FWD: Cetaceans in Captivity

[Guest guest]

This is a disturbing article which has recently been brought to my

attention. I would be interested to read a rebuttal. This is

particularly relevant to me at the moment as we in Hong Kong are

trying to decide how to stop our Ocean Park from pursuing their plan

to capture wild orcas in Indonesian waters. Ocean Park is trying to

justify this action by saying that the captured orcas will be

ambassadors for their species and will educate the people to care for

animals in the wild. Are we not united in our opposition to this idea?

John.

 

http://whales7.tripod.com/policies/white.html

 

Human Celebrities versus Animal Celebrities

by Benjamin White, Jr.

 

" The Cult of Animal Celebrity " , written by Paul Watson and published

by Merritt Clifton, puts forth recent context for defending the

captivity of marine mammals and opposes those that want them free: the

theory that many millions of dollars are going into helping " celebrity

animals " that could be spent better protecting wild populations.

 

The premise is false and is being used to defend Paul Watson's ongoing

funding by Steve Wynn of the Mirage Casino and Merritt Clifton's clear

allegiance with marine parks and aquaria. Three years ago I quit as

president of Sea Shepherd when Paul changed the policy of the group

toward captivity in order to appeal to Steve Wynn for funding. It

worked, Paul got $50,000 as a first installment in appreciation for

his backing off on the captivity issue and his trashing of the efforts

of myself, Lisa Lange and Peter Wallerstein to close down the Mirage's

captive dolphin tanks. I guess Sea Shepherd's motto could be changed

to " No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth unless the price is

right. "

 

Merritt Clifton, masquerading as the animal rights movement's

muckraking journalist, has made a career of late defending those that

make a living from captive animals and trying to marginalize those

that think zoos, circuses, vivisection labs and aquariums should be

abolished, not reformed.

 

Saying that there is too much fuss being made over " animals with

names " is a sly shorthand for referring to captive animals, they are

the only ones up close and personal enough to have been given names.

Paul and Merritt's arguments offer a false dichotomy: that one must

choose between helping named captive animals or wild unnamed animals.

Amazingly, Paul is using his hero status as a militant defender of

marine mammals to parrot the same arguments long used by the public

display industry. How wonderful it must be for Sea World, that has

virtually invented the world trade in marine mammals, to be defended

by the likes of Paul Watson and Merritt Clifton.

 

The job of those that presume to speak up for animals, it seems to me,

is to speak and act to stop animal suffering period, regardless of

where the animals are. One need not choose between helping animals in

the wild or in captivity, we obviously need to do both.

 

Paul writes, with his casual use for the truth, that the amount of

money raised for the cause of freeing marine mammals with names may

exceed $45 million a year. The use of the slippery word " may " gives

license for vast exaggeration. Yes, contributions to free these

creatures " may " exceed $45 million, but they don't. Having been

involved in all four of the efforts decried: the campaigns to Free

Willy, Free Lolita, Free Corky and Free Hondo, I can attest that the

amount is nowhere even close. The Free Willy campaign, headed up by

Earth Island Institute, was started with a grant from Warner Brothers

for two million dollars essentially to deal with an in-house problem:

Warner was coming out with Free Willy 2 and knew that if there was no

plan afoot to move Keiko from his tiny tank in Mexico City, they would

be raked over the coals. The entire budget for the tank being built to

house Keiko in Newport, Oregon is about 11 million. It will be used as

a stranding rehab facility once Keiko is gone. I personally opposed

the building of yet another tank and favored a sea pen in Nova Scotia

for Keiko, but there is not a shred of evidence that any of the money

going into this project was subtracted from any effort to save life on

the high seas.

 

All of the money for all of the other projects, to free the whales

Lolita, Corky and the sea lion Hondo tally up to far under a hundred

thousand dollars. The only reference anywhere to Free Hondo was on a

banner I tied to the side of the cage out in Puget Sound near Seattle

when I locked myself inside on February 1. Hondo had been caught in

the same cage a week earlier and was being held for execution by the

state Department of Fish and Wildlife. After my cage-sit, and the

resulting front page picture and article in the Seattle Times, state

officials announced that Hondo would no longer be killed because he

had become too much of a celebrity. He was released in June. I

consider one animal saved a tiny victory, whether named or not.

