Look at individuals like Nakai. His chin injury wasn’t just some random accident it was severe trauma, likely from hitting the tank or gates. That kind of injury doesn’t happen in a healthy, natural environment. It’s a direct reflection of stress and confinement. Poor Junior was kept in an indoor pool inside a tiny warehouse. The building’s design amplified the stadium’s music and noise, making it deafening. The chemicals used to treat the water were so strong that the animals would throw themselves out of the pool just to escape them. Or Tokitae. She was a Southern Resident orca one of the most socially complex and tight knit populations. She was captured in 1970 during the Penn Cove capture, where multiple orcas died in the process. She then spent over 50 years alone in a tiny tank at Miami Seaquarium. No other orcas. Just dolphins and trainers. And no dolphins are NOT a substitute for her own species. Then there’s Kshamenk, Naja nother examples of how captive conditions fail these animals.
Facilities like Kamogawa and Kobe Suma Sea World have also been heavily criticized for small tanks and outdated conditions. These environments don’t come close to replicating the scale, depth, or stimulation of the ocean. :/ At Loro Parque, Victoria’s death was deeply saddening. They were not upfront about Ula’s health, and Keto should never have been used for waterwork performances. As for Chimelong Spaceship, I amend that the facility has very large tanks, along with features like a wave machine and underwater jets…. But those are transient orcas, they had to condition to eating fish. They collide with the glass, and can be seen lying motionless on the bottom. I’m also strongly opposed to Chimelong’s recent captures of orcas
I want to hear you guys out but how can you excuse this?
Hi there, so I think this ask highlights one of the big problems about modern discourse today and why I find the "pro and anti" discourse to be extremely counterproductive.
This is an industry spanning hundreds of facilities across the world, all with their own country's laws and cultures governing how they run. Then you have each facility all being run by specific management - some which may be better than others and some which may be actively increasing or reducing welfare.
I have seen this first hand. On the first day of my new job, I was assisting with manually getting a dolphin out of the water because she was covered head to fluke in severe rake marks. She had been attacked overnight by two of the dominant dolphins in the group. She had deep necrotic tissue across her peduncle and dorsal fin that needed to be debrided.
I was. Horrified. I should have taken better photos.
Upon looking at the records (which were still done on paper because that's how averse this management was to change) She should have been moved into another group weeks ago - there were very obvious signs of agonistic behaviour directed at her and clear signs she was not in a compatible group. And yet... Here we are, with this poor injured miserable dolphin who had been failed by her caretakers. And their excuse was... the gates are too hard to open. They had to be manually opened by having someone untie it via scuba. Which... was tedious but... That was not a good enough excuse in my opinion.
I lasted at that facility for 5 months, working so damn hard to help management improve their severely outdated protocols. I wrote proposals, I pushed program changes... They didn't care.
The dolphins were bored, overweight and refusing to engage in programs because it had to follow a specific structure and management said it would be too difficult to change. I walked out of a program when I was asked to go into the water with guests because the dolphins were showing OBVIOUS aggression precursors and I was not about to risk my life for them.
It ruined my mental and physical health and I resigned just before COVID hit the island. The facility has since gone under and I have no idea what happened to the dolphins. And guess what? This facility was a sea pen in the middle of the ocean. So sea pens don’t magically fix welfare problems. They can actually CREATE welfare problems.
The reason I talk about this is because I am extremely aware of how wrong things can go.
Everything that you have said... I agree, for most of it! Nakai was probably not in an ideal social group and was chased into the wall - he would have had to hit it at speed for such an injury to occur. But since nothing like that has happened since... probably means the team recognised a mistake in management and fixed it.
There were major issues with water quality and chemical composition of pool water in the early days. There were egregious abuses done to those animals out of sheer ignorance - and also just because it was a bunch of cowboys winging it in the early days. I will never ever forgive Sea Land of the Pacific for trapping 3 orcas into tiny dark boxes overnight. Or the abusive aversive methods they used on Tilikum, Nootka and Haida.
