Dolphin Welfare vs. Dolphin Rights at the American Cetacean Society Conference

Lori Marino on November 16, 2012

Is it appropriate to keep dolphins (including belugas and killer whales) in captivity as long as you accord them certain approved standards of care? Or do dolphins have the inherent right not to be held captive by humans in the first place?

It’s a question that hovered in the air at last weekend’s meeting of the American Cetacean Society in San Diego. And at one session, it came right to the surface and took center stage.

The welfare-vs.-rights debate suffuses the whole animal protection movement. In relation to farm animals, welfarists work to get better conditions for farm animals, specifically in factory farms; while animal rights proponents denounce welfarism, insisting that the only moral course is to abolish factory farming – and, indeed, all use of animals as food for humans.

Welfarists argue that the abolitionist approach is impractical and that any improvement is better than none. Abolitionists reply that this is like arguing for better conditions for slaves, and that welfarism simply keeps the whole sordid business going.

In the companion animal area, welfarists work to “euthanize” homeless pets humanely rather than in gas chambers, while no-kill advocates say that humane societies and shelters should simply never be in the business of killing homeless pets.

In every area – vivisection, wildlife management, zoos and other entertainment – the issue keeps rearing its head. And last weekend’s annual conference of the American Cetacean Society was no exception. Over and over, the question was: Do we have the right to treat intelligent marine mammals as subjects for research and other kinds of exploitation?

Are they “stocks” or are they individuals?

One of the key laws that governs our relationship to dolphins and whales is the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). It is classic animal welfarism, and it has made a big difference for the animals.

Today, 40 years later, many people say the MMPA is out of date. And this became clear in the very first session of the conference, when Barbara Taylor, a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, took stock of how the law is working for marine mammals today.

While the act brought an end to many kinds of abuses – like hundreds of thousands of dolphins being caught and drowned in tuna nets (368,600 in 1972 alone) – new threats to the animals have emerged. Climate change, military and commercial sonar, and complaints from the fishing industry have grown and are all taking their toll on marine mammals. And it isn’t clear that the MMPA can deal effectively with these issues.

Dingell’s language shows the extent to which marine mammals were viewed as resources, stocks and species – not individuals in their own right.

When he was working to push the bill through Congress in 1971, Rep. John Dingell famously said: “Once destroyed, biological capital cannot be recreated.” That’s true, and Dingell deserves great praise for his work. But his language shows the extent to which marine mammals were viewed as resources, stocks and species – not individuals in their own right.

That’s still the case. And in this and other presentations, whales and dolphins were being referred to as “stocks” and resources, with the focus on how many of them we can kill while still ensuring that the species is “sustainable.”

This view of the lives of whales and dolphins is very different from those who take the position that these animals are individuals, not stocks, and that it is simply wrong to be treating them primarily as resources.

Variations on the same issue came up all through the conference. But the whole issue blew into high gear on Saturday afternoon in the session entitled “The Question of Personhood.”

The question of personhood

What is a “person”? And are dolphins and whales persons? At this session, Tom White, professor of business ethics at Loyola Marymount University and author of In Defense of Dolphins, reminded us of the distinction between a “human”, which describes your biological identity, and a “person”, which describes your moral and legal place in the world.

White explained persons as being individuals who are alive and aware, who have emotions and a sense of themselves and their own existence, who can control their own behavior, recognize other persons and treat them appropriately, and who have a variety of sophisticated cognitive abilities.

Rights are the same as needs – you have the right, as a person, to a life that fulfills your basic needs as a member of your species.

Once you understand what constitutes a person, he said, it’s easy to recognize what their “rights” are. Basically, rights are the same as needs – you have the right, as a person, to a life that fulfills your basic needs as a member of your species.

Dolphin rights, he noted, are clearly not the same as human rights. Dolphins don’t need to drive a car or have equal pay for equal work. They have different needs. For example, as beings whose identity and individuality are intricately bound up with their social group, they have the need, and therefore the right, to live their lives with that group. And that means they have the right not to be held captive.

