Superpod 5: Scholar-Advocacy at Its Best

Lori Marino on July 31, 2016

About 200 people gathered on San Juan Island, Washington, from July 19 -23 for the Superpod 5 meeting. It was the fifth in a series of annual gatherings on the island open to the public and attended by an international group of scientists, filmmakers, authors, journalists, former trainers, naturalists and orca advocates.

The theme of this year’s gathering was “The Future”, and a new feature was added, the Scholar-Advocacy Conference, which highlighted students and young people applying their education and professional skills to marine mammal conservation, welfare and advocacy in a broad range of ways.

The Scholar-Advocacy day featured outstanding talks by several young scholar-advocates.

Mariah Kirby, a 20-year-old biology major and aspiring marine mammal researcher from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, discussed how she uses social media to advocate for orcas and other cetaceans.

A powerful and professionally-produced exposé of the plight of captive dolphins and whales.

Michelle Strom, a 15-year old high school sophomore from Columbia, South Carolina, who has created a popular website called Cetacean Awareness, a user-friendly and informative site featuring information about captive and wild cetaceans, a blog, and suggestions for how the public can get involved in advocacy, talked about her goal of becoming a marine mammal scientist.

Ella Van Cleave, a college student in British Columbia and a “Superpod veteran” at age 18, showed her latest project, a trailer for her film proposal aimed at reconnecting teens with the oceans entitled “To The Sea”.

And Katie and Abbie Emmons, two young filmmakers who founded the international non-profit student advocacy group Blue Freedom, premiered their documentary “Voiceless”, which earned them a standing ovation. The film is a powerful and professionally-produced exposé of the plight of captive dolphins and whales, capturing in a unique way all of the high emotional points of the films “The Cove”, “Blackfish” and “A Fall from Freedom” in about 30 minutes. Katie and Abbie, with wisdom beyond their years, explained that they chose to make a short film that can easily be shown in classrooms.

scholar advocacy-superpod5-2

The panel discussion comprised a mix of established scientists, including Dr. Jeff Ventre, Dr. Naomi Rose, Dr. Ingrid Visser and myself, joined by the Emmons sisters, Ella Van Cleave and Mariah Kirby. All talked about what scholar-advocacy means to them and how important it is to be informed and educated about marine mammals when advocating for them. Katie Emmons reiterated the message of scholar advocacy – knowledge is a tool that can be used to create positive change in the world. And Ella Van Cleave spoke eloquently about how important it is to not be pigeonholed into one area or another while in school. The more well-versed you are in a variety of areas the more effective you are as an advocate.

Naomi Rose, Ingrid Visser and I also shared our own stories of how we became scholar-advocates for marine mammals and some of the unique professional issues we face from being prominent scientists and advocates. All of us have faced professional criticism from the scientific community because of our advocacy for other animals, but we also realize that, as scientists, we are especially formidable advocates for the animals we want to protect. You can view the panel session here to hear everyone’s insights.

As these teenaged scholar-advocates talked about their projects the audience’s attention was also captured by an even younger voice: that of 9-year-old London Fletcher from Washington State. London is already an outstanding scholar-advocate with intelligence and maturity beyond her years. A cute wisp of a girl with big eyeglasses, she is an active volunteer responder for the Whatcom Marine Mammal Stranding Network, and was awarded Volunteer of The Year in 2015. She is also working currently to raise awareness about the need to free salmon from the lower Snake River dams to help the starving orcas and other cetaceans in the region.

This was the first scholar-advocacy conference at Superpod but it will surely not be the last. I was inspired by the intelligence, energy and compassion of all of the young advocates representing the future, and the whole experience reinforced the view that knowledge is power.

The future is in very powerful hands!

Paper Concludes Pigs Are Behaviorally, Cognitively, Emotionally Complex Individuals

Lori Marino on July 14, 2016

With intriguing descriptions of the abilities of pigs, a new white paper concludes that “pigs are not very different from the dogs and cats we share our homes with. They may even be not very different from ourselves.”

