Marineland owner Holer dead at 83

NIAGARA FALLS — John Holer, owner of the Niagara Falls amusement park Marineland, has died. He was 83.

His death on Saturday was confirmed by his longtime friend, Niagara Falls councillor Wayne Thomson, who’s also chair of Niagara Falls Tourism.

Thomson declined to comment out of respect for the Holer family, saying he would share his memories at Holer’s funeral. Its date has not been set.

The tourist attraction has been a key part of the Niagara Falls community for decades and is familiar to many through its commercial jingle, “Everyone Loves Marineland.” But not everyone loves the amusement park, which has for many years been embroiled in controversy. For years, animal activists have fought to have it shut down.

Marineland has always maintained its animals are well-treated and all allegations of abuse and mistreatment are not true.

Holer was born in 1935 in Maribor, Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia. He immigrated to Canada and landed in the Niagara region in the late 1950s and started a circus.

“I saw that a vast number of visitors were coming to Niagara Falls, and there was very little for them to do besides the actual falls,” Holer recalled in a 1983 interview.

Sensing an opportunity, he opened Marineland in 1963, with a few sea lions doing shows in a small pool and the park grew into a massive tourist attraction that included a killer whale, beluga whales, dolphins and land animals such as deer and bears.

In 1977, the U.S. government seized six bottlenose dolphins that Holer had caught in the Gulf of Mexico, and following the death of a beluga whale in 1999, arson threats were made against him.

In 2012, the Toronto Star wrote extensively about whistleblowers alleging mistreatment of animals — stories that included a killer whale that spent its final four years indoors, often alone in a small pool with little natural light; dolphin skin floating in the water; and a sea lion that suffered eye damage because of filth in the water.

The Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (OSPCA) did not charge Marineland, but ordered it to make changes, which the park complied with.