All the deaths that Tilikum was involved with, in my opinion, is blood on the management of Sea Land's hands.
Tokitae was another colossal failure on so many levels. She should have been moved to SeaWorld Orlando decades ago. Her aversion to change was significant but it only got worse as she aged and managment sat on their hands and refused to do anything about it. And then Dolphin Company hands her over to "Friends of Tokitae" and their little sanctuary experiment.
Despite it being very well established that she struggles with new things, they put a transport sling over the side of her pool and made her do behaviours. These were people that had no idea what they were doing. She was being flooded. She had no space to move away from that sling. The last video we saw of her alive - which has since been taken down and the Friends of Toki page is completely gone - was her being directed to swim near the sling - she was erratic and very obviously stressed. A 60 year old whale with a weakened immune system.... She died shortly after that video was taken.
In regards to Loro Parque, I disagree about them "not being transparent". Ula was always a wildcard after being hand raised from birth. The fact that she even made it past her first year was remarkable - first calves are always more likely to die in the first year and Ula had a lot of the odds stacked against her. I don't think they lied, I think she was in good health for the most part.
Honestly there's always a lot of assumptions that people make when animals die. And, quite frankly, unless you know that animals' veterinary records, you won't know the full story. Yes, maybe there was a change in fish type at Loro Parque - but the assertion that it would cause gastric torsion is a massive leap. We don't even know how to predict and 100% prevent gastric torsion in the most well-studied domestic animals - cattle, dogs, horses ect. Cetacean veterinary medicine is SO NEW and still very much a developing process.
I have been pretty clear that I do not agree with wild capture and the Penn Cove captures were horrific and should never ever have occurred. But I also am interested in objective welfare observation, rather than what happened in the past that I have no control over.
Kamagowa and Suma are absolutely too small but, interestingly, those animals seem very engaged with their caretakers and show a lot of signs of positive welfare such as regular and active play - including innovating and expanding their habitat by including slide outs into their play and social behaviour. Grand Vista's reasoning behind smaller tanks is to make the animals look "bigger". Quite frankly, that's an atrocious excuse and that's just shitty management and a reflection of how backwards some of Japan's animal welfare ethics are.
Chimelong isn't perfect but it is impressive on multiple levels - they have a healthy breeding population, they have orcas constantly engaging in play behaviours and healthy social groups, they have enriching habitats. I haven't seen any signs of severe raking, which is a really good sign of good social structure. And I do believe it's due to the fact that these orcas are allowed to breed and build natural family groups.
The glass banging behavour you mentioned has only been recorded a few times - so it's not a "stereotypical behaviour" because those are repetitive behaviours that happen without seemingly no purpose. I made a TikTok on this a while back. But I don't believe these orcas are hitting themselves hard enough to cause any sort of "self-harm". To me it looks more like communication.
And "lying motionless" is yeah... that's how some of them choose to sleep. Some of them surface rest or swim rest... Some of them rest at the bottom of the tank. I'd be curious to see if that has an effect on their dorsal fins. They may also find it more interesting to rest while people watching from the glass.
So this isn't really a welfare concern - unless they also weren't being engaged with enrichment, learning opportunities, socialising ect. But it seems pretty clear that they are getting those opportunities.
With all of these cases, we can only assess based on information available and that isn't a subsitute for proper welfare evaluation and research studies. But we can still look at behaviour and animals that are resting, socialising, playing, problem solving and learning are less likely to be in chronic stress or negative welfare states.
Anyway thank you for listening to my TED talk.
TL;DR just because animal lobby groups and animal rights activists lie and exaggerate on some elements in cetacean welfare, doesn’t mean bad things never happened or still happen to this day.
Advocating for cetacean welfare means advocating for responsible animal management informed by best practice and science. It does not mean saying every single facility is fine actually and no abuses or significant welfare issues ever happen. And it also doesn’t mean that the solution is to take every animal and put them in sea pens. Because welfare problems still happen! In sea pens!