Lori Marino of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy offered four simple arguments for why cetacean captivity is both a moral and scientific dead end:

  1. Cetaceans possess all the characteristics of personhood, which, ironically, makes them especially vulnerable to being harmed by captivity.
  2. The scientific data show unequivocally that they cannot thrive in captivity. Instead, they suffer stress, become aggressive, self-mutilate, and die early.
  3. Little of any value is currently being learned about cetacean cognition, behavior and intelligence from captive research. By contrast, field studies of wild dolphins are producing fascinating discoveries about cetacean behavior and intelligence.
  4. And the captivity industry is tied to the infamous dolphin and whale drive hunts, at which certain animals are pulled from the slaughter and sent to marine parks around the world.

The third member of the panel was Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist who conducts research on captive dolphins at Hunter College, the National Aquarium and the National Zoo, and is the author of The Dolphin in the Mirror. Dr. Reiss focused her talk on the argument that we should all be working together to bring an end to the drive hunts and slaughters. But this was something of a straw man since no one present would dispute that. And when it came to the question of the value of captive research, her examples were from 10 and even 30 years ago, which was not lost on the audience at question time.

Reiss and Marino exchanged strong opposing views during the panel session. And so, the Saturday session came to an end with the clear distinction being made between those who see dolphins and whales as stocks, resources and property, and those who see them as individuals with rights and needs.

Empathy in Nonhuman Animals

On Sunday morning, we heard a fascinating talk by Frans de Waal, the famous primatologist whose books include Chimpanzee Politics and The Age of Empathy. While most of his research has been on apes, monkeys and elephants, he said that much of it could also be applied to cetaceans.

De Waal showed a series of videos demonstrating empathy in nonhumans – for example, how one great ape will console another; how chimpanzees and bonobos reconcile after an argument; how elephants cooperate to solve a problem (even if this means giving up getting a larger share of the reward); and how capuchin monkeys have a sense of fairness and will rebel if they feel they’re being treated unfairly.

But however fascinating and insightful de Waal’s research surely is, he cannot bring himself to take the next step that’s dictated so obviously by his own research: that the insights we’ve gathered from all this painstaking research is that most, if not all, of the animals who have provided it are self-aware beings who have demonstrated that they do not belong in captivity. And while many scientists, like Marino, have either abandoned captive research or, like Denise Herzing, conduct their work with wild dolphins, de Waal and Reiss have yet to take that step.

De Waal defended his position by saying: “I don’t believe that chimps are moral beings. But they have elements of human morality.” Many in the audience said that his research demonstrated to them how very clearly they are indeed moral beings.

Where now?

Just as it took a long time for the Western world to agree that all humans are persons in the legal as well as moral sense of the term, so it will take time for us to agree that many other animals must be recognized as persons with rights appropriate to their species.

This year’s conference of the American Cetacean Society showed how fully this issue has come to the fore – and that the fields of science, ethics and policy are now pointing clearly in the same direction: We cannot continue to treat whales and dolphins simply as stocks, resources and species; they are individuals and persons in their own right.

Kimmela Delivers the Science to the Nonhuman Rights Project

Lori Marino on November 7, 2012

The Kimmela Center has joined with the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to work toward the common goal of gaining basic rights for animals. The Nonhuman Rights Project, led by prominent animal rights attorney Steven Wise, is working to change the common law status of large-brained, socially complex nonhuman animals from legal “things” or “property” to “persons”, for whom fundamental rights like the right to bodily liberty and bodily integrity are not yet recognized.

Nonhuman animals need to be recognized as having certain fundamental rights, and these can only be enforced through a transformation in the eyes of the law from “property” to “persons”. As a legal person, a nonhuman being’s basic rights would be protected, and if the NhRP is successful it will be a real game-changer in our relationship to other animals.

This work will demonstrate that these animals have the cognitive characteristics that qualify them for common law personhood.

As the NhRP’s Science Director, Kimmela Executive Director Lori Marino has recruited a sizeable team to gather the scientific evidence the NhRP will need to bring its cases in 2013. The international science team is comprised of a group of volunteers ranging from students to librarians to university faculty members who have expertise in the fields of animal behavior and intelligence and online databases. The team is conducting a massive online search of all the relevant, peer-reviewed, scientific research on cognition (i.e., intelligence, self-awareness, emotion, social complexity, and brain size and complexity) in species that are under consideration for NhRP cases. These include the great apes, several cetacean species, and elephants. This work will allow the legal team to demonstrate that these animals have the cognitive characteristics that qualify them for common law personhood.