Contrary to Paul's assertion that Sea Shepherd is opposed to captures

from the wild, he was at the same time offering to capture the sea

lions for the National Marine Fisheries Service and transport them via

the Edward Abbey to California. This gave exactly the wrong message:

that it is the sea lions that are to blame for the steelhead trout

decline instead of the people that had driftnetted, deforested and

dammed the steelhead and salmon to oblivion.

 

What Paul is really expounding is the old finite funding pie argument,

that there is a limited amount of money going into animal protection

and more should go to what he once did so well: the interference with

the killing of sea mammals at sea. But even in this context it is

bizarre to defend marine parks and aquaria. For many years

representatives of this industry have attended the meetings of the

International Whaling Commission (IWC) and the Convention in Trade in

Endangered Species (CITES) with one purpose in mind: to prevent the

extension of protection from the great whales to the smaller

cetaceans. Any measures that would have protected small whales and

dolphins have been successfully blocked, enabling not only the ongoing

trade in these animals but their continued slaughter worldwide.

 

Paul's description of Sea World as having saved more animals in the

wild than all animal advocacy groups combined is both wildly

numerically inaccurate and reminiscent of Weyerheuser calling itself

the tree growing company. After having their corporate butt thrown out

of Washington state for killing four killer whales in capture nets and

trying to hide their bodies, Sea World went to Iki Island, Japan to

find a new source for entertainers. There they revived the waning

drive fishery by agreeing to take the prettiest of the dolphins and

pseudorcas off the hands of the fishermen for a handsome fee. They

describe this as a " rescue " because the fishermen slaughter all

dolphins not taken by the display industry. None of the thousands of

animals destroyed over the years by this industry funded slaughter

had, as far as I know, been given names.

 

It's embarrassing to hear Paul, one of the founders of Greenpeace,

credit the marine park industry with having caused the public's love

affair with marine mammals. That assumes the industry's primary

fallacious argument, that they educate in a positive direction. They

do not. They teach dominance: that might makes right. Every child

admitted is taught, through his parent's passive consent, that having

whales and dolphins against their will, away from their family, doing

tricks for our amusement, is all right. Paul also adopts the " it's a

jungle out there " defense, an old saw of the industry, to try to

pretend that captivity us for the victim's own good. Who among us

would choose permanent " protective custody " instead of facing the

rigors of freedom?

 

Paul laments that none of this attention focused on captive animals

has served to help whales and dolphins in the wild. That claim may

help in fundraising but it is not true. The killing of dolphins in

tuna nets worldwide, mainly as a result of an Earth Island campaign

and monitoring program, has dropped from hundreds of thousands a year

to about 3500, obviously, still 3500 too many. During the twenty years

Paul mentions, the killing of whales has gone down from tens of

thousands a year to hundreds. None of this steals from the urgency of

stopping the murder of those, but it is simply untrue to say the

movement to assist wild cetaceans, of which Paul has played a huge

part, has not swelled in parallel to the increase of compassion for

captive cetaceans.

 

While we're on the subject, why does Sea Shepherd only defend animals

on the high seas out of U.S. territory and only when the killing does

not have the sanction of the International Whaling Commission? Paul

has been highly vocal lately in opposing the Makah Indian Nation's

intention to begin killing whales again, but if they get IWC approval,

as now seems likely, he will do nothing to stop them. If a group's

mandate is to protect marine mammals, but they exclude those captive,

those in U.S. waters and those being killed under the approval of the

International Whaler's Club, it would seem their scope of

responsibility has shrunk almost to the size of Greenpeace's (that now

doesn't oppose the killing of 200,000 Canadian harp seals a year.)

