PETA Statement Re: SeaWorld Earnings Dive—Marine Park Can Save Itself by Saving Animals

For Immediate Release:
February 27, 2018

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Please find a statement below from PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman regarding SeaWorld’s fourth-quarter earnings report, released this morning:

SeaWorld is underwater: It has just reported losing 1.2 million visitors last year, its CEO has left, and it’s facing a class-action lawsuit by investors and a consumer-protection lawsuit by visitors as well as a criminal fraud investigation. The company tries to ignore mounting public pressure to change its ways, while its earnings plummet and the miserable animals in its custody—including Malia, a 10-year-old orca showing signs of infection, which recently killed her sister Unna; her father, Tilikum; and the matriarch orca Kasatka—remain trapped in tiny tanks. PETA has filed a resolution calling on SeaWorld to end all its breeding programs and has offered the floundering abusement park a way to boost its dismal numbers: start working to release the orcas into seaside sanctuaries and stop imprisoning animals altogether.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—became a SeaWorld shareholder in 2013 in order to put pressure on the company to transfer the animals at its facilities to seaside sanctuaries. For more information, please visit PETA’s website SeaWorldOfHurt.com.