The research base will also comprise the basis for educational outreach initiatives to professionals and students, media and the general public about the cognitive abilities of these animals.

The first phase of their work – searching and archiving all the scientific papers available – will be completed by the end of December. The materials will then be compiled into a searchable bibliographic database that the legal team can access easily as they prepare to go to trial.

We will keep you posted on the NhRP Science Team’s efforts and accomplishments.

By this time next year we may be close to the day when a dolphin or chimpanzee cannot be owned, held captive, or harmed.

The Georgia Aquarium Plunders the Oceans in the Name of Conservation

Lori Marino on October 26, 2012

By Lori Marino, Ph.D., Emory University Center for Ethics and The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, and Thomas I. White, Ph.D., Conrad N. Hilton Chair in Business Ethics, Loyola Marymount University.

On June 15th, the Georgia Aquarium quietly filed an application for a permit to import 18 wild-caught beluga whales from Russia into the United States. They plan to keep some of them for themselves and to distribute the rest among three SeaWorld facilities, the Shedd Aquarium and, eventually, the Mystic Aquarium and are receiving public comments on this issue until midnight October 29th at https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/08/30/2012-21481/marine-mammals-file-no-17324

The last time a U.S. aquarium took marine mammals directly from the wild was in 1993, when the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago set off a firestorm of protest by capturing some Pacific white-sided dolphins from California waters. Since then, in order to avoid pubic controversy over their profitable marine mammal entertainment programs, U.S. marine parks have abided by a self-imposed moratorium on the capture and import of wild marine mammals. Instead, they have focused on captive breeding to stock their pools and keep the shows going. In seeking to import 18 wild-caught belugas the Georgia Aquarium has abandoned the moratorium on taking wild dolphins and whales. If the import is approved, it will roll the clock back to an era when U.S. marine parks regularly removed wild dolphins, orcas, and whales from their families in the oceans to put them into shows.

The Georgia Aquarium says that the import is all about conservation. But the truth is that the import is about reinvigorating a stalled beluga captive breeding program in order to sustain and grow the population of popular belugas at U.S. marine parks. Currently, there are only 34 belugas in captivity in the United States. The 18 wild Russian belugas the Georgia Aquarium wants to import would push that number to above 50, infusing the existing captive population with new genes, and growing the population to a size that the Association of Zoos and Aquariums considers right for a successful captive breeding program.

Such “species survival programs” are justified on the basis of conservation. But, ironically, the beluga population in the Sea of Okhotsk from which the Georgia Aquarium 18 were captured is healthy (in fact, a condition for receiving an import permit is that the capture will not endanger the target population). In contrast, the longevity and survival of belugas is much more threatened in captive settings like the Georgia Aquarium, where programs to breed and sustain the beluga population have been unsuccessful.

Infant belugas fare very poorly when born into an artificial environment where their mothers lack the social support they would enjoy from sisters, aunts and friends in their natural setting. The last baby born at the Georgia Aquarium died at just a few days old. Overall, belugas in captivity lead more stressful and less healthy lives than their wild counterparts. The bottom line is that most captive breeding programs are not about conservation of animals in the wild; they’re about conservation of zoo and marine park profits.

Report on the NOAA Beluga Import Public Hearing

Lori Marino on October 18, 2012

Last Friday, October 12th, at the public hearing held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, MD, Kimmela Executive Director Lori Marino joined other researchers, legal experts, advocates and conservationists to present her objections to the Georgia Aquarium’s application to import wild-caught beluga whales for public display.

During the three-hour meeting, various individuals from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the Georgia Aquarium, and Atlanta-based teachers affiliated with the aquarium testified to the educational benefits of marine mammal public displays and claimed that the welfare of the captured belugas would not be at risk during the multi-transfer plane transports from Russia to the United States.

Advocates for the belugas presented evidence that the wild-captures and transfers are inhumane and therefore in violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).

Courtney Vail, Campaigns and Programs Manager for Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) testified that if the permit were granted to the Georgia Aquarium, it would set a dangerous precedent for future beluga populations.

“The Georgia Aquarium’s decision to seek wild belugas from Russia,” Vail told NOAA, “is at best regressive and at worst irresponsible in contributing to the continuing international trade in belugas, which undermines the conservation and welfare of this species worldwide.”

