Good additions! Also beyond the larger "threats" like illness, starvation and predation in the wild, I imagine wild animals have really mundane day-to-day negative experiences too (just like in captivity btw!). This is probably beyond the scope of anything that can be scientifically quantified, but like.. they must have just shit days. The matriarch is being really snappy with them and they don't know why. All the females in the pod have calves and they are so hyperactive and just won't leave them alone. They couldn't sleep well and have a stomach ache and now the hunt went bad too.
Perfect existence with only rainbows and happy times, free from all negativity and frustrations, really doesn't exist anywhere.
And now I'm reaching out with every note I sing and I hope it gets to you on some pacific wind wraps itself around you and whispers in your ear tells you that I miss you and I wish that you were here
got my first ever official customer complaint because when i was going over the terms of their life insurance they were like "well i don't plan to die" and i was like "well you're going to"
I find this whole discourse around declining fertility rates so disingenuous. Not a single YouTube channel with a large following -- except for very small antinatalist ones -- examines it from a philosophical perspective rather than the usual socio-economic one. If I were stopped in the street and asked why I am not having children, Iâd say my life is meh, Iâm not enjoying my time here, itâs all so boring, repetitive, stressful and exhausting, so why would I want my child to feel the way I do?
This is such a taboo notion for the normies that theyâd rather circle around âmuh living crisisâ excuse ad nauseam than dare to ask if life is worth starting (not to mention worth continuing).
I know, right? If I were to explain my antinatalist views to my family or strangers, they would think I'm crazy.
They think life has to follow this path: get a job, get a husband/wife, get children, die. If you don't want any of that you're seen as weird. They're such animals. They don't think and they don't want to think.
Even so-called environmentalists will get angry if you dare to tell them to not get children. It has been known for a long time now, that we're overpopulated because of how much resources we use, especially people in the west.
"I'm pregnant. How can I make all the baby stuff as zero waste as possible?"
How about you don't bring another life into this world, you selfish little fuck?
If not even people who claim to care about the environment and who have knowledge about how humans waste resources and how the future seems bleak due to soil degradation and future world wide hunger crises for example, will understand how awful it is to bring children into this world, then who will?
Antinatalism is such a niche philosophy. People would never accept it. We can't change these animals. We can only watch and do better.
All I care about is the inevitable suffering we go through, like full stop. Itâs really hard for me to fathom that as being a risk worth taking because âparenthood is so worth it.â
âBut you donât know if theyâll suffer that much or in that way, some people enjoy being alive!!â So youâre admitting that youâre gambling on your childâs life, thx for clearing that up
I was very lucky to be involved in Open Ocean training with Dolphin Quest during my internship there and Iâm so happy to see it evolve into what it is today.
Cirrus is a former navy dolphin, so she took to the open ocean very easily and is the one who does the open ocean walks.
When I was there, there was still the netted ocean habitats. The net was there to provide the dolphins with extra security when going out there. But damn that thing was a pain to maintain. That thing needed to be inspected manually on any day ocean habitat training was happening - ensuring there was no damage to it.
Then it had to be cleaned every 6 months and it took a team of interns and trainers two whole days to remove it, clean it and put it back in. That was a loooong two days.
For Ocean Habitat training we were still working on encouraging some of the younger dolphins like Cooper, Marley and Cavello to go out to a netted habitat.
The dolphins were very hesitant and sometimes would bolt back through the tunnel if they felt it was too much. Other dolphins just flat out refused to enter the tunnel entrance lagoon because even that was too much for them.
A lot of people have this idea that dolphins in human care are desperate for more space and would swim off without a second thought. The reality is that the dolphins donât understand why they should leave the comfort and safety of what they know to be their home and venture into unknown environments. How are they supposed to know thatâs actually ~natural~ and ~better~ for them? They donât care about that, they care about what is reinforcing, what feels safe and where their social groups are.
We literally have to convince them and reinforce them and show them itâs okay and trainers really need to have a good relationship with their animals for this to happen.
Honestly I was so surprised in seeing these reactions and seeing how the dolphins responded to being offered larger habitats. They really just. Didnât care.
We created a reinforcement history around the open ocean and the ocean habitat. It didnât offer any intrinsic value and the dolphins only showed interest and motivation in going out there when they were reinforced for it.
Simply being given a bigger area to swim in doesnât necessarily mean theyâre going to be happier.
