Cetacean Captivity

Why Free the Whales

The time has come to stop confining cetaceans in captivity.

• The basic reason is cetaceans are superior to us in intelligence. We would not confine humans so we should not confine whales.
• In the wild, cetaceans travel hundreds of miles a day. Confining them to a small cement pond is equivalent to wrapping a human in a body cast so they can not move for decades at a time. It is a form of torture.
• As can see in the picture in the top corner, cetacean captors are forcing cetaceans to breed, much the way slave owners chose the mating partners of their slaves. This is not something you should do to a species your intellectual superior.

Why Keep Whales in Captivity

Here are the reasons given by officials at the Vancouver Public Aquarium for keeping whales in captivity:

• It brings in more visitors and hence cash receipts.
• It teaches children about whales and the cash receipts they bring.
• We, the staff at the aquarium, are experts on what constitutes maltreatment of whales. Trust us. Besides we cannot afford tanks remotely close to simulating the wild.
• It lets us do research on whales more conveniently. This gives us legitimacy.
• Some whales are too sick or too acclimatised to captivity to be released into the wild. Since we will always have some whales in captivity, we should continue to capture new whales. We have to keep the facilities filled.

  Huh?

• It is just soft headed emotionalism to be concerned for the whales. They are not dying. They are fine. We cannot afford to do anything that other than what we are doing. Stop rocking the boat. Protesters are just people who like making trouble.

  This is not true. Female orcas live 90 years in the wild. About half of orcas captured die within 4 years.

• The whales are highly trained to co-operate. Therefore they must have no objections to their treatment. Whales never kill humans in the wild, but have a number of times attacked and even killed trainers. This is no evidence of their distress. These are just anomalies.

Note that all these reasons are benefits for humans, not benefits for the whales captured. It never occurs to their keepers to think of whales as intelligent individuals with a right to a pleasant life. They think of them as cattle whose only function is to serve man. The arguments for cetacean captivity are similar to those just to justify slavery. The arguments were only about the benefits to the slaveowners and considered the welfare of the slaves irrelevant.

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