Orcas Are Not Thriving at SeaWorld

Lori Marino on November 24, 2014

In a September 4, 2014, guest column titled “SeaWorld Responds” published in Florida Today, SeaWorld veterinarian Dr. Chris Dold said:

“[I] can unequivocally state that our whales, along with every other animal in our parks, are thriving, both mentally and physically.”

But how do you define “thriving”? According to Thomas White, who teaches ethics at Loyola Marymount University:

“Full, healthy growth and development of the traits, skills and dispositions that allow a being to have a satisfying and successful life as a member of that species.”

Thriving has everything to do with a species’ characteristics shaped by evolution and adaptation. And, as if it weren’t self-evident enough that a species adapted to long distance travel, hunting, and lifetime social relationships is fundamentally at odds with being in a marine circus like SeaWorld, we can still fall back on the abundant empirical scientific data which show that orca nature is fundamentally incompatible with conditions at SeaWorld.

Dr. Dold goes on to say:

“What’s interesting to me is that so much of those who criticize us are basing that on their own opinions.”

We are all familiar with the exasperating climate change deniers who refuse to acknowledge that we humans are creating global climate catastrophes and mass extinctions. They are best known for their data-poor rhetoric and, especially, their insistence that anthropocentric climate change is still a matter of debate. In the face of the overwhelming evidence they continue to maintain that the issue is still “just some people’s opinion.”

The science tells us unequivocally that orcas cannot thrive, or even survive for very long, at places like SeaWorld.As most of us have figured out, it is best not to take the bait of those who try to draw us into endless battles that have already been settled by facts and evidence.

The same can be said for the so-called “evolution versus creationism” debate or, back in the 1960’s and 70’s, the “debate” over the health effects of tobacco smoke manufactured by the cigarette industry to confuse the public.

And now we can add SeaWorld’s arguments to the long list of failed crusades currently being kept on artificial life support.

SeaWorld wants to convince the public that the question of whether the orcas at their marine circuses are thriving is a matter of legitimate debate and differences of opinion. But the issue has, in fact, been settled. We now have the science that tells us unequivocally that orcas cannot thrive, or even survive for very long, at places like SeaWorld.

Here are a few findings from the scientific literature:

  • Annual mortality rates for orcas are 2.5 times higher in captivity than in the wild.
  • Most captive orcas die by the early 20’s (wild orcas can live to 60-90 years old).
  • Captive orcas exhibit several behavioral abnormalities that are rare or absent in the wild and symptomatic of psychological stress and trauma. These include hyper-aggression toward other whales, swimming in a stereotyped manner, maternal rejection of newborns, self-injurious behaviors such as breaking the teeth on hard surfaces, and serious and lethal aggression toward humans.

These are not “opinions”; they’re facts. And those of us in the scientific and animal advocacy fields need to call SeaWorld on their deceptive statements.

Even more important, we should not let the rhetoric and empty arguments distract us from our real goal, which is not to win an already-settled debate with SeaWorld but to bring an end to dolphin and whale captivity.

Dolphin and Whale Sanctuaries: Still Just a Field of Dreams

Lori Marino on November 14, 2014

I just returned from the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) Captive Wildlife Conference in Burbank, CA, where prominent scientists, veterinarians and advocates converged to discuss the ongoing effort to end the exploitation of captive wildlife.

The first day was dedicated to presentations on elephant welfare in zoos and circuses and the critically important role sanctuaries continue to play in getting captive elephants out of exploitive and abusive situations and into a more naturalistic and caring setting. There are only a handful of legitimate elephant sanctuaries around the globe and only two in the United States. Clearly, we need many more qualified sanctuaries for elephants and other wild animals.

On Day Two, I spoke on a panel about marine mammal captivity with Dr. Naomi Rose of the Animal Welfare Institute, Blackfish producer Manny Oteyza, and Lincoln O’Barry of Ric O’ Barry’s Dolphin Project about the fact that even though the situation for elephants, big cats, bears and primates in exploitive captive facilities is deplorable, it’s still not as bad as it is for dolphins and whales. There’s one simple reason for this: While there are at least a few sanctuaries for land-based animals, there are no dolphin or whale sanctuaries anywhere in the world. Not one.