Written by Kimmela Executive Director Lori Marino and Emory University Prof. Christina M. Colvin, the paper is entitled Thinking Pigs: Cognition, Emotion, and Personality – An Exploration of the Cognitive Complexity of Sus Domesticus, The Domestic Pig.

The authors conclude that pigs:

  • have excellent long-term memories;
  • have a sense of time, remember specific episodes in their past, and anticipate future events;
  • are whizzes with mazes and other tests requiring location of desired objects;
  • love to play and engage in mock fighting with each other, similar to play in dogs and other mammals;
  • live in complex social communities where they keep track of other individuals, both pigs and humans, and learn from one another;
  • cooperate with one another and show signs of Machiavellian intelligence such as perspective-taking and tactical deception;
  • are emotional and exhibit empathy;
  • have distinct personalities.

Dr. Marino explains that “We have shown that pigs share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans. There is good scientific evidence to suggest we need to rethink our overall relationship to them.”

Based on the authors’ review paper published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology in 2015, this is the first white paper from The Someone Project. It is published by Farm Sanctuary and available here.

Announcement and Call for Presentations

Lori Marino on June 6, 2016

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR
PRESENTATIONS

for the first

SCHOLAR-ADVOCACY CONFERENCE ON

MARINE MAMMALS

Where: Superpod5 event

Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, Washington

When: Tuesday, July 19th, 2016

Superpod 5 is the fifth in a series of annual gatherings on San Juan Island

open to the public and attended by

an international group of scientists, filmmakers, authors, journalists, former trainers, naturalists, orca advocates.

If you are a student or young professional working on

marine mammal protection, conservation, welfare and rights by applying your education and skills in

such areas as science (biology, psychology, environmental, veterinary, etc.), business, law, photography, filmmaking, and teaching this is your opportunity to share your work with an international group of scientists, marine mammal training and care experts, and advocates.

Call for Abstracts

(Deadline June 24, 2016)

We are accepting submissions for presentations in the forms of either a poster or talk based on your work studying and advocating for marine mammals. (Note: Only noninvasive studies with marine mammals will be accepted).

Please submit a one-page abstract (with your name, email address, city and state) describing what you would like to present

along with a brief bio to:

Dr. Lori Marino
lorimarino@kimmela.org

(Any questions? Contact me.)

Information about Presentation Formats

Poster: Maximum poster size: 4 X 4 feet and must include the title and your name. Materials for hanging posters will be provided. It is recommended that you provide hardcopy summaries of your poster for participants to take back home.

Talk: Duration no longer than 15 minutes. Please aim for approx. 12 minutes for your talk and 3 minutes for questions. You are encouraged to use visual aids, e.g., PowerPoint slides, videos.

More details to follow.

Sanctuaries for Captive Cetaceans

Lori Marino on May 10, 2016

Removing the last obstacle to a better life

The Whale Sanctuary Project, a new non-profit organization launched last week, has been met with much enthusiasm and relief by animal advocates, scientists and people everywhere who understand not only that it is impossible for orcas and other marine mammals to thrive in concrete tanks, but that it is fundamentally immoral to use them in this way.

The project is headed by Dr. Naomi Rose, marine mammal scientist for the Animal Welfare Institute; David Phillips, co-founder and executive director of Earth Island Institute and director of the International Marine Mammal Project; and myself.

While the Whale Sanctuary Project is a separate organization from The Kimmela Center, it shares an underlying philosophy in several key ways. First, it is based on best scientific practices and applies the expertise of a stellar list of experts in fields ranging from marine mammal science, veterinary medicine and training, to engineering, to law and policy, and business and management. We will be providing a tangible way to shift our relationship with these animals from one of exploitation to restitution: restoring as much of what we’ve taken from them as we can.

This new project will also offer cutting edge educational and outreach programs to show people who these animals are and why they should live in the oceans rather than in concrete tanks. This can only be done in a setting like a sanctuary where the animals are not being exploited.

Second, The Whale Sanctuary Project is one of an ongoing series of societal improvements in how we treat other animals, particularly those who demonstrate many of the same psychological characteristics as us humans, like vulnerability to the stresses of confinement, boredom and loss of autonomy.

