SeaWorld taught us about marine life, which is why it got in so much trouble
After years of pressure, the park has said it will stop breeding orcas
SeaWorld’s CEO said Thursday that the company would no longer breed orcas in captivity, responding to intense pressure from animal rights groups and the public.
The move comes after a series of PR troubles, including the recent admission that it ordered an employee to spy on animal rights activists protesting its captive orca program.
Sending a spy to infiltrate PETA seems like a desperate move. But the company is facing an existential crisis that goes back to its roots. It was SeaWorld’s founders who, in the 1960s, aimed to educate Americans about the amazing and varied life of the oceans — and it’s likely the awareness they helped to create led to the company’s current troubles.
In the past few years, SeaWorld has had to fend off accusations that its captive orca program cruelly confines the wild, highly intelligent animals — and has watched its stock tumble in the process. Protests against the company have spiked, thanks in part to the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which essentially blames SeaWorld for turning one of its star orcas, Tilikum, into a crazed, captive murder. (Tilikum is linked to three human deaths, including a SeaWorld trainer.)
The company’s troubles began long before Blackfish debuted. SeaWorld launched in 1964, the brainchild of a group of fraternity brothers from UCLA who wanted to compete with theme parks in Los Angeles, 100 miles to the north of SeaWorld’s eventual San Diego home.
The founders had some semi-insane-seeming (and, from a marine biologist’s standpoint, wildly uninformed) ideas about what the park would offer: porpoise races, harnessed sea lions towing boats and a rookery of penguins doing military drills on the back of a whale named Sniffles.
SeaWorld was an immediate hit, but it wasn’t until the park debuted its first orca in 1965 that it hit on its most lucrative and popular franchise: Shamu, the “killer whale.”
Caught off the coast of Canada by whale hunters, Shamu was sold to SeaWorld for $70,000. The charismatic orca wowed audiences, sending ticket sales upward — and triggering an orca gold rush.
For the next several years whale hunters pursued orcas off the northwestern coast of Canada, netting baby whales that were often separated from their mothers. Some witnesses to the mass nettings of orca pods have recalled hearing the whales “scream” as they were taken captive and cut off from their families.
Soon, the public caught wind of orca hunting. Incensed, animal rights and environmental groups pushed Congress to ban the capture of marine mammals in 1972. But the law created an exception for mammals caught for educational purposes. Hundreds were captured through this loophole and sent to marine parks around the globe, including SeaWorld. (Eventually, all orca hunting was banned in the Pacific Northwest, sending whale hunters to other waters, mostly around Iceland.)
SeaWorld has long defended its orca program, hewing to the notions of its founders. “People aren’t aware that the oceans produce more than 50% of the Earth’s oxygen. Our company is about developing this awareness,” said co-founder Milton Shedd. “The ocean is something we live and breathe.”
In fact, when SeaWorld started few Americans had any idea that the oceans contained a vast world of marine wonders. SeaWorld can be credited, at least in part, for changing that — and, perhaps, for creating the very awareness of the ocean’s creatures that has led to a groundswell of criticism against its practices.
In an Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times Thursday, SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby said as much: “When the first SeaWorld Park opened in 1964, orcas, or killer whales, were not universally loved, to put it mildly. Instead, they were feared, hated and even hunted. Half a century later, orcas are among the most popular marine mammals on the planet. One reason: People came to SeaWorld and learned about orcas up close.”
Last year, the state of California banned captive orca breeding, which SeaWorld said will effectively shutter its orca program. No new orcas would eventually mean no dazzling orca shows, the company reasoned. (The company sued the state to overturn the ban.)
In response to the criticism, the company said it would change some of its practices, including the introduction of new, more natural tanks for its orcas. But now it’s said it will stop its breeding program and orca shows altogether. Instead, SeaWorld said, it will focus its energies “on rescue operations — so that the thousands of stranded marine mammals like dolphins and sea lions that cannot be released back to the wild will have a place to go,” Manby wrote.
That means, when the last of SeaWorld’s orcas die, the public won’t be able to see them up close, which, somewhat ironically, could help SeaWorld regain some measure of popularity. It will also mean, in a decade or so, if people want to see these magnificent creatures, they may have to venture beyond SeaWorld’s very, very big fishbowls and into the orcas’ wild ocean home — an increasingly inhospitable place.
Manby, in explaining SeaWorld’s latest move, noted that hundreds of species go extinct each year, and that some scientists predict 50% of large mammals will vanish within 100 years.
“In this impending crisis,” he wrote, with a last gasp of defense, “the real enemies of wildlife are poaching, pollution, unsustainable human development and man-made disasters such as oil spills — not zoos and aquariums.”