Vail went on to describe how the Georgia Aquarium has violated several conservation requirements put in place to prevent harm to the species in the wild.

Lori Marino addressed the question of whether there is educational value to beluga public displays. She emphasized that the Georgia Aquarium has not met the minimal requirements for education required by the MMPA and should be denied the permit on that basis alone.

“Despite the claims of the Georgia Aquarium that this beluga import will serve an educational purpose they have provided no legitimate evidence that any real education is taking place during visits to marine mammal public displays,” she said. “They, and their co-applicants, are not meeting the minimal standards set by the MMPA for education.”

Her full testimony is here.

Other presenters included Natalie Prosin, Executive Director of the Nonhuman Rights Project, who said that beluga whales are so cognitively and socially complex that they should be considered legal persons. She served notice in her testimony that the Nonhuman Rights Project is preparing to argue for legal personhood for several large-brained highly intelligent mammals, including belugas, in 2013.

Ric O’Barry, the former dolphin trainer and dolphin advocate for the past 30 years who is featured in the movie “The Cove”, said he was stunned that the Georgia Aquarium could even suggest that removing whales from a wild population, warehousing them for several years in pens, and then charging admission for people to see them promotes education and conservation.

O’Barry’s comments echoed the disbelief of all of the advocates about how the Georgia Aquarium could claim they have met the requirements of the MMPA.

The period of online public commentary continues until October 29th. There is still time to make a difference by going to http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/permits/georgia_aquarium_belugas.htm to submit substantive arguments opposing the permit.

The Georgia Aquarium Plays the Education Card … Again

Lori Marino on October 10, 2012

Last week the Orlando Sentinel published an article on the very contentious issue of The Georgia Aquarium, SeaWorld and other aquariums trying to import wild-caught beluga whales for public display.

There has been a lot of focus on the Georgia Aquarium because it is the hub of this effort, but I am glad to see that attention and criticism is also being turned to SeaWorld and the other players in this exploit.

Yesterday, the New York Times published a piece on the strong opposition to the import application which featured objections from the scientific community, including myself and my colleague, Hal Whitehead, and even criticism of taking whales from the wild from Robert Michaud, the scientist who was hired by the Georgia Aquarium to coordinate research into the beluga populations in the Sea of Okhotsk.

There is no evidence that public displays of dolphins and whales are educational in any sense of the word.

This is the first time since 1993 that a U.S. marine park has sought to acquire wild-caught whales for public display. When asked to justify this major change in policy, the Georgia Aquarium replied that it is “to promote conservation and education.” They play the education card regularly because the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) requires public displays of marine mammals to be educational. They also know that education is an unassailable objective, so all zoos, marine parks and aquariums pay lip service to it.

My analyses of the educational claims of the marine mammal captivity industry and specific claims made by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) are quite well-known by now. You can read my co-authored article “Do Zoos and Aquariums Promote Attitude Change in Visitors?” here. In a nutshell, there is absolutely no evidence that public displays of dolphins and whales (or other animals) are educational in any sense of the word.

Saying that something is educational is not the same as something actually being educational. And this was the focus of my testimony to Congress at the House Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife in 2010 on the educational claims of the marine mammal captivity industry.

In my testimony, I questioned whether the marine mammal captivity industry is meeting the educational requirements of the MMPA and argued that in order for any program to meet even minimum standards for education or conservation, two straightforward criteria must be met:

First, the information provided about the animals on display and their natural history, biology, behavior and conservation status must be accurate. Second, there must be evidence, based on valid outcome measures, that visits to these facilities serve an educational or conservation purpose.

To address the accuracy question, I evaluated the online public information provided by three major organizations – the AZA, the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, and SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment. These three organizations collectively represent more than 60 percent of the zoos and aquariums in the U.S. holding marine mammals on public display.

These organizations do not meet even the minimal standard that information supplied to the public must be accurate.I found that these organizations misrepresented information about the welfare and intelligence of marine mammals with boldly inaccurate assertions and biased half-truths. Their claims that marine mammals live longer in captivity than in the wild, that dolphins are average in intelligence, and that marine mammals do not become stressed in captivity are examples of the incorrect information they feed to the public to present a benign picture of marine mammal captivity. Therefore, with regard to the first criterion, these organizations do not meet even the minimal standard that information supplied to the public must be accurate.

