ok, so I’m not at all an expert, but what I’ve learned from visiting various marine research centers and talking with people who work with these animals:
1) At this point in the US, all of the large marine animals like this you see cannot be released into to wild, and they come to the centers from things like injury and rescue. We do NOT just go out to the ocean and capture random animals. That is super illegal.
2) All performances like this are purely voluntary on the animal’s part. If a seal or sea lion twice the size of a person doesn’t want to do an activity with you, there is nothing you can do about it. You can encourage behaviors through positive reinforcement, but in the end the sea lion does what the sea lion wants.
3) This kind of training is actually very necessary for proper care of large, intelligent animals! The more intelligent an animal is, the more important it is to have sufficient social and mental stimulation, and training with keepers provides both. The displayed behaviors that these tricks utilize are often seen as play and/or social behaviors in the wild.
4) And perhaps most importantly, training large animals to move and position themselves in certain ways is necessary for minimizing stress during routine medical care! You can’t safely manhandle a large sea lion into showing its belly, so if you need to do a medical check without tranquillizing the animal (which carries its own risks and stresses), you need to be able to ask the animal to roll over on its own. If you watch the dance in the above post carefully, you’ll note that a lot of the different “dance moves” are effectively presenting different parts of the body. So what this performance does is take all of the stances/actions you might need it to do for a health checkup and sets it to music!
germansingergirl
discoholicmusic
annaxmalina
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
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