It’s really such hypocrisy as so many pros tell everyone to go to Seaworld to see for themselves, you do that and they are still upset. :p As if stepping inside is going to immediately change your mind. I can tell you even when I was pro, there were things I saw at the FL fac that I really didn’t like/agree with (if you think wild arctic is bad at SWC, Florida’s version is much worse.) so it’s just pros being hypocrites because they are unable to defend these parks.
I actually went thinking that maybe there is a lot of educational material at the park, and that people can learn something there etc etc. Part of what I found so jarring was how short everything fell of just that very simple expectation, which honestly left me bewildered and a bit disgusted because that’s really the one ‘saving grace’ of any of this. No one’s going to learn about an animal just because they SEE it. Especially when there’s little-to-no educational signage and essentially no educational material available in the shops. This is where Seaworld was truly a joke compared to the aquarium and zoo. It’d be uproaringly hilarious if it wasn’t so telling and sad. I don’t want to hear people telling me how it’s such a respectable zoo/aquarium facility. It’s a theme park designed for a theme park experience, where animals are present as part of that. I previously asserted that they’re a theme-park-not-a-zoo, and literally every aspect of going there made that assertion concrete. To come to any other conclusion you have to basically ignore everything.Which is what a lot of procaps seem to do, but.If you know anything about the place and don’t care about rides/etc it’s just really loud and sad there.