Captive audience
Vancouver Aquarium under public siege for holding whales and dolphins in its tanks
For years, Vancouverites did not seem to mind that the Vanco uver Aquarium kept dolphins and belugas in its tanks. The city’s ranks of hardcore animal activists never stopped opposing what they have called a “whale jail” and an artifact of a “species-ist past,” but nobody seemed to be paying close attention.
Tellingly, last November, when a local yogi held a protest outside the attraction to oppose the Aquarium’s new Yoga with the Beluga Whales program (a violation, she said, of yoga’s principle of “interconnectedness with all beings”) only about 20 people showed up.
But then Blackfish made the rounds. The 2013 documentary chronicled the story of Tillikum, a captive SeaWorld orca that has killed three people, including a trainer at SeaLand, a now-shuttered Victoria, B.C., marine park.
Annelise Sorg with the Vancouver group No Whales In Captivity described watching all of Blackfish’s grimmest details with a “big stupid grin” on her face.
“Sitting in the theatre, I couldn’t help but think of the reaction that Blackfish will cause within the industry, the public and the government,” she wrote in an August, 2013, blog post.
Sure enough, the film had barely hit Netflix before bullhorn-wielding protesters started massing outside the Aquarium’s Stanley Park location.
“My personal view is that the Vancouver Aquarium should begin to phase out the holding of whales and dolphins in captivity,” Mayor Gregor Robertson said in an April statement.
Next week, the issue is expected to come to a head when the Vancouver Park Board convenes a special meeting to review the practice “of keeping captive cetaceans [whales, dolphins and porpoises] in Stanley Park.’’
If the board indeed places a kibosh on belugas and dol- phins, it could have dramatic consequences for a facility that is already well into a $100-million expansion that will include new pools for its beluga whales.
Previously, Vancouver Aquarium president and CEO John Nightingale has called the decision a “life and death matter,” but was less definitive while speaking to the National Post on Friday, saying “it’s entirely possible they might pass a bylaw doing something.”
But with the fate of Vancouver’s captive whales possibly hanging in the balance, the city has seen an all-out battle between animal activists and Vancouver’s premier attraction.
In the past few months, the increased pressure from activists has prompted the aquarium to step up security over fears that particularly militant animal activists could target the Stanley Park site.
“If somebody felt strongly that the animals are better off dead than in an aquarium; that’s our concern,” said Mr. Nightingale.
For years, the aquarium’s consistent response to anti-captivity activists has been the argument that their whales spark public interest in the environment, help fund aquarium-led rescues of injured B.C. marine life and provide a standing population of research specimens for whale biologists.
Just this week, Terrie Wil- liams, founder of the California-based Center for Ocean Health, wrote a letter of support crediting the Vancouver Aquarium with helping science to figure out the “basic physiology of whales.”
“I’ve worked with zoos and aquariums across the world – you have a jewel in what is sadly a very small network of forward-thinking, conservation-minded zoological facilities,” she wrote. “It is unimaginable that anyone would consider the Vancouver Aquarium team, a non-profit organization, as anything less than heroic.”
First opened in 1956, there is no denying the Vancouver Aquarium has had a checkered history of marine mammal care, most notably in 1964, when it became the first facility in the world to host a captive orca. Moby Doll, a male killer whale found near Saturna Island, was originally fated to be killed by an Aquarium sculptor to serve as an exhibit, but after being harpooned, the still-conscious animal was instead towed back to Vancouver harbour and put on display in a dry dock.
After three months, the injured whale — who had initially refused to eat — died of exhaustion from trying to stay afloat in the low-salinity harbour water.
The capture kicked off a worldwide industry for captive orcas that continues to this day, but the aquarium — as well as others in marine biology — continue to see Moby Doll’s doomed trip to Vancouver as a net positive for the overall plight of wild killer whales, who had previously been seen as vicious monsters.
Plenty of other captured wild an ima ls would meet similar fates as Moby Doll, including a group of six narwhals, b ut nowadays, the Vancouver Aquarium takes it as a point of pride that it was the world’s first marine mammal park to stop displaying animals captured from the wild.
The aquarium also phased out its captive orcas in 2001 and generally, it is largely devoid of any amusement park flair.
“People are carrying around pictures of killer whales, and we say we don’t have them, they carry around signs saying ‘ stop ripping wild families apart,’ and we pledged 18 years ago never to catch another animal from the wild,” said Mr. Nightingale.
Still, opponents maintain the root problem remains: Sentient marine mammals on display for human entertainment.
“To be quite blunt, what [the Vancouver Aquarium] really teaches children is that it’s OK to mistreat these animals,” Paul Spong, a whale biologist who began his career at the Aquarium, told the Vancouver Courier.
But as Mr. Nightingale told the National Post, “free the whales” arguments get murky once you start digging into the logistics.
After decades of domestic life, the aquarium’s cetaceans are essentially doomed if returned to the Pacific Ocean.
Or, the aquarium could simply wait until all of its cetaceans die, in which case the aquarium’s much-maligned expansion plans suddenly emerge as a good way to keep the animals comfortable in the 20-year interim.
“As they are all discovering, it’s complicated,” he said.