In 2011, for example, the National Institutes of Health decided to end their funding of biomedical research on chimpanzees, and in 2015 announced plans to retire all chimpanzees in government facilities to sanctuaries.

Last week, the University of Louisiana’s New Iberia Research Center announced it would send to the new Project Chimps sanctuary not only Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees whose freedom the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) has been fighting to secure for more than two years, but also the 218 other chimpanzees who remain in captivity at that facility. I worked as Science Director for the NhRP when they filed a habeas corpus lawsuit against Stony Brook University in April 2015. The organization achieved an unprecedented legal victory for nonhuman animals when New York County Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe issued an Order to Show Cause that required Stony Brook (where Hercules and Leo were being held for research) to come into Court and give a legally sufficient reason for detaining them. Rather than let the case proceed through the legal system, New Iberia chose to take the two chimpanzees back to Louisiana and began negotiations the NhRP and with sanctuaries.

Also last week, and again in response to public demands, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus put on their last elephant show. They are sending all their captive pachyderms to their retirement facility in Florida.

Twenty-five orcas will still be held at theme parks, forced to live out their remaining lives in concrete tanks.Over the last five years, public opinion has also shifted regarding entertainment companies holding dolphins and whales captive in concrete tanks. Following the killing of trainer Dawn Brancheau by orca Tilikum in 2010, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration ordered SeaWorld to end human “water work” with orcas during shows. Since that time, numerous legislative and legal efforts have been initiated to end the captive breeding of orcas and other cetaceans in marine parks and to phase out their use in entertainment. And last month, SeaWorld acceded to public pressure and announced an end to all orca breeding in their parks around the world immediately.

As laudable as this decision was, it doesn’t go far enough. Twenty-five orcas will still be held at theme parks in North America, forced to live out their remaining lives in concrete tanks. While most of them were born in captivity, Tilikum (who is now gravely ill at SeaWorld Orlando), Lolita at Miami Seaquarium, Corky at SeaWorld San Diego, and Kiska at Marineland in Canada were all taken from their families in the wild.

While many organizations and individuals are working to have cetaceans retired from captivity at theme parks, there is one major obstacle to these efforts: there is currently nowhere for them to go. None of them can be released directly into the wild, and most, if not all, will require lifetime care in a sanctuary setting.

The Whale Sanctuary Project is setting out to remove this obstacle. Our mission is to establish a model seaside sanctuary where cetaceans (porpoises, dolphins and whales) can be rehabilitated or can live permanently in an environment that maximizes well-being and autonomy and is as close as possible to their natural habitat. And we invite SeaWorld and other marine parks to join us in the realization of this last phase of shifting our relationship with marine mammals from one of exploitation to one of respect.

The creation of The Whale Sanctuary Project was made possible by a generous initial donation from the socially conscious company Munchkin Inc., makers of innovative products for babies and children, and its CEO, Steven Dunn. They have also pledged at least $1 million toward the completion of the first sanctuary. Through their Project Orca, they have been dedicated advocates for the retirement of orcas and other cetaceans to seaside sanctuaries where they can thrive.

Please visit the website of The Whale Sanctuary Project for more details on how we are moving closer to our goal of creating the first permanent cetacean sanctuary in North America and how you can help support it.

An Open Letter to SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment

Lori Marino on March 29, 2016

While we applaud the SeaWorld decisions to end immediately their captive breeding program and to phase out theatrical shows by 2019, we cannot in good conscience allow the misrepresentations in your new advertising campaign to go unanswered and unchallenged.

Despite your progress, 28 orcas remain in concrete tanks that are detrimental to their health. The best solution for those animals is to relocate them to seaside sanctuaries, as living in natural habitat has been proven to promote the health and well-being of whales and dolphins.

We emphatically reject your mischaracterization of seaside sanctuaries as “sea cages”. Moreover, your current ad campaign blatantly conflates the effort to move orcas to sanctuaries with release to the wild, which is not being proposed by any responsible organization. Your ad is an attempt to create a false choice: either keep orcas at your facilities, or drop them in the ocean to fend for themselves. What is being proposed as the best option is the relocation of captive orcas to carefully managed seaside sanctuaries where orcas can thrive without performances and the well-known stressors of living in a concrete tank, and instead receive care, feeding, and veterinary support in a more natural setting.

