Say ‘No’ To Jail Tanks At Marineland And SeaWorld – Whales Belong In The Ocean

By Doug Draper

Beyond the sandy dunes lining the northeastern shores of the Cape Cod community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is one of the most fertile areas for marin

Humpback whale off coast of Cape Cod's Provincetown. This Photos and others below courtesy of the Dollphin Fleet of Provincetown.

e life in the coastal waters of the North Atlantic.

This 842-square miles of ocean – known since its designation by an act of U.S. Congress in 1992 as the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary – is still thankfully host to Humpback, Minke, Finback and other species of whales, and to sharks, seals, porpoises and tuna. On a good day of sailing on these waters, a person may enjoy the spectacle of dozens, if not hundreds of dolphins dancing in the boat’s wake.

Thanks to the Dolphin Fleet of Provincetown – a company of boats that, in concert with marine experts like Carole Carlson and others from the Center for Coastal Studies, my family and others have enjoyed the experience of viewing these wondrous beings in their natural habitat now for more than 30 years. I can still remember taking my daughter Sarah out on one of these excursions a good 15 years ago when she was only five-years old, and watching her eyes turn wide as boat cut off its engines and all we could hear was the sound of water lapping against the bow as a female Humpback and her calf glided by.

Since then, this is the only way our daughter has experienced these great creatures. She has never expressed any desire to go to SeaWorld or Marineland, and my wife Mary and I have never had any desire to take her there. And I don’t mind telling you, I am proud of that as the tired old debate of whether whales and other marines mammals comes up again.

With the recent death of Dawn Brancheau, a trainer at a SeaWorld amusement park in Florida, where a whale pulled her down into the cement tank where he was imprisoned until she drowned, the debate has surfaced once again in the media, including on CNN’s Larry King Live, on whether these magnificants mammals should be kept in captivity. Some have even argued that this particular whale, named Tilikum and reportedly involved in at least two other human deaths during its many years of captivity, should pay the ultimate price itself.

But let’s use some reasonable sense here.

If you chose to wander into to a pride of lions on a safari excursion, for example, or move into some fragmented little node of vanity home somewhere in the woods in B.C. and California, intruding into what little is left of the territory for wolves or cougars or bears on this continent, and one of these animals takes a look at you and thinks ‘food’ or gets startled when your ride around a corner on your mountain bike and thinks ‘danger’, and rips you apart, why is the mainstream media so quick to brand the animal as a “killers” and all but celebrate its destruction?

Before assigning that kind of motive to them, which smacks of something like ‘cold-blooded’ or ‘psychotic’, maybe – just maybe – we should stop and consider the possibility that of all the creatures on this planet, none have killed in larger numbers as we humans, who pride ourselves in being so rational. If you don’t believe that, let me just refer to World Wars One and Two, no end of human-induced famines and genocides over the last 50 years, and the killing via everything from bullets and missils and suicide bombs just goes on and on.

I rest my case and the last thing I’m going to worry about on this planet is a “killer tiger” or a “killer whale.” Given our history, I’m far more concerned about what next we humans are going to do.

And that brings me back to the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, where the responsible people of the Dolphin Fleet there (and in case anyone is wondering, I’m not advertising for these people nor would I accept free tickets from them for a story like this or suggest that all whale-watching outfits are as responsible as these folks are when it comes to placing the welfare of the animals ahead of getting too close or crowding them) take you out on a respectful journey to a world of where you can encounter these magnificent creatures on their terms.

I was an environment reporter in this region for the once-independent St. Catharines Standard from 1979 to the late 1990s, and I often wrote commentaries against the argument made by amusement parks like Marineland and SeaWorld that they provide opportunities for people to get close to these animals and learn something meaningful about these animals.

My question to them and, unfortunately to far too many elementary and secondary school teachers that have taken their students on trips to these places over the years on some grounds that it is an educational experience, what do people really learn when you’ve got an animal in tub of chlorinated water that would normally swim hundreds of miles a day in the open seas?

Are we simply embedding the old belief so many of us have grown up with about humans having “dominion” over other living creatures to the point of exploiting them for our amusement? Or are some of us hopefully learning, as Ric O’Barry, a former trainer of dolphins that performed on a 1960s TV show ‘Flipper’, that “in a world where so much that is wild and free has already been lost to us, we must leave these beautiful mammals free to swim as they will and must.”

“They do us no harm and wish us none,” concludes O’Barry, “and we should let them alone.”

As Dan Wilson, a Niagara resident and long-time advocate for animals put it so well in an article posted on Niagara At Large earlier this March (still available for reading by scrolling down the posts on NAL’s front page), the owners of Marineland and SeaWorld aren’t the agents who are most to blame here. “They are simply trying to make a buck,” he wrote, and that is true. It is the hordes of us who continue to frequent these places that have to ask ourselves why.

I drive by the Marineland parking lot on any average day in the spring, summer and fall, and the parking lot is full with line-ups of families voting with their wallets against ‘bleeding hearts’ (the owner of the Marineland facility often took to calling us ‘kooks’) like O’Barry, Wilson and Draper have to say.

We can argue all we want that there are opportunities for all of us, for about the same price it costs per person to go through the gates of one of these amusement parks, to view these mammals in their natural habitat. It apparently matters not that you can probably learn more about them viewing a wildlife documentary on TV.
I have come to the conclusion that it is unlikely we humans will ever change the dominant and aggressive attitude we have toward other animals we share this planet with in my lifetime.

If you have thoughts on this subject, please share them in the comment boxes below. You can also find out more about the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary by clicking on  http://stellwagen.noaa.gov   and the Dolphin Fleet in Provincetown by clicking on www.whalewatch.com.

(Please click on www.niagaraatlarge.com for Niagara At Large and more news and commentary on this and other matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)