 

Paul Watson and Merritt Clifton have joined the public display

industry. The posting by Paul that I am responding to is really the

second in a series, the first one was called Moral Relativity and

Marine World, Africa. In that article, Animal People editor Merritt

Clifton defends not only that amusement park's purchase of pseudorcas

from the Iki Island drive fishery but the expedition the company took

to Alaska to pay Inuits to kill mother walruses so their babies could

be taken into captivity.

 

Paul complains that divisiveness in the " movement " is becoming

increasingly negative and destructive and that we need to have peace

among all factions, by agreeing to disagree. The trouble with this

happy scenario is that the industry he and Merritt defend is

predicated on taking what doesn't belong to it and then lying to keep

it. Have we lost the capacity for telling right from wrong? My own

moral touchstone for determining if a situation is justifiable for an

animal is to consider if the same situation would be tolerable for a

person. Would Paul and Merritt justify centers where people were taken

against their will from their families, force fed until they submit,

kept in an environment far diminished from their natural home, have

children taken from their mothers routinely, and then forced through

food deprivation to perform until they die? To call this industry, as

Paul does, part of the animal protection movement or to define this

debate as one over " moral relativism " does not tell the truth or help

us into the future. To the degree that we, the people who supposedly

stand up for critters, acquiesce to animal suffering based on such

fuzzy and self serving logic, we surrender both our value to the

animals and our moral compass. By compromising with those that

deliberately cause suffering by stealing animals from their home and

family we become the protector of the jailer, abandoning the jailed.

 

Paul Watson's benefactor Steve Wynn promised (to me and many others)

that his casino would have dolphins only temporarily, serving as a

halfway house for dolphins taken from abusive facilities on their way

to freedom. Problem is, Steve forgot that freedom part. Then he acted

as point man for the industry and sued the National Marine Fisheries

Service, resulting in them losing purview over almost every aspect of

captivity. Due to his efforts, captive cetaceans are virtually

unprotected.

 

As far as I can see, there is very little division among animal rights

groups over this issue. Ten years ago, there were a bare handful of us

fighting for the abolition of whales in jails. Now it is embraced by

virtually every group, including such previously immovable rocks as

HSUS. We do not have a worsening rift in the movement but two people

with guilty consciences that want to solicit new members for their

Quisling Club. If Paul and Merritt want to denigrate those who work to

free wildlife and glorify those that work in institutions founded on

cruelty, that's fine, but they should admit they have acquired a

vested interest in the subject. They should say how much they have

received from the industry (Paul has garnered well over $100,000 from

Steve Wynn) instead of pretending they are just another objective

activist giving advice on strategy.

 

I have a bias. I am an abolitionist. I have sworn to the dolphins that

I will stop at nothing to save every life, to free every creature and

close every facility that I can. Like it or not, that's where I stand.

Paul and Merritt have a bias. They should own up to it.

 

On a personal note, I just can't understand why Paul doesn't get it. I

was captive with him after being arrested stopping the Canadian Seal

Hunt in 1983. We were both facing six years to life. We ended up in

adjoining cells for ten days. One day Paul was so depressed he stayed

on his bunk with his head covered up all day, talking to no one. He

was my best friend and I was worried about him. The next day he was

back in his typically wonderful good humor. But I've always wondered

why he feels no connection with the orca that floats listlessly

between performances, with nowhere to go, nothing to do, no stories to

tell, no fish to catch, no life to live. These creatures have been

sentenced to life imprisonment for no offense other than appealing to

people.

 

The fact that they have been labeled with stupid pet names (how

amazing their real names must be!) should not be used as a reason to

encourage their jailers by dismissing their suffering. Free Willy?

Free Hondo? Free Corky? Free Lolita? Yes! and Yaka, Bubble, Molly and

all the rest. The only way to save a species is one by one. Free them

all. And let's not let anyone, friend or foe, plant false doubt and

make us lose focus. Our enemies are real, they are those that cause

animal suffering, whether on the high seas or in our backyard.

 

What does one say to an old friend that chooses to switch sides and

speak for the enemy? Everyone makes mistakes. Come back to the fold.

Money can't buy you love (except on the sleazy side of town.)

 

Benjamin White, Jr.

3 August,1995