Written by Jeff Mackey
Another SeaWorld orca has died prematurely in captivity—this time, heartbreakingly, the deceased was a mere 10 months old. The infant, Vicky, died over the weekend at Loro Parque, an amusement park in Spain's Canary Islands. The cause of death is not yet known—there are reports that she had been behaving unusually in the preceding days.
Vicky was the offspring of Kohana and Keto, two SeaWorld orcas on display at Loro Parque. Senior SeaWorld employees oversaw orca training at Loro Parque when Keto killed trainer Alexis Martinez by ramming him and dragging him underwater. Kohana, who is Keto's niece—inbreeding is another sad outcome of captivity at SeaWorld—rejected Vicky, as she had previously done with her first calf, a male named Adan. It likely didn't help that Kohana had been taken away from her own mother after just 19 months—ocean-dwelling orcas carefully guard their calves, and young females help the mothers care for them.
What You Can Do
SeaWorld's reckless disregard hurts orcas and endangers those who come into contact with them. Please tell SeaWorld that you won't visit its parks so long as it imprisons marine animals, and spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, urging everyone to follow suit.
PETA protested outside SeaWorld parks in San Antonio and San Diego today, just one week after the marine-animal prison chain was hit with a $38,500 repeat violation fine from the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) for allowing dangerous contact between employees and orcas in defiance of a federal court order—and basic decency.
This SeaWorld San Antonio employee was shocked to learn about the violations that led to the OSHA fine.
The fine resulted from a follow-up investigation and photos and footage on TV of trainers who hugged and kissed orcas without any protective barrier, as required by an earlier OSHA ruling. SeaWorld fought OSHA's decision with two unsuccessful appeals, but the ruling stands.
Aggression between orcas is nearly non-existent in nature, but the constant stress of living in forced social groupings inside tiny tanks at SeaWorld causes them to lash out, posing a danger to animals and employees alike. SeaWorld's own corporate incident logs contain reports of more than 100 incidents at its parks. Orcas have pulled trainers into the water, held them at the bottom of the pool, head-butted them, slammed into them, breached on top of them, and, of course, killed them—and those are just the episodes that have been reported.
Please tell everyone you know to leave all marine-animal parks and aquariums out of their family travel plans, and ask SeaWorld officials to release their animals to sanctuaries.
Written by Michelle Kretzer
Tyrese is already a Grammy-nominated R&B singer-songwriter and a rapper, an actor, a bestselling author, a television producer, and a model, and now he's adding "animal advocate" to his résumé. He posted this breathtaking picture of an orca in his or her ocean home on Instagram, with the caption "Shows me [that] certain animals shouldn't be in captivity …."
© StarMaxInc.com
The image was seen by Tyrese's half-million followers and became one of the day's most popular photos. Something tells me Tyrese will be checking out Blackfish, the highly anticipated documentary about the plight of captive orcas, including Tilikum, the imprisoned orca at SeaWorld who was kidnapped from his ocean home at the age of 2 and has since spent his life relegated to a small concrete tank.
In other Hollywood news:
And Randall and other shining stars filled the Twitterverse with sweet tweets for animals this week:
To keep up with what all your favorite stars are doing for animals, follow @PETA on Twitter.
When SeaWorld decided to offer up 20 million shares of common stock in an initial public offering, no one expected PETA to be one of the first in line to buy.
But Wall Street was in for a surprise. We quickly purchased the smallest number of shares necessary to give us the right to attend and speak at annual meetings and to submit shareholder resolutions asking for policy changes. Our first order of business as part owners of SeaWorld? Getting the orcas out—including Corky, who has been enslaved by SeaWorld for 44 years.
iStockphoto.com/DaveRig
We will educate stockholders about how marine parks tear orcas and dolphins away from their homes and families and imprison them in minuscule concrete tanks, where they suffer from captivity-induced stress and illness.
And of course meanwhile, PETA and our supporters will continue trying to win freedom for orcas and dolphins as soon as possible by telling everyone that these animals live in a SeaWorldofHurt.
Does this sound like déjà vu to you? A weekend visitor to SeaWorld in San Antonio has sent PETA disturbing photographs of a dolphin who appears to be missing a chunk of flesh from his or her lower mandible. The injury is strikingly similar to the one sustained by an orca named Nakai at the San Diego SeaWorld just a few months ago. Just as we did for Nakai, PETA has filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and requested an investigation into the cause of the dolphin's injury.