Sure, there are captive facilities that call themselves sanctuaries, but that does not make them legitimate havens of protection and lifelong care. Rather, they are typically places that exploit the dolphins under the guise of the title “sanctuary”. A genuine sanctuary provides an environment in which the residents can lead some semblance of a satisfactory life closer to the wild setting. In a real sanctuary like PAWS, the only interest is in the welfare of the residents; they are not used as a means to an end – i.e. for profit or publicity.

While there are at least a few sanctuaries for land-based animals, there are no dolphin or whale sanctuaries anywhere in the world.Those of us who are working to phase out dolphin and whale captivity for entertainment in places like SeaWorld have to contend with the reality that even if we were successful we’d have nowhere to relocate them. Captive dolphins and whales cannot just be dumped back into the ocean. Even those who are good candidates for eventual release need rehabilitation in a more natural setting where they can feel the tides and shifting temperatures of the ocean, regain some physiological conditioning and autonomy, and learn to survive. Moreover, given that the majority of captive dolphins and whales will not be releasable, they will depend upon sanctuaries for care throughout the rest of their lives.

In a recent blog post in The Dodo, Dr. Naomi Rose expressed concern about the precarious situation in which captive dolphins and whales find themselves. Even if places like SeaWorld decide to end captive entertainment, she argues, there will need to be a transition plan for these animals so that they don’t end up “going from the frying pan into the fire” – like being sold off to entertainment corporations overseas. Those of us who advocate for dolphin and whale freedom have to be ready to offer a legitimate practical solution. We do not want the lack of sanctuaries to be the show-stopper for the long term effort to phase out dolphin and whale exploitation.

So while signs of movement and change are encouraging, we need to add the missing component to our efforts: the funding and building of legitimate sanctuaries for dolphins and whales in this country and around the world.

The National Aquarium is already discussing possibilities for creating a sanctuary for the bottlenose dolphins they currently hold so that they can live out their lives under better circumstances. And there are other protocols for rehabilitation and release which have been employed successfully around the world by organizations such as Born Free Foundation. All of these efforts demonstrate the feasibility of rehabilitating dolphins and whales in sea pen sanctuaries.

There are also already plans, protocols and even identified locations for some captive orcas, such as Lolita, who has been held at the Miami Seaquarium for over 40 years after being taken from her natural home as a member of the Puget Sound southern resident population of orcas.

More of us in the marine mammal community need to focus our attention on the need to develop and implement plans and campaigns for creating sanctuaries.

Currently, dolphin and whale sanctuaries are just a field of dreams. But, if we build it, they will come.

Climate Change: The Cow in the Room

Lori Marino on September 23, 2014

We are in the midst of a public awakening, of a sort, about climate change, with hundreds of thousands of protestors taking to the streets this past Sunday, and TV hosts interviewing celebrity guests as the United Nations prepared to hold its annual summit on the topic. But few people have been talking about the elephant in the room – or, more appropriately, the cow.

People typically point to the global transportation industry as the largest culprit in climate change. But factory farming is an even larger contributor. Today, about 70 billion animals worldwide, including cows, chickens and pigs, are crammed into Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOS) each year.

How does animal agriculture contribute to climate change? According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. (FAO), animal flatulence and manure are responsible for 18 percent of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, including 37 percent of methane emissions and 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions. The methane releases from billions of imprisoned animals on factory farms are 70 times more damaging per ton to the earth’s atmosphere than CO2. The poor diet and massive amounts of antibiotics given to these animals (to increase input-output “efficiency”) exacerbates their digestive difficulties and, hence, their waste and pollution.

But, on Sunday, hundreds of climate change marchers around the world were lining up at food trucks for meat – the same meat that’s producing the effect motivating them to be there in the first place.

Climate change experts and activists alike, such as Al Gore and Bill McKibben, are conspicuous in their neglect of the meat issue. And TV hosts and commentators barely ever make the connection. I have been to climate change dinner meetings where factory farmed animals are on the menu.

