When
park staff do nothing to help a beached pilot whale, these people take action.
Last Saturday, when Carlo De Leonibus and his wife took their daughter, Cat, to SeaWorld Orlando for her 11th birthday, they expected yet another exciting afternoon of whale and dolphin watching. SeaWorld was a regular destination for the Tampa-area family, and it had inspired young Cat to become a dolphin trainer when she grew up. But after what they witnessed at Whale and Dolphin Stadium, Cat’s career plans have changed, and her family will not be returning to SeaWorld.
The show was a sort of
low-rent version of Cirque du Soleil starring dolphins,
short-finned pilot whales (members of the dolphin family), and tropical birds.
In the midst of the entertainment, one of the small whales leapt up onto the
“slide-out” area, where it became beached and unable to move back into the pool.
It was an ugly sight: The
whale rocked and writhed, vainly trying to push itself back to the water. Many
in the audience began shouting and even swearing, demanding that someone on
staff do something to assist the poor animal that was clearly in distress.
The crowd was extremely
furious. People were stomping their feet. Everyone wanted that dolphin to be
helped.They waited and waited, but to De Leonibus’ astonishment, no one
intervened, he tells TakePart in an exclusive interview. “The crowd
was extremely furious. People were stomping their feet. Everyone wanted that
dolphin to be helped,” De Leonibus recalls. “One man said he was going to go
protest outside the park’s gates.”
De Leonibus had seen
enough. The struggling pilot whale had been stuck for at least 10 minutes, he
estimates, “though my wife and daughter think it was more like 20 minutes.”
The distraught father went
to confront a nearby staffer, who “said everything was just fine, the dolphin
was just playing,” he recalls. The worker casually told him, “We teach them to
do that, to roll back in the water themselves.” But De Leonibus says, “He
wasn’t even looking at the animal.”
De Leonibus was stunned by
the ho-hum attitude of the staff. “They were laughing and smirking at our
concern,” he says. “They acted like this is what dolphins do all the time.”
That’s when he returned to
the stands, picked up his camera, and began recording the pathetic scene. His
video (above), complete with the cries of a freaked-out audience, is now
on YouTube with 18,413 views and counting.
“The dolphin! He’s stuck!”
someone can be heard screaming. As the screaming continued and the whale
floundered and flailed, the video shows other pilot whales make futile attempts
to liberate their marooned tank-mate.
A thunderstorm was
barreling in and the show was postponed. The crowd waited for it to pass.
Another 10 minutes or so elapsed before two trainers finally walked over and
pushed the whale back in the water, De Leonibus says. According to that
account, the animal spent about 20 to 30 minutes in a stranded position.
Meanwhile, young Cat was
growing more upset by the moment.
“I went up to where it was
and began screaming at a trainer to help the dolphin,” she tells TakePart. “He
said they leave them there to learn how to get down, but the dolphin was still
stuck after 30 minutes and people were screaming louder and harder. I felt so
bad for the dolphin, and kept pointing it out, but he wouldn’t listen. He told
my dad, ‘We can’t do anything about it.’ ”
The family did not wait out
the storm. They walked out, never to return. It left an indelible impact on the
birthday girl. “I wanted to train dolphins and work with them. They are my favorite
animals. They’re smart and seem really nice,” she says. But after this
incident, “I would not go work for SeaWorld.”
Cetaceans hauling
themselves onto slide-outs, unbidden by trainers, is nothing new; there are
other online videos of stuck animals. Captive whales and dolphins who beach
themselves for more than a few moments, especially pregnant females, can
develop health problems. I wrote about this in Death at SeaWorld, and you can witness a pregnant dolphin
voluntarily beaching herself here (also notice the difference
between this behavior and that of the desperate pilot whale De Leonibus
filmed).
“Whales getting stuck was a
regular but relatively infrequent occurrence when I worked there,” says
ex-trainer Jeff Ventre, an important figure in both Death at SeaWorld and
the documentary Blackfish. Slide-outs “are a bit
slippery, so the animals don’t damage their ventral surfaces, but this also
means they can slide too far up and get stuck, Ventre tells TakePart. “The
bottom line is that small cetaceans in captivity face unnatural health risks
from various causes, including pool design.”
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Courtney Vail, of Whale and
Dolphin Conservation (WDC), concurs. “It’s clear that SeaWorld teaches
slide-out behavior, for a variety of reasons: medical care, performances,
public interaction, etcetera, so we cannot say this is natural behavior,” she
tells TakePart. “Either they are conditioned to do this as a learned behavior,
or they’re showing their own free will in choosing to strand, either for
attention, boredom, or perhaps even to escape from aggressive poolmates. Either
way, it is byproduct of confinement and certainly has potential implications
for their health and welfare.”
When asked about the video
over email, SeaWorld spokesman Fred Jacobs responded, “Pilot whales come out on
the ledge all the time and always get back into the deeper water without any
problem. The younger animals are still inexperienced and sometimes it takes
them a bit longer.”
Jacobs wrote that the
animal in the video was a young pilot whale that was “saved by our animal
rescue team when it beached in South Florida.” He explains, “After it was
rescued and rehabilitated, it was deemed unreleasable by the federal government
and became a part of our collection.”
A commenter on the YouTube
video who seemed to have inside knowledge of SeaWorld wrote, “I never said it
was normal behavior, but… It’s just something they seem to like doing and if
they didn’t like it they wouldn’t do it so much.” When there’s lightning, the
person added, “trainers leave the stage which may be the reason it took so
long.”
If the lightning initially
kept the trainers from coming to the animal’s rescue, then SeaWorld seems to
have a double standard for staff and visitors, because the front of the metal
stadium seating is exposed to the elements, including where the De Leonibus
family sat.
WDC’s Vail does not want to
overstate the situation, but adds: “I’m encouraged that the public is clearly
focused on the plight of this one whale. They definitely know and feel
something isn’t right. Their distress mirrors the potential distress of
this whale, and speaks to our growing disaffection with captivity.”
For Cat and Carlo,
“disaffection” is putting it mildly.
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“I had no idea about
SeaWorld before this incident,” he says. “I thought it was a rescue
organization that took care of animals. I honestly thought they sent animals
back to the wild.”
After posting his video, De
Leonibus was contacted by DigitalJournal environmental
writer Elizabeth Batt. “She told me all about captivity, how these creatures in
shows are not released,” he says. “I had no idea SeaWorld employees could care so
little or show no concern. To work there and show no compassion for an animal
that was stranded and panicking is frightening to think about since they rely
on SeaWorld employees to take care of them.”
Batt tells TakePart,
“SeaWorld is supposedly a family-oriented business. What happened obviously
upset Cat tremendously, and they didn’t care. If they preach to kids, then they
should answer to kids.”
De Leonibus wishes he could
get his hefty entry fees back, “to donate it for a cause to save these animals and
help their natural habitat.” Meanwhile, he reaffirms, “my daughter no longer
wants to be a dolphin trainer at SeaWorld and wants to work with animals in
their own habitat,
like a marine biologist would.”
And, he adds, “If there are
any suggestions on careers where my daughter could work with dolphins outside
of captivity, I’d love to know, because after what we saw, that’s her future
goal.”
PatoAlf. Frente de Liberación Animal MDP,Psicología
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