Cassie Randolph: ‘Think Isolation Is Hard? Try Being an Animal at SeaWorld’
The Bachelor Star Teams Up With PETA to Urge People to Steer Clear of Abusement Parks
For Immediate Release:
April 9, 2020
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
As people around the world find themselves quarantined in their homes, The Bachelor winner Cassie Randolph—who is helping care for boyfriend Colton Underwood as he recovers from COVID-19—has trapped herself inside a glass tank for a new PETA campaign aimed at helping the marine mammals who’ve been quarantined in SeaWorld’s cramped tanks for decades. The ad reads, “If you think isolation is hard, try it for 30 years. Don’t go to SeaWorld.”
Gushing about her love of surfing and seeing dolphins in nature in an accompanying video, the California native says, “It’s really amazing to see ’em out there. And the fact that people would take them from their natural environment and their families and their life is just so sad, because really, people are doing it for money and for entertainment.”
In nature, orcas form complex relationships, work cooperatively to find food, and traverse up to 140 miles of the ocean in a day. But those at SeaWorld are housed in incompatible groups inside cramped tanks, and some are even given the drug diazepam to manage their stress-induced aggressive behavior. Across the three SeaWorld parks, 140 dolphins are crammed into just seven small tanks. They’re forcibly bred, sometimes after being drugged, and they’ve been observed with open wounds and extensive scarring on their faces and bodies.
SeaWorld is currently closed to visitors because of COVID-19, and PETA is calling on the park to use this time to develop a plan to move the orcas, bottlenose dolphins, and other marine mammals it holds captive to seaside sanctuaries.
Randolph concludes, “It’s important to not visit these places that are putting their mammals in captivity. I don’t think people are really aware of how sad their lives really are when they’re there.”
Randolph joins a long list of celebrities—including Gregg Sulkin, Ireland Baldwin, Bella Thorne, Noah Cyrus, and Madelaine Petsch—who’ve teamed up with PETA or its affiliates to promote kindness to animals.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