We care about climate change as long as it doesn’t get too inconvenient and end our barbecues and steak house jaunts.

If we live in a world where everyone is afraid to talk about the “cow in the room” what chance is there for a real awakening to the consequences of human actions? Perhaps one in 70 billion?

The Giraffe on Your Plate

Lori Marino on February 16, 2014

Millions of people are rightly outraged over the Copenhagen Zoo’s recent killing of Marius, a young giraffe. It is wrong to end the life of any sentient being. But what was done to Marius is just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of “surplus” animals in zoos are killed every year – either at the zoo or, worse, sent to “canned hunt” facilities where they are hunted down, shot, and killed as trophies.

But, on the heels of the Marius tragedy, I cannot help but bring to light another important point. Giraffes have a close bovine cousin whom we kill and eat by the millions every year – and without a second thought. Those animals are cows.

There are striking parallels between giraffes and cows. Here are just a few of their shared characteristics:

  • They are both even-toed ungulates (two-toed hooved animals).
  • They both have a natural lifespan of about 25 years.
  • Their brains are about the same size relative to their body (with the cow having a slightly larger than average relative brain size).
  • Their brains contain the same emotional processing system found in all mammal brains, including humans.
  • Mother giraffes and cows nurse and nurture their children for months.
  • Both giraffe and cow mothers call their children by bellowing to them.
  • Adult giraffes and cows babysit youngsters who are not their own.
  • Giraffe and cow youngsters “moo” to find their mothers and friends.

There are other similarities, too, between what happened to Marius at a zoo and what happens to all his cousins, the cows in factory farms.

Marius was killed in exactly the same manner (shot in the head with a stun gun) as 39 million cows are killed every year.

There are striking parallels between giraffes and cows.His mother lost her child when he was 18 months old. But it’s even worse for the 9.3 million dairy cows in factory farms who have their babies torn from them just hours after birth.

Marius’s mother is not afforded the decency of being allowed to make choices about her life. She is simply a commodity whose behavior and even reproduction is controlled by humans. And millions of cows in factory farms are also denied the same fundamental consideration: intensively confined, repeatedly impregnated, and bred for high milk production and meat as nothing more than unfeeling objects.

The frequent argument that factory farming is justified because cows, unlike giraffes, are “bred for” our plates is not supportable because domesticated cows still exhibit the same behaviors and characteristics of wild ungulates – as these parallels with giraffes show.

The fact that so many people are angry at the killing of Marius while they’re still quite comfortable eating his close relatives from a factory farm should make us think about the inconsistencies in how we treat animals.

Marius’s death is about much more than the killing of one young giraffe, however sad and shocking that is. It is a reminder of our unjustified prejudice toward another animal who is extremely similar in every way that matters – the “giraffe on your plate.”

The Scala Naturae: Alive and Well in Modern Times

Lori Marino on January 26, 2014

Three thousand years ago, in Ancient Egypt, people generally believed that the sun god Ra rose from the darkness each day and rode across the sky. Observations – by sailors, for example, who could watch mountains slowly sinking below the horizon as they sailed from shore – gradually disproved that notion.

However, for another 2,000 years it was still mostly agreed that the Earth was at the center of the universe and that all heavenly bodies revolved around it. Indeed, it could be quite dangerous to suggest otherwise. But scientific data kept showing that this view was indisputably incorrect. And despite persecution from the Catholic Church, Galileo’s model of the universe eventually won out.

Over time, the dynamic self-correcting nature of science has led us to an increasingly better understanding of the world. We no longer accept Earth-centered astronomy, flat-earth models, or the idea that disease is based on imbalances in bodily “humors”.

But there is still one domain that we cling to despite all the evidence to the contrary – a view of nature known as the Scala Naturae or Great Chain of Being. The Scala Naturae is a philosophical view of nature attributed to Aristotle in Ancient Greece. According to this view, nature is arranged on a kind of ladder or hierarchy of increasing “advancement” and value, moving up from inorganic objects like stones, at the very bottom, to plants, through the “lower” animals such as sponges, to vertebrates such as fish, then to “higher” animals such as mammals, then to monkeys and apes, and finally humans.

