Ex-SeaWorld Employee Gives Chilling New Details About Animal MistreatmentÂ
TW: Descriptions of animal abuse. I know that this isnât what I usually post on here, but Iâm very passionate about this sort of thing, and I want more people to know the horrors that are going on behind SeaWorldâs closed doors.
The past few years have seen a stream of former SeaWorld employees speak out about their time at the company. Now another employee is stepping forward â and revealing even more details about just how poorly the parksâ animals are treated.
Sarah Fischbeck joined SeaWorld San Diego as a water quality diver right after high school in 2007. During six years with the company, she worked jobs across the animal departments, performing maintenance on tanks and cleaning them, and regularly diving with the animals. But she was also witness to some of the darker aspects of SeaWorld, which eventually led to her voluntarily leaving the company in 2013.
âIf people knew what I know, or saw what I have seen, they wouldnât sell another ticket,â she told The Dodo. Hereâs her inside look.
Many of SeaWorldâs animals turn to in-fighting as a result of the cramping and stress of captivity, but Fischbeck said the orcas had it worst of all.
While the whales have been spotted with rake marks caused by tankmatesâ teeth, and a host of serious injuries caused by fighting, Fischbeck confirmed just how regular â and severe â the fighting could get.
âYouâd be diving at the bottom of the tanks and youâd find these long strips of what looked like black rubber,â she explained. âAnd it was skin theyâd peeled off each other.â
âWe had divers take whale skin home to their families all the time as souvenirs,â Fischbeck added.
One morning, Fischbeck said, she arrived early for a maintenance dive in one of the orca pools that was supposed to be empty â and was surprised to see one of the whales waiting for her.
âHer tummy was scratched up,â she said. âAnd she was swimming in this pool that was supposed to be locked out for us.â
They called the trainers, but they said that the whales had all been locked up the night before. Then the team realized what had happened: The orca who entered the pool had somehow hoisted herself or been pushed into the locked pool, over a metal grate topped with painful nubs, gashing her belly in the process.
âShe was being picked on so much her only escape was over that locked barrier,â Fischbeck said. âAnd she was pushed into a locked pool.â
The orcas also took their frustration out on birds. Though orcas are natural predators, the bird killings appeared to be an act of frustration more than hunger. âTheyâd constantly tear apart birds,â Fischbeck said. âThey werenât eating them at all. Youâd find the whole bird â just in pieces.â
One beluga named Ruby was bred continuously, despite each pregnancy ending in tragedy. She had her first calf in 2008 through artificial insemination, but the baby passed away soon after â the public story is that the calf was sickly and she rejected it.
Ruby actually turned on the calf, according to Fischbeck. âShe actually killed it,â Fischbeck said. âShe attacked it and she killed it and they separated it from her and resuscitated it and it lived in the back pool for a month and it died.â
Ruby got pregnant in 2010, and again turned on the calf â a female named Pearl. SeaWorld expressed surprise that the beluga had rejected her infant, but Fischbeck alleged they anticipated it. âThey had divers in the water because they knew Ruby had this tendency,â she said.
They had also drugged Ruby with Valium to try to calm her down, according to the former diver. âRubyâs dose went up when she was pregnant, and right before she was supposed to be due,â Fischbeck said. âThey upped her dose because she killed her first calf.â
Despite SeaWorldâs precautions, Ruby attacked her newborn daughter, and SeaWorld removed the calf. An infertile female adopted the baby, according to Fischbeck, and Ruby was shut off in another tank for months.
âThey had to keep Ruby separated from her because Pearl had to be big enough so Ruby wouldnât pose a threat,â Fischbeck said. âI remember it because diving with the belugas, it was always like, âYouâre going to dive with the calf or dive with the bitchy one in the back.ââ
It was clear that Ruby wasnât cut out for motherhood, but calves were profitable and Ruby was fertile. In 2012, she fell pregnant again. SeaWorld said the conception was natural, but Fischbeck said they had birth control and could have stopped it if they wanted to. âWhy would you have a pregnant animal thatâs already killed one calf and tried to kill another?â she said.Â
Unsurprisingly it ended in tragedy. Ruby had a miscarriage, Fischbeck said, and her kidneys shut down and she was quickly placed in the tiny back pool, which is hidden from guests and from the air, so no one could see her.