Does anyone have the fucking tiktok video of the overly enthusiastic rich bearded guy showing off his new hiking shoes in his Mansion and the Woods, but then another dude duets with it to make it look like he's escaping from being held prisoner please please
I hate you. I hate orca captivity. Why are you not ashamed Keeping orcas in captivity is animal cruelty because these highly intelligent apex predators swim up to 100 miles a day in the wild making any concrete tank a tiny "bathtub" that causes extreme psychological distress and "zoochosis â You can see the damage in their collapsed dorsal fins which happens to 100% of captive males but less than 1% in the wild and their broken teeth from biting metal bars out of pure frustration In these tanks their sensitive sonar constantly bounces off the walls creating an acoustic hell while they are forced to perform "tricks" for dead fish because they are kept hungry until they obey Separating them from their families with whom they stay for life in nature is traumatizing and leads to unnatural aggression and early death This isn't education or conservation it is exploitation for profit and forcing an emotional social being into a chlorinated cage for entertainment is the definition of abuse.
Oooh damn we got big feelings today. Interesting because I've discussed most of these issues and concerns on my blog before but clearly you haven't bothered to look. Or you did and that's what's upset you because it's uncomfortable to be wrong?
I don't expect you to change your mind but just for my followers and people who are interested in learning, let me break down the things you've said:
"Keeping orcas in captivity is animal cruelty because these highly intelligent apex predators swim up to 100 miles a day in the wild"
Orcas are socially intelligent, sure. Sometimes they swim up to 100 miles a day, but if they have all their needs met, they often won't swim such long distances. Travel is energetically expensive and it requires specific motivations to do so eg. finding food, avoiding stressors.
"Any concrete tank a tiny "bathtub" that causes extreme psychological distress and "zoochosis â"
I wouldn't call over 7 million gallons of water a bathtub. You can't dive and jump and swim fast in a bathtub - so it's an invalid comparison.
Is the "extreme psychological distress" in the room with us right now? Because I work in behaviour rehabilitation of animals experiencing chronic stress. Animals experiencing significant chronic stress won't eat very well, won't participate in learning/problem solving as their mental resources are taken up, they will regularly be unwell due to their immune systems being compromised and they may display behavioural shutdown as well. These are not behaviours that are baseline in captive orca populations.
SĂĄnchezâHernĂĄndez P, Krasheninnikova A, Almunia J, MolinaâBorja M. Social interaction analysis in captive orcas (Orcinus orca). Zoo Biology. 2019;38:323â333. https://doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21502
Santa, A., Kanda, K., Kako, T., Miyajima, M., & Adachi, I. (2024). Matching-to-Sample Task Training of a Killer Whale (Orcinus orca). Animals, 14(6), 821. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14060821
Almunia J, LĂźke JP and Rosa F (2025) Vocal activity as a welfare indicator in killer whales in managed care. Front. Mar. Sci. 12:1595113. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1595113
What We Have Learned From Killer Whales in Managed Care
"Zoochosis" is a linguistically and scientifically invalid word that was made up by "Born Free" - an anti zoo organisation that is good at marketing without actually improving welfare outcomes for animals in zoos. It does not address the nuances of zoological management and basically chalks up all potential issues as inherent to the zoo environment. This is deeply counter productive to addressing welfare concerns.
"You can see the damage in their collapsed dorsal fins which happens to 100% of captive males but less than 1% in the wild"
But the females don't have dorsal fin collapse - so are only the males "suffering" then? Or could it be due to the simple fact that the male orca dorsal fin is very tall and heavy and orcas in human care are spending more time at the surface, therefore having less support of the water column?
Interestingly, it's not 100% of male orcas. Panghu, wild captured from Russian waters and now living in Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park, is 20 years old and still has an upright dorsal fin. Yet the facility is a lot smaller than SeaWorld's so perhaps it's also genetics related.
"Their broken teeth from biting metal bars out of pure frustration."
Biting at metal bars/gates is pretty rare but mouthing is also how all cetaceans explore their environment. Mouthing or ramming gates may happen from social frustration - like fencing fighting in dogs. They have very soft teeth enamel, so if they do mouth at anything hard, it'll affect their teeth. I've written up a post on teeth that you can find in my "cetacean welfare" tag.