In Nakai's case, the USDA listed the orca's injury as being caused by a recessed track that holds gates that separate two of the tanks. Another injury to another animal, also caused by SeaWorld's dangerous enclosures, would demonstrate a clear violation of the Animal Welfare Act, which states that facilities must be structurally sound and free from objects, projections, or edges that may cause injury and that all animals must be handled in a manner that does not cause physical harm.
But even without injurious enclosures, SeaWorld still harms marine mammals by robbing them of everything that is natural, pleasant, and important to them, such as living in family pods and swimming up to 100 miles a day in the open ocean.
And SeaWorld sentences animals to an early grave: Orcas, for instance, can expect to live an average of 30 to 50 years in the wild, and some live as long as 90 years. The median age for orcas in captivity is only 9 years. The debilitating stress of captivity weakens the animals' immune systems. In fact, some other weekend visitors to SeaWorld San Antonio reportedly told employees about a shark who was lying belly-up in a tank and appeared to be dead.
SeaWorld: Dangerous for human beings and deadly for marine animals.
Update:
After visiting SeaWorld and taking photographs of Nakai's injury (two of which are shown below), Dr. Ingrid N. Visser, founder and principal scientist of the Orca Research Trust, found that there are "puncture marks that match orca teeth spacing," which "is a clear indication that an altercation between the orcas was involved." The puncture marks in question can be seen at the bottom right of the wound in the first photo below:
©Ingrid N. Visser, Ph.D.
This evidence strongly suggests that Nakai's wound was indeed caused by a bite resulting from incompatible confinement rather than contacting with the side of the pool, as SeaWorld has alleged.
Originally posted September 28:
Following a serious and gruesome injury to an orca in an avoidable attack, PETA has submitted a complaint asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to take disciplinary action against SeaWorld for housing orcas incompatibly in violation of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA).
As you can see in these disturbing photographs, Nakai, an 11-year-old male orca at SeaWorld in San Diego, sustained a laceration so significant that, as a whistleblower said, "a dinner plate-sized chunk of his lower mandible [has been] sheared off, exposing underlying tissues, and bone." The flesh cut from him "was big enough and intact enough for SeaWorld to retrieve it from the bottom of the pool."
According to the whistleblower's report to journalist Tim Zimmermann, Nakai's injury was a result of "a major altercation" between Nakai and two other orcas, Keet and Ikaika. The AWA makes it clear that "marine mammals that are not compatible must not be housed in the same enclosure." Yet SeaWorld parks have a long history of housing incompatible orcas from widely divergent groups together in enclosures—and the result has been stress, agitation, aggressive and bloody raking, serious injury, and death.
It's clear that SeaWorld can't be trusted to make the safety and well-being of marine animals its top priority. Please don't ever visit SeaWorld (or any other marine-mammal park)—and tell company executives why you won't support the abuse of Nakai and the other intelligent, complex animals they've imprisoned and enslaved.
While most of us are grilling veggie dogs in the park or sipping drinks by the pool today, working animals won't have it so easy:
Horses pulling horse-drawn carriages today will tromp on hard pavement all day long in the intense heat. They will breathe exhaust fumes and will not have adequate food or water. Tonight, they will be crammed into a tiny stall for a few hours until they are dragged out in the morning to start again.
Hens used by the egg industry are spending the day crammed five deep into wire "battery cages" about the size of a file drawer. Because they are packed so closely together, they will have to urinate and defecate on each other.
Today, Indian donkeys will struggle to pull heavy carts that are overloaded with bricks and sugarcane. They will toil under the blazing sun with little rest, food, or water. They may be beaten or whipped to force them to keep going.
iStockphoto.com/Rpsycho
Orcas who are enslaved at marine parks today will perform meaningless tricks in front of crowds of screaming people in order to get food. They will swim endless circles in a tank that is, for them, comparable to a bathtub. The reverberations from their sonar will bounce off the walls, adding to their frustration and anger.
Female dogs in puppy mills will likely spend Labor Day in either a crude, filthy cage or chained to a tree. They will suffer from painful medical conditions, such as ear infections, mange, and abscessed feet, for which they will receive no veterinary care. They will either be pregnant with or nursing yet another litter of puppies, who will be taken away from them and sold.
