Despite the death of a dolphin named Nea at the Brookfield Zoo on Monday, it was business as usual when shows resumed the next day. Nea suffered a fractured skull after apparently colliding with another dolphin. Staff were alerted to the collision after hearing a "loud pop."

With particularly twisted logic, the zoo's senior vice president of "collections" claimed the show resumed since the dolphins "love to do the demonstrations because it is part of their normal behavior." For the record, dolphins' "normal behavior" is swimming dozens of miles a day, not swimming in circles in a concrete tank.

© Photodisc/Sea Life/Getty Images

Many other animals have died in troubling circumstances at the Brookfield Zoo, including Mame, an elephant in her prime at age 34 who was found on the ground with serious injuries, a 4-month-old tiger cub who lost his right foreleg and part of his tail after being attacked by another tiger, a giraffe named Dusti, and 16 stingrays used in the touch tank.

Now that scientists have proved that dolphins talk, let's use our own vocal cords to converse with family and friends and remind them that every ticket purchased to a zoo or aquarium means supporting the miserable lives and deaths of captive dolphins and other animals.

 

Written by Jennifer O'Connor

csiwhalesalive / CC

After a brief glimmer of hope that the slaughter in Taiji, Japan, would not happen this year, it has belatedly begun. Of the 100 dolphins rounded up so far, half will be released and the other half will be sent to prison aquariums. Fifty pilot whales have been slaughtered.

But there is hope: Worldwide outrage prompted by the recent movie The Cove means that the future of the slaughter is uncertain, according to an anonymous official at the Taiji fisheries association.

There's still work to be done. Please contact your local Japanese embassy and express your disgust over the sale of dolphins to aquariums and the slaughter of pilot whales.

Written by Shawna Flavell

AwesomeFlorida / CC

Discovery Cove doesn’t sound like such a fun place when what you’re discovering is that animals kept in captivity and forced to perform stupid stunts in a pool the size, to them, of a sink tend to die young.

This past weekend, a dolphin named Sharky collided with another dolphin during a live “performance” and died shortly afterwards. The story has been doing the rounds of the international news media, which invariably uses terms like “freak accident” and “random,” interspersed with the occasional quote about the incident being “unfortunate”. Which is all very nice, I guess, but they’re missing a key point about this story: Dolphins don’t do well in captivity because they don’t belong there, and one tragedy or another is inevitable when these animals are required to perform tricks that are as unnatural to them as they are inhumane.

Sharky, like the vast majority of dolphins held captive in marine mammal parks, died a few decades short of his natural life expectancy. The only difference between his story and that of his counterparts around the country is that his story actually got reported on.

More info on marine mammal parks here.

Hayden Panettiere (the star of NBC’s Heroes), was so outraged about the hideous dolphin cull taking place in Japan right now that she went out herself to try and put a stop to it. Along with five of her friends, Hayden paddled out on a surfboard in an attempt to stop a pod of dolphins from reaching a cove where the Japanese fishermen were waiting to slaughter them, but was violently deterred by the men on the fishing boats, who used hooks and the boats’ propellers to stop her from reaching the animals. Here’s what she said about the situation:

PETA is sending her a Compassionate Citizen award for her incredible bravery and her dedication to helping animals in need. I hate to have to use the obvious pun here, but you’re a hero, Hayden. Keep up the great work.

There’s more on this story, as well as footage of the horrific dolphin slaughter, on Sky News.