"In these tanks their sensitive sonar constantly bounces off the walls creating an acoustic hell"
Incorrect. Cetaceans are perfectly capable of controlling their echolocation abilities and are not just firing off click trains at random. See below a spectrogram of recordings of dolphin echolocation in a tank vs a lagoon
(Source)
You can see that both animals are echolocating regularly and there was no major difference between dolphins in lagoons vs tanks, besides the snapping shrimp recorded in the lagoons.
Since we know that cetaceans are capable of modulating their click frequency and intensity, we'd see lower frequency and intensity in the tank if echolocation was causing any sort of distress to the animals.
Fun fact: Echolocation and signature whistles were both concepts that were discovered and studied in dolphins living in tanks.
AN EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION OF ECHOLOCATION BEHAVIOR IN THE PORPOISE, TURSIOPS TRUNCATUS (MONTAGU)
KENNETH S. NORRIS, JOHN H. PRESCOTT, PAUL V. ASA-DORIAN, and PAUL PERKINSThe Biological Bulletin 1961 120:2, 163-176
And those discoveries were able to be applied to wild dolphins. And we now know how acoustically sensitive these animals are to boat traffic, navy submarines and offshore oil drilling, which DOES actually cause significant impairments and communication issues in wild populations.
Stevens, P. E., Hill, H. M., & Bruck, J. N. (2021). Cetacean Acoustic Welfare in Wild and Managed-Care Settings: Gaps and Opportunities. Animals, 11(11), 3312. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11113312
Stevens, P. E., Allen, V., & Bruck, J. N. (2023). A Quieter Ocean: Experimentally Derived Differences in Attentive Responses of Tursiops truncatus to Anthropogenic Noise Playbacks before and during the COVID-19-Related Anthropause. Animals, 13(7), 1269. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13071269
"while they are forced to perform "tricks" for dead fish because they are kept hungry until they obey"
Just another blatantly incorrect assumption straight from the Blackfish playbook. While this WAS a technique used 40-50 years ago, it has not been implemented in facilities like SeaWorld in decades because it created dangerous and frustrated animals.
Animals are provided with their entire dietary intake regardless of "performance". You can see multiple times when orcas simply refuse to participate and trainers step back and cancel a show. They are still given all their food. They also don't always care to work for food because its so readily available - so trainers have to be creative and use other reinforcers like rubdowns, ice and gelatin.
"Separating them from their families with whom they stay for life in nature is traumatizing and leads to unnatural aggression and early death"
While the initial wild captures were undoubtedly traumatic - the orcas you see today are all part of matrilineal family groups, with some exceptions. But they have shown a lot of adaptability in their social groups and certainly not "unnatural aggression".
A good example of this is the Loro Parque orca group, which is by far the most unnatural hodgepodge of loosely and unrelated orca. Yet a study in 2019 revealed that agonistic ("aggressive) behaviours were between 1-2%
(Source)
"This isn't education or conservation it is exploitation for profit and forcing an emotional social being into a chlorinated cage for entertainment is the definition of abuse."
That's your opinion and you're entitled to that. I don't believe it is a factually informed opinion, as you don't seem to know that the chlorine levels in the orca pools are less than what is in our drinking water. It is mostly just filtered salt water.
I would also say that while we still don't have enough data to conclusively 100% support this, there is more research coming out now that is showing positive welfare states in cetacean species such as orcas and bottlenose dolphins. And if people are entertained by animals doing learned behaviours as part of their usual enrichment of the day and can be educated by that, I don't see that as a bad thing. Provided that the welfare of the animals is prioritised.
Unfortunately the rhetoric anon is applying here is not helpful to actually improving animal welfare. I noticed pretty much the entirety of this message is cut and paste talking points from the organisations that rely on you being convinced that orcas in human care are suffering so they can obtain financial and legal support.
So I would encourage anyone curious about cetacean welfare to diversify their sources and watch out for any social media post that gives you a strong feeling/reaction.
You can also check out this collection of papers based on data collected in one of the largest multi-instiution studies ever undertaken on cetaceans:
There is a strong commitment among accredited zoos and aquariums that exhibit cetaceans to use data to ensure the animals thrive under their
I don't normally get into ship wars cause I don't care what you like, but bruh if you get excited over the fantasy of June and Serena being in love, then you are a genuinely disturbed individual and need to admit that you have a rape fetish