As to the question of whether there are any objective outcome measures that demonstrate learning and attitude change in visitors to marine mammal displays, I found absolutely no evidence to support this claim. The marine mammal captivity industry depends on dubious studies and irrelevant visitor polls to make their claims. The one peer-reviewed study published by the AZA was deeply flawed and could not provide any support for the education claim.

My general conclusion from all the available evidence was that the marine mammal captivity industry has fallen far short of their obligation to educate the public. (My full testimony is here, and you can view the video of the full session here.)

On October 12th I will be presenting these conclusions at the public hearing to be held by NOAA at the Silver Spring Metro Center Complex, NOAA Science Center, 1301 East-West Highway, Silver Spring, MD 20910.

Georgia Aquarium Seeks Permit to Import Wild-Caught Belugas

Lori Marino on September 24, 2012

Cover photo: In a beluga whale transport similar to what the Georgia Aquarium plans, four belugas are being transported from Russia to China’s Huangzhou Polar Ocean Park for a life in captivity.

Next month, a federal government agency will decide whether the Georgia Aquarium should be granted a permit to bring 18 beluga whales from Russian waters to the United States. The aquarium, which is based in Atlanta and is the largest in the nation, captured most of the whales 12-24 months ago in the Sea of Okhotsk and is holding them at the Utrish Marine Mammal Research Station on the Russian Black Sea coast.

belugas santa-091612The Georgia Aquarium plans to keep some of these wild-caught belugas for themselves and to distribute the rest among three SeaWorld facilities, the Shedd Aquarium and, eventually, the Mystic Aquarium.

The last time a U.S. aquarium took marine mammals directly from the oceans was in 1993, when the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago captured some Pacific white-sided dolphins from California waters, setting off a public outcry that resulted in U.S. marine parks deciding not to take any more marine mammals from the wild for their displays.

(For a video of a similar capture by another country in 1999 go here.)

But this year, on June 15th, when the Georgia Aquarium applied for a permit to bring those 18 belugas to this country, that tacit agreement was shattered. If the Georgia Aquarium gets its way and receives a permit, this will open the floodgates for marine zoos, circuses, parks and aquariums to capture belugas from Alaska, dolphins from the Atlantic, and whales from the Pacific.

Since this is a controversial issue, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is in charge of giving such permits, opened a period of public commentary on this issue which ends on October 29th. A public hearing in Washington DC is scheduled for October 12th, and Dr. Lori Marino of the Kimmela Center expects to be present.

And Kimmela is working to bring the voice of the scientific community to this issue by collaborating with Humane Society International (HSI) and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) to create a Scientists’ Statement outlining the scientific reasons for opposing this import application and undersigned by some of the most prominent scientists in the world.

Last week, Dr. Naomi Rose, Senior Scientist of HSI, was in Atlanta to join Dr. Lori Marino of the Kimmela Center in a public presentation about the beluga issue at Emory University’s Center for Ethics.

Kimmela is also assisting local animal rights groups in Georgia by providing them with relevant peer-reviewed papers on belugas and the claims of the captivity industry and disseminating talking points to help these groups make their case. These materials include:

A critical evaluation, by Dr. Marino and other scientists, of educational claims made by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums: “Do Zoos and Aquariums Promote Attitude Change in Visitors? A Critical Evaluation of the American Zoos and Aquariums Study.”

A study of the brain of beluga whales by Dr. Marino and other scientists: Anatomy and Three-Dimensional Reconstructions of the Brain of the White Whale (Delphinapterus leucas) from Magnetic Resonance Images.

A historical record and inventory of beluga whales in captivity.

A comprehensive list of talking points and background by Dr. Naomi Rose of Humane Society International.

Kimmela also provided scientific background for a series of posts, Barnum and Belugas, exploring our relationship over the centuries with belugas by board member Michael Mountain on his Earth in Transition website.

And this post by Elizabeth Batt offers more background into the beluga captivity industry.

The government agency NOAA invites your comments on its website page devoted to the Georgia Aquarium’s application for a permit. The public hearing will be held on October 12, 2012, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the NOAA Silver Spring Metro Center Complex, NOAA Science Center, 1301 East-West Highway, Silver Spring, MD 20910.