Last Thursday, the BBC ran the headline: "SeaWorld barred from breeding whales in captivity." As major as the news was, that headline was misleading. SeaWorld San Diego had applied to the California Coastal Commission to build new tanks for its orcas, and the state agency that regulates construction along California's coast essentially said, "Sure, you can build new tanks. But in exchange you have to end your breeding program."
As anyone who's watched that killer whale being masturbated (er, getting a human handjob?) in the documentary Blackfish knows, SeaWorld's breeding program is an important part of its business. SeaWorld doesn't capture wild orcas like it used to.
SeaWorld's stock immediately dropped 4.86 percent after the Coastal Commission decision. "This is bad news," an equity research analyst told the Los Angeles Times the next day. "A much better result for SeaWorld would have been if the Coastal Commission had denied their request."
SeaWorld and the Coastal Commission may have to sort this out in court. SeaWorld also has marine parks in Texas and Florida; the California Coastal Commission decision doesn't affect them.
Meanwhile, in France, an orca who was born in captivity in 1996 died today.
His name was Valentin, and he "was born on site at the park," Marineland said in a statement. Valentin's death comes a week after a devastating flood that killed 20 people along the French Riviera and also killed "sea lions, sharks, turtles and smaller farm animals" at the park.
It also comes four months after Valentin's mother's death at the same amusement park. Valentin's mother's was Freya, and Freya is the orca John Hargrove describes at the beginning of his book Beneath the Surface, a whistleblower's account of the captive-orca industry. Hargrove once worked for Marineland.
Hargrove experienced Freya at her most aggressive—his book starts out with a harrowing, near-death experience involving her. (Activists say orca aggression is a result of the animals' frustration over captivity.) After Freya dragged him to the middle of the pool, where he was most vulnerable, "I felt her teeth pressing on my hip bones, just over the wetsuit; the entire width of my body was in her mouth, like a twig in a dog's mouth," Hargrove writes.
And then:
She pulled me underwater but chose not to puncture me before releasing the grip of her jaw. I floated back to the surface, facing her. I had both hands on her but she went under and rolled again. She came at me once more, grasping me in her jaws, pulling me under a second time before releasing me, allowing me to float upward. I knew that this could well become a pattern—I'd seen it happen before when orcas would toy with birds that had strayed into their pools—or when they turned on their trainers. She might come back to drag me under again and again until I became unconscious in the water from the repeated dunking. But I was determined not to die.
The incident went on and on—it's so heart-poundingly stressful that Beneath the Surface begins with it. But it's just one anecdote about what one orca trainer went through once. As for what orcas go through? As Hargrove tells it:
[His] book is full of harrowing eyewitness allegations about the treatment of killer whales in captivity, including food deprivation ("The practice has been kept secret" because "it would not be good for business to say that the stars of the show were not given food in order to make them perform"), chronic stress ("Many were medicated for ulcers"), artificial insemination ("We used a small lubricated plastic tube—no thicker than a ballpoint pen but flexible—to figure out the pathways of her vagina"), incest (one female "was bred with her uncle... twice"), forcible separation of mothers and calves (one female "had been taken from her mother, then she had her first calf taken from her, and then she herself was removed from the side of her second calf"), and forcible impregnation of youths ("Females that in the wild would be too young to breed").
When I contacted SeaWorld about Hargrove's allegations, they told me Hargrove's statements are "purposefully misleading or demonstrably false."
According to the San Diego Union Tribune in June, "SeaWorld San Diego saw its attendance sink by 12 percent last year, making it the worst-performing of the top 20 theme parks in North America."
The Union Tribune went on to say: "Lagging attendance and revenues have been well-documented during the last year amid backlash from the critical documentary Blackfish. Since its release in 2013 and repeated airing on CNN, attendance has declined and companies such as Southwest Airlines and Mattel have severed corporate ties."
