Sasza

But just because someone is a “marine biologist” it does not mean that they’re an expert in the welfare and husbandry of marine mammals in human care.

It’s a highly specialised field with animals living significantly different conditions from their wild counterparts- entirely different challenges and stressors.

"With communist greetings" 😭😭 oh my God

"call it Miningrad or something else" fuckkk this is too good

The entirety of number 4. I love him I'm crying

MY FAVORITE PART: "All this creates an awkward situation for you, and especially for me"

The Ukrainian authorities gave official permission for the decommunization of the sculpture "Motherland" in Kyiv. A trident will appear on the shield, which is raised over the Ukrainian capital by a giant female figure, instead of the coat of arms of the Soviet Union." - BBC Russia

[...] she was surprised to discover that child labor was still legal in the fields; the more she learned about the hazards of tobacco, the less those fields seemed like a place for kids. A 2001 study found that one in four tobacco workers suffers from acute nicotine poisoning, or “green tobacco sickness.” Symptoms range from dizziness and vomiting to difficulty breathing and heart rate fluctuations requiring hospitalization. The pain can be so excruciating that some workers call it the “green monster.” A tobacco farmer in Kentucky said the sickness “can make you feel like you’re going to die,” a phrase I’ll hear others repeat.

These hazards have led countries like Russia and Kazakhstan to ban anyone under 18 from harvesting tobacco. The United States has played a role in such global efforts, recently spending at least $2.75 million to eliminate child tobacco labor in Malawi. But no such prohibition exists here. “Why do we ban cigarettes to minors,” Bailey asks me, “but somehow it’s perfectly OK to have 12-year-olds getting nicotine poisoning in the fields?” 

[...]

Child labor standards, too, are considerably weaker in agriculture, where children—then mostly black, now mostly brown—can begin work at the age of 12. Limits on work hours, put in place to ensure that jobs don’t interfere with study, are more permissive for field workers. A tobacco grower who hires a 12-year-old to work seventy-hour weeks in the summer is well within the letter of the law. 

No one knows how many children work in America’s tobacco fields each summer, helping to bring in our nation’s deadliest crop. When I put the question to Larry Wooten, president of the North Carolina Farm Bureau, he wasn’t willing to concede that such a workforce even exists. “It’s hocus-pocus,” he said. “I couldn’t drive you to a farm this afternoon in North Carolina where anyone under 16 is harvesting tobacco, unless it was the farmer’s children driving a tractor.” 

[...]

Oooh damn we got big feelings today. Interesting because I've discussed most of these issues and concerns on my blog before but clearly you haven't bothered to look. Or you did and that's what's upset you because it's uncomfortable to be wrong?

I don't expect you to change your mind but just for my followers and people who are interested in learning, let me break down the things you've said:

"Keeping orcas in captivity is animal cruelty because these highly intelligent apex predators swim up to 100 miles a day in the wild"

Orcas are socially intelligent, sure. Sometimes they swim up to 100 miles a day, but if they have all their needs met, they often won't swim such long distances. Travel is energetically expensive and it requires specific motivations to do so eg. finding food, avoiding stressors.

"Any concrete tank a tiny "bathtub" that causes extreme psychological distress and "zoochosis “"

I wouldn't call over 7 million gallons of water a bathtub. You can't dive and jump and swim fast in a bathtub - so it's an invalid comparison.

Is the "extreme psychological distress" in the room with us right now? Because I work in behaviour rehabilitation of animals experiencing chronic stress. Animals experiencing significant chronic stress won't eat very well, won't participate in learning/problem solving as their mental resources are taken up, they will regularly be unwell due to their immune systems being compromised and they may display behavioural shutdown as well. These are not behaviours that are baseline in captive orca populations.

Sánchez–Hernández P, Krasheninnikova A, Almunia J, Molina–Borja M. Social interaction analysis in captive orcas (Orcinus orca). Zoo Biology. 2019;38:323–333. https://doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21502

Santa, A., Kanda, K., Kako, T., Miyajima, M., & Adachi, I. (2024). Matching-to-Sample Task Training of a Killer Whale (Orcinus orca). Animals, 14(6), 821. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14060821

Almunia J, Lüke JP and Rosa F (2025) Vocal activity as a welfare indicator in killer whales in managed care. Front. Mar. Sci. 12:1595113. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1595113

What We Have Learned From Killer Whales in Managed Care

"Zoochosis" is a linguistically and scientifically invalid word that was made up by "Born Free" - an anti zoo organisation that is good at marketing without actually improving welfare outcomes for animals in zoos. It does not address the nuances of zoological management and basically chalks up all potential issues as inherent to the zoo environment. This is deeply counter productive to addressing welfare concerns.

