UC-Irvine Ends SeaWorld Ticket Sales

School Cuts Ties With Marine Abusement Park After Petition by peta2 Campus Representative

For Immediate Release:
April 17, 2015

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

It took a year, but a University of California–Irvine (UC) campus representative for peta2, PETA’s youth division, succeeded in getting the Associated Students of UC-Irvine to vote on Thursday to stop SeaWorld ticket sales. The vote came on the heels of a peta2 petition calling on the school to end the sales, an op-ed in the student newspaper in which peta2’s campus representative called the student government to action, and recent precedent-setting moves by Baylor University and California State University–Long Beach, both of which have cut ties with SeaWorld.

“Today’s compassionate college students want nothing to do with a business that sentences sensitive, far-ranging orcas to a lifetime of deprivation in tiny tanks,” says peta2 Director Marta Holmberg. “peta2 is asking all schools to follow UC-Irvine’s example and refuse to partner with SeaWorld until it releases the orcas it holds captive into marine sanctuaries.”

Since the release of Blackfish—the documentary that revealed how orcas suffer physically and psychologically when they’re separated from their families and forced to perform circus-style tricks for food in tiny concrete tanks—attendance at SeaWorld parks dropped, businesses ended longtime partnerships with it, and it was named one of the worst companies in the U.S. in a Consumerist poll.

peta2—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—is calling on SeaWorld to develop ocean sanctuaries in which orcas could be rehabilitated and finally have the opportunity to engage in natural behavior that visitors could observe from nearby “whale watching” centers. PETA will take this call straight to the home of SeaWorld’s new CEO, Joel Manby, at a protest this weekend.

For more information, please visit SeaWorldOfHurt.com.