âShe was on the surface floating,â Fischbeck said. âHer skin was turning yellow.â
Ruby passed away in 2014, after Fischbeck left, and she doesnât know what happened to her.
And like the other animals, the belugas exhibit stereotypic behavior, mindless repetitive patterns that are often a symptom of captive stress. One male, Ferdinand, will compulsively perform spy hops, little jumps out of the water that wild belugas use to spot predators.
âHeâd been in captivity so long heâs bored,â Fischbeck said. âHe just sits in the water and pops in and out of the water ⊠he still does it.â
âThe Magic Landing penguins are super sweet,â Fischbeck said. Theyâre also super skittish, and arenât sufficiently shielded from the public, she added, as theyâre protected only by a few feet of glass and visitors have full access to them.
âThey have no protection from the audience,â she explained. âThose Magellanic penguins have been suffering for years because the visitors come and they throw pennies in the pool.â
As a diver, Fischbeck said, she also found shoes, cameras, socks, maps and âanything you can imagineâ littering the penguin habitat â which often led to serious health issues for the penguins.
âThey donât know any better â they see something shiny, theyâre going to eat it,â she said. âThey have penguin surgeries all the time [to remove the objects from the birds] ⊠itâs horrible.â
One walrus, Obie, exhibited severe stereotypic behavior, and would throw his food up to cope with the stress of captivity. While this behavior has been reported before, Fischbeck confirmed it happened compulsively.
âThey would sit there and regurgitate their food against the glass ⊠It would turn into this gelatinous mass,â she said. âWe [cleaned] ⊠it all the time â that was just a regular duty at that pool.â
The stress also affected the sea turtles. SeaWorld was left with dozens of hybrid turtles after a breeding mishap and stuck them in an overcrowded tank together, according to Fischbeck. But sea turtles are generally solitary, and the stress of captivity made them turn on each other.
âIf you Google sea turtles they have a nice, smooth shell,â she added. âIf you look at the Turtle Reef turtles it looks like they have rounded calcium deposits and itâs because the other turtles are chomping on them.â
The dolphins also suffer from captive aggression, and Fischbeck said it could get quite severe. âWeâd be the first ones to the pool most mornings ⊠and more than once we found a dolphin pushed out of the pool by the other dolphins,â she said. âJust laying on the concrete.â
Theyâd report the incident, and would be kicked out while a crane was brought in to lift the dolphin back into the tank. Fischbeck said she didnât directly witness injuries, but that the falls couldnât have been good for them. âYou canât take a four-foot fall over a glass wall and not be damaged,â she said.
The aggression didnât stop there. In one tragic incident Fischbeck reported seeing, a group of males was harassing a baby calf from the other side of the wall. The baby panicked and ran into a wall and died. The mother dolphin was devastated, and wouldnât leave her dead calfâs side.
âShe was just calling and swimming in circles, super distressed. Her calf was just lying there dead,â Fischbeck said. âThey couldnât separate the mother from the baby so they had to drain the pool ⊠She would not leave her calf and they drained the water around her.â
Another dolphin, named Beaker, had a similar encounter but fortunately survived. âWhen she was a calf, one of the whales rammed her into one of the walls and broke her jaw and they had to reconstruct it,â Fischbeck said, adding that Beaker was left with a permanently downturned beak.
Fischbeck said she believes the aggression problem is partially due to SeaWorldâs unnatural breeding program, which upsets the natural social order and leads male dolphins to act out. A similar phenomenon has been observed among SeaWorldâs orcas.
âThey breed dolphins like you breed guinea pigs. The second they can breed them, they breed them,â she said. âA young female dolphin isnât supposed to be having babies back to back to back.â
Fischbeck voluntarily left the company in December 2013 â a decision she says she made due to poor treatment as an employee and the treatment of the animals.
âI ate up all of my savings to get on my feet again,â she said, âbut I got out.â
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