While we’ve rejected every other inaccurate model of the world, like the flat Earth, we continue to embrace the Scala Naturae.As Christianity grew, the church added spiritual beings to the ladder, placing angels above humans, and then, at the very top, God, who was seen as perfect and all other natural forms as progressively less perfect as one moved back down the ladder.

As this view of nature spread, humans were increasingly seen as being separate from animals by virtue of being “part-animal” and “part spiritual.”

Darwin’s discoveries showed conclusively that there is no ladder, but that all life is instead connected through branching evolutionary relationships – known as phylogeny. Even though he demonstrated that there is no “up” and “down”, Darwin’s insights were relabeled as the “phylogenetic scale”, which continued to preserve a hierarchical system in which “higher” organisms were more “evolutionarily advanced” than “lower” ones.

To this day the phylogenetic scale leads many people to claim the impossible: that some modern species are ancestral to other modern species. For instance, modern fish are viewed as ancestral and “more primitive” to mammals, and modern great apes are viewed as ancestral to humans, who are considered the most “advanced”. And while we’ve rejected every other inaccurate model of the world, like the flat Earth, we continue to embrace the Scala Naturae.

The effects of this belief system continue to be disastrous for us, the other animals, and the planet. That’s because there are consequences to upholding incorrect and archaic views of the world – like when doctors recommended plunging sick people into ice cold water to get rid of the yellow bile. The seductive quality of the Scala Naturae is that it places us at the top of a hierarchy and tells us that we are not only better than all the other animals but that we are qualitatively different and that we enjoy some of the perks of being spiritual, like being closer to God and the angels.

As long as we view ourselves as “higher than” or “qualitatively different from” the other animals, we will continue to make assumptions about them that promote abuse and exploitation. The Scala Naturae gives us license to exploit other animals because they are seen as being further down the ladder. It also helps us to view ourselves as not being fully part of nature, and therefore to disconnect from empathizing with other animals. It seems to give us a “right” to treat them as commodities for our own use. Even seemingly well-intentioned ideas about stewardship and dominion are ultimately just manifestations of the same hierarchical view that leads to abuse and exploitation.

It’s time to add the Scala Naturae to the list of archaic and disputed ideas like the Flat Earth, and to adopt the science-based view of nature as an interconnected tree of life forms, branching in many directions, and where we humans live.

SeaWorld’s Act for Dolphins

Lori Marino on January 22, 2014

SeaWorld wants to put as much distance as possible between itself and the infamous dolphin massacre at Taiji.

In a position statement, the company says it’s “opposed to these drive hunts in Japan and elsewhere,” and, in another statement, that it’s committed to “see it stop.”

I believe them. The Taiji drive hunts, with 41 dolphins dead this last time, along with 52 being shipped to marine circuses from Dubai to China, and another 140 injured, orphaned and traumatized as they’re driven back out to sea, are a public relations nightmare for the whole captivity industry.

To support the notion that they’re against these massacres, SeaWorld is identifying itself with an out-of-date campaign called Act for Dolphins, which was put together eight years ago by marine mammal scientist Diana Reiss, Dr. Paul Boyle (then CEO of The Ocean Project) and myself. And while SeaWorld played no role in Act for Dolphins, by linking to its website they are implying that they were involved.

That, in itself, is fine by me. But SeaWorld has now caught itself in a snag. On the one hand, it tries to co-opt the Scientists Statement Against the Japanese Dolphin Drive Hunts that Diana Reiss and I co-wrote. Yet at the same time it’s claiming that “there is not a shred of scientific support” for my statements in the film Blackfish, and attacking me and my scientific colleagues who are featured in the movie with ad hominem comments depicting us as “advocates masquerading as scientists.”

You can’t have it both ways, SeaWorld. If you want to “Act for Dolphins”, you need to get your own act together first.