End Killer Whale Captivity

The SeaWorld effect - when belugas learn to say “vroom”

“When she was two years old, a lonely orphan beluga began making friends with fishermen and tourists in Chedabucto Bay, Nova Scotia. As more and more people came to visit her during the summer months, she became something of a celebrity.

But as she also became habituated to humans and boats, she was injured several times by propellers. And instead of learning to be part of a beluga family, she was learning to sound like a propeller and to mimic the human children who were calling out to her.

We would see people exploiting the deep need these animals have for social interaction and for acoustic stimulation. As solitary orphans, they’re missing all the sounds of their families and all the socialization and communication with other beluga whales. And they find themselves in the relative silence of the waters. They are very chatty animals, and in their families there can be constant chatter. And with their big brains that are designed for communication, taking in acoustic information and making sense of it, and then interacting with their environment, they begin to seek out anything that will fill that emptiness – that void.

People often misunderstood her behavior. They got in the water to swim with her, even trying to ride her. And they were offering her food.

But one thing we learned was that Wilma wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the food. What she wanted was the interaction and companionship – like she’d have had with her family. She wanted the eye contact and the physical contact. She liked being touched, and even let people put their hands in her mouth.

And what we were seeing was that people took advantage of this and actually started to alter her behavior. These are free-ranging wild animals, but the human activity they encountered was confusingly chaotic and inconsistent, often creating frustration for the whale. Too often well-intentioned but misinformed people treated orphan belugas with the same kind of circus mindset that you see in captivity, which is totally inappropriate for wild whales. Instead of what these belugas would be learning from their real families, they learned behaviors in response to these surrogate human families

We met people who would be talking about them in trainer-speak and behaving that way as well. They’d been trying to control the whales and manipulate their behavior for their own entertainment. Wilma was inundated by thousands of tourists. She was just this one little whale out there by herself with people vying for her attention. The sad thing was that people would think Wilma was playing when sometimes she actually was warning them she wasn’t pleased with what was happening.

Read the rest of article here.

http://www.earthintransition.org/2012/09/when-belugas-learn-to-say-vrooom/

That is what these parks teach people - That it is ok to treat wild animals like the ones in captivity. That it is ok to jump in the water and swim with WILD animals, to talk to them in “trainer talk”, touch them and try to teach them tricks!. And look what happened, this whale was injured multiple times from being hit by boats. She needed relocation to try to find her kind again, not to become a tourist attraction!!.