If you were in a bathtub for 25 years, don’t you think you’d get a little irritated?

Around the world, dolphins and orcas are kept in small tanks, forced to perform circus tricks for our entertainment.
Industry leaders defend the educational benefit of holding marine mammals in captivity, but what values are created by orcas jumping through hoops, particularly when the health and safety of those animals and their trainers are at risk?

To this day there is no record of any orca doing any harm to any human being in the wild. Yet of the 200 orcas in confinement, more than two dozen have injured or killed people. In the last 20 years alone, several people have died at the hands of orcas in captivity. More than half of all marine mammal workers and trainers have been injured by the animals they work with on a daily basis.

In the wild, these regal creatures live in big families. They form a very matriarchal society. The adult offspring rarely leave their mother’s side. They have life spans similar to humans, the females can live to about 100, males to about 60, yet dolphin and orca life expectancies are cut drastically in confinement.

Nonetheless, the captive industry continues to downplay their mortality rates and claim that marine mammals are healthier and safer in their care.

Some facilities promote themselves as conservation enterprises. However, few are involved in substantial conservation efforts. Rather than enhancing wild populations, facilities engaged in captive breeding merely create a surplus of animals that may never be released.

Contrary to popular perception, captures of marine mammals from the wild are not a thing of the past. Captures are inhumane and often very violent. Animals are routinely killed or injured. Capture results in a six–fold increase in mortality risk during and immediately after capture. Once in captivity, wild-caught marine mammals gradually experience the atrophy of many of their natural behaviors and are cut off from the conditions that allow the expression of cultural traits, such as specialized vocalizations.

Lori Morino, neuroscientist with OSHA, tells us the orca brain screams out intelligence and awareness. A part of their brain has extended out adjacent to their limbic system, the system that processes emotions.

It seems these animals have highly elaborate emotional lives. It’s becoming clear that dolphins and whales have a sense of self. We look at mass strandings, and how they stay with each other; everything about them is social.

Stress-related conditions such as ulcers, behaviors like pacing and self mutilation, and abnormal aggression within groups frequently develop in predators denied the opportunity to forage and roam.

When there’s tension in the wild they’ve got thousands of square miles to get away. Can you imagine being squeezed in a small concrete enclosure for the rest of your life when you’re used to swimming hundreds of miles a day?

Is it normal to have intelligent, highly evolved animals in concrete pools, a regal thing floating lifeless in a concrete pool with his fin flopped over?

Scientists maintain that the lives of captive marine mammals are impoverished, that people do not receive an accurate picture of a species from captive representation, and that the trade in live marine mammals negatively impacts populations and species.

It’s time to stop the shows and stop forcing these animals to perform in basically a circus environment. They should release the animals that are young and healthy enough to be released so that they can live out their lives and experience the natural rhythm of the ocean.

Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1994 any entity offering “an education or conservation program based on professionally recognized standards of the public display community” can legally import, breed and take marine mammals from the wild and use them with little or no further oversight. And because any person holding marine mammals for the purpose of public display is also a member of the public display community, they can legally set said “standards.”

In fifty years we’ll look back and go, “My god, what a barbaric time.”