'Long Gone Wild': Exploring the Rise of International Marine Parks

Aug 20, 2020

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."
-Helen Keller

Life After Blackfish

Before I went vegan, the documentary Blackfish rocked the world in 2013. Without even watching it and only hearing that the animals at marine parks were the victims of decades of abuse and trauma, I knew that I would never step foot in SeaWorld again. However, after years of decline, SeaWorld is in recovery and profits are on the rise again. Even worse, similar marine parks are becoming increasingly popular in other countries, which is where the Long Gone Wild story begins.

History

It wasn't until 1965 that the first orca, Namu, was taken into captivity at the Seattle Marine Aquarium. After the Marine Mammal Protection Act, an ironic name, passed in 1972, exempted SeaWorld "under an educational-display exclusion," captive orcas soon became popular. More orcas were captured, and the endless breeding process began.

The World's Loneliest Orcas

Lolita is an orca I've heard much about through PETA's tireless fight to free her. Captured at the age of four in 1970, she has been alone in the world's smallest orca tank at the Miami Seaquarium since 1980 after her tankmate Hugo committed suicide by repeatedly ramming his head into the tank walls. And she would have likely been killed in 2017 if Hurricane Irma hadn't shifted away from Miami because the aquarium simply left her there to, I suppose, fend for herself somehow; perhaps death would've been a blessing after forty years of forced isolation and fifty years of captivity.

Even in the States, MarineLand has a bad reputation with animal rights activists. Kiska, captured at age two in 1979, has been trapped there in solitude, giving birth to five calves that all perished. Though, like in the dairy industry, nearly all babies that survive are separated from their mothers and shipped to other parks. Lastly, we have Kshamenk, captured at age four in 1992, who resides alone in Argentinian park Mundo Marino.

Sentience & Intelligence

So, why does it matter if these orcas are alone? Do they even recognize what it means to be in captivity? Unfortunately for them, they do. Naturally, orcas travel over 100 miles per day, along with their pods. They, like humans, are social creatures and receive great satisfaction and relief from being around and interacting with their own kind.

In solitary confinement, desperate for any source of physical and mental stimulation, they often bite at bars and break their teeth or exhibit "logging," the act of simply floating still out of absolute boredom. Their dorsal fins collapse, and their skin bubbles from being trapped out in the sun all day. As far as intelligence goes, things in human brains that are considered to be markers of intelligence, like gray matter and wrinkles, are even more present in whales, leading scientists to believe that they are at least as mentally complex as humans.

What we have to realize is that though their tanks may look big to us, to an animal the size of an orca, it's like being trapped in a white padded room forever with absolutely no source of stimulation other than walking around in circles.

Orcas In Court

Much of this film follows various ways SeaWorld has finagled themselves out of lawsuits and gone back on their word. Perhaps their most egregious act of deceit was when they, along with the Florida Attractions Association, killed the Florida Orca Protection Act, despite the fact that the bill took words verbatim from SeaWorld's own 2016 statement vowing to end the orca program, including orca breeding, by 2019.

In SeaWorld's trial against OSHA, defender Eugene Scalia argued that there is inherent risk to working with SeaWorld's animals, like playing in the NFL, and performers should therefore be allowed in the water with the animals. However, NFL players train most of their lives for their work; receive constant medical care and supervision; have a means of communicating their physical and mental pain and can stop playing whenever they want; aren't playing against lions or bears that could just maul them to death on a whim; and, most importantly, the players are all choosing to potentially put their health at risk. Captive animals get no choice; they either perform willingly or are starved until they're desperate enough to perform just to get some food, which is virtually all the time. Marine park performers cannot control the animals and are completely at the mercy of the whales' temperament every time they get into the water. Luckily, the judges ruled in favor of OSHA, with only one, Brett Kavanaugh, dissenting.

Other Victims

The biggest problem I have with films like this is the focus on orcas (and occasionally dolphins). Though there's nothing wrong with caring about the orcas, and I certainly find it infuriating that we're still fighting this battle against marine parks, it seems hypocritical to me that the filmmakers hardly even mention other animals commonly used in marine parks, like sea lions and walruses and even birds. (Though there was a Canadian film released this year, The Walrus and the Whistleblower, about an ex-trainer's battle with MarineLand to release a walrus with whom he'd grown close, which I'm eager to watch.)

Additionally, they mentioned that it takes about 1,000 pounds of fish per day to feed nine whales, which amounts to approximately 1,000 lives lost daily to feed these exploited animals. And let's not forget that for every one pound of intended fish caught, there are about five pounds of bycatch, so that amounts to 5,000 pounds of other fishes, reptiles, mammals, and birds that are killed to feed only nine whales. To be clear, I'm not angry with orcas for existing and eating fishes -- that's just the circle of life -- but the excessive amount of unnecessary suffering inflicted on so many different creatures just so families can take their screaming children out to watch whales swim around a pool is despicable.

Across the Globe

For the international side of the problem, the film focuses primarily on the rapid expansion of marine parks in Russia and China. In 2015, the largest European marine park opened in Moscow. Three years later, the Russian government sanctioned the capture of 13 orcas to be sold to Chinese parks, using the same reasoning as the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act: educational purposes. However, there were no set regulations for how many animals could be captured and killed on this expedition. And when activists from Ocean Friends followed one of the ships, they were threatened with weapons, and afterward, the hunters destroyed their base camp in retribution.

The marine park industry is booming in China, and there are even fewer regulations for animal welfare. There are already 58 marine parks there, with even more in development, and we have no way to know exactly how many animals they're bringing in (and how many are dying). Animals are combined together in tanks that should be separate, such as belugas with bottlenose dolphins, and the trainers are even more poorly trained than those in western countries.

Hope For the Future

In 2019, Canada passed an incredible bill outlawing any and all breeding and holding of cetaceans in captivity. Though this does mean that whales and dolphins are still trapped in places like MarineLand until death or rescue, this also means all Canadian marine parks will be cetacean-free in the future. The biggest problem currently with captive cetaceans is that there's nowhere to put them once they're rescued, which allows SeaWorld to release odious ads saying that taking "them out of this environment would be inhumane and unwise." (Yeah, obviously, but that doesn't automatically mean that what they're doing is somehow humane.) The National Aquarium in Baltimore is currently working on creating a sanctuary for their dolphins, and the Whale Sanctuary Project is working on a large sanctuary that will be at least 300 times larger than the largest tank today; hopefully, once this is built, we can finally begin to rescue these creatures.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this was an enlightening film, and I hadn't watched one like it since Blackfish several years ago. It's unfortunate that it largely flew under the radar after its release in 2019, but at a cool 83 minutes and available for free through Amazon Prime, I'd say it's an informative watch for anyone interested in the myriad abuses animals face in marine parks and learning what we can all do to help.

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