Moscow agrees to free jailed whales
Russia pledged yesterday to release scores of whales that have been held captive for months in cramped enclosures off its Pacific coast.
Photographs of the 11 orcas and 87 beluga whales languishing in tiny pens, dubbed ‘‘whale jails’’ by environmental activists, prompted an international outcry when they were first published in November. Some of the whales have been held in the enclosures in a bay near the city of Nakhodka, in Russia’s far eastern region, since July.
The whales were captured by local companies that planned to sell them to Chinese oceanariums. One whale can fetch up to $12 million.
An online petition to free the whales, shared on social media by the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, gathered almost 1.5 million signatures. The actress Pamela Anderson appealed to President Vladimir Putin to intervene.
The Kremlin responded that the mammals were being held in cruel conditions but that it would be difficult to release them into the wild without harming them.
The decision to free the whales coincided with a visit to their pens by Jean-Michel Cousteau, an oceanographer who is the son of the late marine expert Jacques Cousteau.
‘‘An official decision has been taken to release all the animals into the wild,’’ Oleg Kozhemyako, the regional governor, said. ‘‘Scientists from Cousteau’s team and Russian scientists will decide when and which animals to release.’’ He said that the authorities would initially release the whales into a rehabilitation facility that would replicate natural conditions while allowing scientists to monitor them. He said the creatures would be released in phases from next month or June.