Sanctuaries for the retirement of captive animals are a longstanding, effective and globally-accepted alternative to artificial enclosures for other large, wide-roaming animals such as elephants, primates, big cats, horses and many other species. It is a highly successful model.

There is no valid reason not to extend the https://www.cialissansordonnancefr24.com/cialis-pas-cher/ sanctuary model to whales and dolphins.

We call on you to demonstrate your truthfulness and authenticity by working with others to develop seaside retirement sanctuaries for orcas and the other cetaceans in your care.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Lori Marino, Ph.D.
Executive Director
The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy

SeaWorld’s Announcement: A Good Start, but …

Lori Marino on March 18, 2016

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby announced today that SeaWorld is ending captive breeding of orcas in its parks. But he intends for this last generation of orcas to live out their lives in concrete tanks at SeaWorld, and apparently intends no changes for all the other dolphins and whales and other animals that the company holds captive for profit.

SeaWorld’s announcement has been met with mixed feelings by the marine mammal advocacy community. David Phillips, Executive Director of the Earth Island Institute, expressed concern about the support that SeaWorld is receiving from the Humane Society of the U.S.:

Because of the stamp of approval from HSUS to SeaWorld keeping all orcas in captivity, it may significantly hurt the growing effort to bring about orca retirement to independent seaside sanctuaries.

So, while I do think it is important to support this step forward, it doesn’t mean that our work is done. We must keep up the pressure to end the capture, trade, breeding, circus performances, and holding of cetaceans captivity and for retirement of all captives.

On CNN.com, marine biologist and author Carl Safina weighed in on the critical issue of how and when the orcas would be retired altogether:

I and some others would like to see orcas retired to net pens in natural waters. This would be analogous to retirement sanctuaries for elephants and chimpanzees  … Let us now devise a realistic, humane, properly funded long-term plan for retirement sanctuaries for orcas.

And author Tim Zimmerman echoed this concern in an article in Outside Magazine:

Even with an immediate end to captive breeding, killer whales are long-lived, and SeaWorld could have some of its younger killer whales in its pools for 30 or more years … This leaves SeaWorld with two costly choices: weathering ongoing criticism for keeping killer whales in its existing pools or investing in developing sea-based sanctuaries.

Responses like these point to the one inescapable conclusion that SeaWorld’s CEO is still avoiding: that while stopping the breeding of captive orcas is an important step forward, the only way the company will be free of continued criticism from animal protection advocates, scientists, and the public is to retire the orcas and all the other cetaceans to sea sanctuaries.

Coastal sanctuaries are the only ethical and practical solution to SeaWorld’s dilemma.

On interviews throughout the day, Joel Manby responded to the sanctuary question with the classic crisis-PR maneuver of ignoring the question and going off on a tangent – in this case by saying that captive orcas cannot be released into the wild, thus creating the impression that retiring the orcas to a coastal sanctuary is the same as releasing them into the ocean. Nothing could be further from the truth. Coastal sanctuaries are the only ethical and practical solution to SeaWorld’s dilemma. And sooner or later SeaWorld is going to have to bite the bullet again, just as it has done today with the issue of captive breeding.

Last December, Dr. Naomi Rose, marine mammal scientist for the Animal Welfare Institute, and I presented a day-long public workshop entitled Sea-Pen Sanctuaries: Progressing Toward Better Welfare for Captive Cetaceans at the Society for Marine Mammalogy conference in San Francisco. Throughout the day, an A-list of marine mammal veterinarians, scientists, sanctuary directors and marine engineers outlined the necessary steps towards building a coastal sanctuary for orcas and other cetaceans.

Several realistic plans exist to achieve the goal of retiring captive orcas and others to sanctuaries within the next five years. We would welcome SeaWorld as an authentic collaborator in this overall effort. Only then will the company be the welfare and conservation organization it pretends to be now.