Sunday, November 16, 2014

A Big Fish in a Small Bowl

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of a fish bowl is gold fish, furthermore a Beta fish or even a small bottom feeder catfish or starfish. The great Orca Whale doesn’t come to mind when thinking of the category of a fish bowl, yet that’s where they are in SeaWorld. Since carnival show times and even earlier animals have been considered entertainment for human consumption. Even though the conditions can be harmful and downright abusive people don’t seem to be too concerned with that.
On September 13th 1916 Mary the Elephant was hung with a crane for killing an assistant trainer who had been hired just the other day. With peoples outrage over the public death of a person, the owner of the carnival decided it would be best to execute her. There are even pictures of it, and over 2,000 people came to see her public execution. 

Similarly the 2010 death of trainer Dawn Brancheau who was killed by Tilikim an Orca who has been involved in two other incidents before that. One in 1999 where a man visited the park the day before and somehow got past security to enter the Orcas tank after park hours, he was found dead and naked on Tilikums back the next morning. The first incident took place in 1991 where tilikum and two other pregnant female orcas were in a tank and Keltie Byrne slipped into the tank while being a part time trainer for sea world. The orcas drowned her and kept her away from the life ring thrown her way. Tilikum is still performing today.
Unlike Mary the elephant Tilikim hasn’t received much outrage at least in the over the top sense that the people of Tennessee were. The outrage has come in the form of a movie called blackfish which brings to light the conditions of these Orcas in captivity. It claims insanity to the Orcas who are acting aggressively toward people and their trainers. Although there hasn’t been much done to take steps to change it. Because its now an industry, drawing in thousands upon thousands of visitors. What people don’t realize is that Orcas are not entertainment. They are not show dogs, they aren’t meant to be kept in such small living spaces while being forced to do tricks for an audience of careless faces every day.
Tilikum isn’t the only aggressive Orca in captivity, there are many accounts that not only stem from seaworld but other parks as well. Going all the way back to 1967 to the present you can find incidents involving Orcas and aggression toward trainers and visitors. http://www.orcahome.de/incidents.htm this website gives a comprehensive list of incidents and their locations.
Seaworlds response to the criticisms in Blackfish and what the Orca project stands for were sort of fleshed out in a long article on their main site, which can be read here http://seaworld.com/truth/truth-about-blackfish/

The whole article is basically spent saying that everything in blackfish is false, while they never really address the aggressive behavior or history of aggressive behavior of captive Orcas. 

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