stop and sort out the green from the rhetoric.

photo credit: The Cove