Pregnant cows on dairy farms will be hooked up to milking machines several times today. They may be suffering from a painful udder inflammation called "mastitis," likely brought on by the drugs that increase their milk production. They may also be lame from being intensely confined and being forced to stand amid their own waste.
This Labor Day, resolve to help the animals who rarely have a day off. To learn what the PETA-supported working animal relief organization Animal Rahat is doing to help animals in India, visit AnimalRahat.com.
There's big news today in a case that PETA has been tenaciously pursuing for some time: Consistent with the citations issued against SeaWorld in 2010, Administrative Law Judge Ken Welsch of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) found that SeaWorld is culpable for allowing its employees to interact directly with potentially dangerous orcas.
Olivier Bruchez|cc by 2.0
For years, PETA has implored SeaWorld to transfer the marine mammals it enslaves to transitional coastal sanctuaries because confining animals of such great size to severely inadequate tanks leads to miserable lives of desperation and frustration—and dangerous conditions for SeaWorld staffers.
After one orca, Tilikum, killed trainer Dawn Brancheau in front of horrified visitors at SeaWorld Orlando, PETA urged the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to pursue a citation against SeaWorld and provided it with compiled research on the history of deaths and injuries at the park and orca aggression in captivity. Today's OSHRC decision affirms that SeaWorld knew that allowing its employees to interact directly with orcas such as Tilikum could have serious or fatal results.
While the judge modified the citation for "willful" violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act to "serious," adjusting the fine accordingly, he found that SeaWorld knew that there was a "substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result" from these interactions, yet it continued to allow them. He found SeaWorld's arguments that it wasn't aware of these hazards to be implausible and lambasted its corporate culture of placing the blame for dangerous incidents exclusively on trainers and discouraging trainers from stopping a show—even after an attack.
Information that came out of the testimony during a two-week hearing before Judge Welsch, as well as during previous proceedings, includes the following:
While SeaWorld's own corporate incident log contains reports of more than 100 incidents of orca aggression at its parks, government attorneys brought up incident after incident that were left out of the log, including the attack leading to Brancheau's death and attacks by an orca who had a penchant for grabbing trainers' ponytails. Yet despite the premature deaths of four human beings—one from extensive internal bleeding—and more than 20 orcas at SeaWorld's parks, the company continues to put profits over humane concerns. Dawn Brancheau would be alive today if SeaWorld had heeded PETA's advice.
Please join PETA in politely asking David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, to prohibit all direct contact with potentially dangerous animals. And, of course, never, ever go to SeaWorld or any other marine-animal park.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday? How 'bout rockin' out and helping animals? That's what birthday boy Morrissey did: When his vegan tour stopped in San Diego, SeaWorld's hometown, on May 22, the longtime animal advocate gave all of his bandmates PETA's "SeaWorld Sucks" T-shirts to wear onstage.
Joe Scarnici/FilmMagic
Any SeaWorld folks who were in the audience should have ducked their heads if Moz played "You Should Have Been Nice to Me" or "Shame Is the Name." What else did they expect from the guy who never misses an opportunity to speak up for animals?
Rock out for orcas with your own "SeaWorld Sucks" tee.
Despite the endangered-species status of the southern resident orcas, the federal government is refusing to offer imprisoned orca Lolita the same protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that the rest of her family pod enjoys.
Rojer | cc by 2.0
You may recall that the National Marine Fisheries Service classified Washington state's southern resident orca population as endangered, giving it protection from being harmed or harassed under the ESA, but without explanation, it excluded Lolita, who was captured from the pod as a calf and has been held prisoner and forced to perform for the last 42 years. PETA called foul on the unlawful double standard and filed suit on Lolita's behalf, joined by the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), Washington residents, and a former employee of the Miami Seaquarium, where Lolita is held captive.
The Miami Seaquarium and the federal government filed motions to get the case dismissed, and the judge acquiesced on timing grounds—he didn't address the merits of the case—meaning that the Miami Seaquarium can continue to confine Lolita to the smallest orca tank in North America (the orca equivalent of a bathtub), prevent her from interacting with any members of her own species, deny her appropriate protection from the sun, and force her to perform silly tricks. But PETA and the ALDF are already regrouping and planning our next move, and the lawsuit's dismissal is merely a hitch in our efforts to see Lolita released into a seaside sanctuary in her home waters.
Please send a polite e-mail to Eric C. Schwabb, assistant administrator for fisheries, urging him to give Lolita her rightful protection under the ESA.
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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