Maybe it’s time for an aquarium exit strategy

Iwas at the Vancouver Aquarium a few years back. It was August, the facility itself was packed and all seats around the whale tank were taken 20 minutes before showtime.

As it turned out, the show was mostly underwhelming — far more educational than entertaining.

A dutiful young woman with a microphone hectored the crowd on matters of the environment, with an emphasis on the caretaking of our oceans.

Every so often, after making a point about the frail and delicate interconnectedness of nature, the young woman with the microphone would instruct the animal to do something benign like wave a flipper.

I can tell you what the audience was there to see, and it wasn’t a waving flipper.

The audience wanted to see a belly flop, or the whale equivalent of such a spectacle. They wanted to watch as a couple thousand pounds of mammal threw itself entirely out of the water, only to return to its bathysphere with a splash that would wash away Lumbermen’s Arch were it not secured to the ground. Didn’t happen. The biggest splash of the show wasn’t a splash at all. It was as though all the kids in the front row had an allergy to sea water.

In the end, I can’t say I was disappointed by this. Animals in captivity performing for my entertainment has long felt unseemly to me.

In fact, the only reason I was in the audience was my granddaughter, who, like me, in the end found the entire show rather underwhelming.

Why in these enlightened times do we continue to keep whales in thimbles?

I was on theprovince.com reading the latest on the tragic death of the two belugas at the aquarium, when I noticed a poll on the site asking readers if cetaceans should be kept in captivity. Not surprisingly — at least, not surprisingly to me — the results were trending heavily toward “no.”

I returned to the story and read how Sarah Kirby-Yung, the chair of the Vancouver park board, wants a plebiscite in the 2018 municipal election on the issue of cetaceans at the aquarium. I fully support this idea, but wonder, at the same time, if it goes far enough.

Perhaps it’s time for us to give serious consideration to an exit strategy for the aquarium, much as we did years ago for the Stanley Park zoo.

Defenders of the aquarium, and that includes many good, hard-working, nature-loving people, will argue the institution’s merits as a refuge for endangered marine life, as well as its merits as an institution of education.

But it feels to me like that is little more than the lipstick of do-goodery.

Rehabilitation and education are noble objectives, but let’s figure out a way to achieve these goals with the long-term objective of keeping the ocean in the ocean.