"You can see the damage in their collapsed dorsal fins which happens to 100% of captive males but less than 1% in the wild"

But the females don't have dorsal fin collapse - so are only the males "suffering" then? Or could it be due to the simple fact that the male orca dorsal fin is very tall and heavy and orcas in human care are spending more time at the surface, therefore having less support of the water column?

Interestingly, it's not 100% of male orcas. Panghu, wild captured from Russian waters and now living in Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park, is 20 years old and still has an upright dorsal fin. Yet the facility is a lot smaller than SeaWorld's so perhaps it's also genetics related.

"Their broken teeth from biting metal bars out of pure frustration."

Biting at metal bars/gates is pretty rare but mouthing is also how all cetaceans explore their environment. Mouthing or ramming gates may happen from social frustration - like fencing fighting in dogs. They have very soft teeth enamel, so if they do mouth at anything hard, it'll affect their teeth. I've written up a post on teeth that you can find in my "cetacean welfare" tag.

"In these tanks their sensitive sonar constantly bounces off the walls creating an acoustic hell"

Incorrect. Cetaceans are perfectly capable of controlling their echolocation abilities and are not just firing off click trains at random. See below a spectrogram of recordings of dolphin echolocation in a tank vs a lagoon

(Source)

You can see that both animals are echolocating regularly and there was no major difference between dolphins in lagoons vs tanks, besides the snapping shrimp recorded in the lagoons.

Since we know that cetaceans are capable of modulating their click frequency and intensity, we'd see lower frequency and intensity in the tank if echolocation was causing any sort of distress to the animals.

Fun fact: Echolocation and signature whistles were both concepts that were discovered and studied in dolphins living in tanks.

AN EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION OF ECHOLOCATION BEHAVIOR IN THE PORPOISE, TURSIOPS TRUNCATUS (MONTAGU)

KENNETH S. NORRIS, JOHN H. PRESCOTT, PAUL V. ASA-DORIAN, and PAUL PERKINSThe Biological Bulletin 1961 120:2, 163-176

And those discoveries were able to be applied to wild dolphins. And we now know how acoustically sensitive these animals are to boat traffic, navy submarines and offshore oil drilling, which DOES actually cause significant impairments and communication issues in wild populations.

Stevens, P. E., Hill, H. M., & Bruck, J. N. (2021). Cetacean Acoustic Welfare in Wild and Managed-Care Settings: Gaps and Opportunities. Animals, 11(11), 3312. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11113312

Stevens, P. E., Allen, V., & Bruck, J. N. (2023). A Quieter Ocean: Experimentally Derived Differences in Attentive Responses of Tursiops truncatus to Anthropogenic Noise Playbacks before and during the COVID-19-Related Anthropause. Animals, 13(7), 1269. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13071269

"while they are forced to perform "tricks" for dead fish because they are kept hungry until they obey"

Just another blatantly incorrect assumption straight from the Blackfish playbook. While this WAS a technique used 40-50 years ago, it has not been implemented in facilities like SeaWorld in decades because it created dangerous and frustrated animals.

Animals are provided with their entire dietary intake regardless of "performance". You can see multiple times when orcas simply refuse to participate and trainers step back and cancel a show. They are still given all their food. They also don't always care to work for food because its so readily available - so trainers have to be creative and use other reinforcers like rubdowns, ice and gelatin.

"Separating them from their families with whom they stay for life in nature is traumatizing and leads to unnatural aggression and early death"

While the initial wild captures were undoubtedly traumatic - the orcas you see today are all part of matrilineal family groups, with some exceptions. But they have shown a lot of adaptability in their social groups and certainly not "unnatural aggression".

A good example of this is the Loro Parque orca group, which is by far the most unnatural hodgepodge of loosely and unrelated orca. Yet a study in 2019 revealed that agonistic ("aggressive) behaviours were between 1-2%

(Source)

"This isn't education or conservation it is exploitation for profit and forcing an emotional social being into a chlorinated cage for entertainment is the definition of abuse."

That's your opinion and you're entitled to that. I don't believe it is a factually informed opinion, as you don't seem to know that the chlorine levels in the orca pools are less than what is in our drinking water. It is mostly just filtered salt water.

I would also say that while we still don't have enough data to conclusively 100% support this, there is more research coming out now that is showing positive welfare states in cetacean species such as orcas and bottlenose dolphins. And if people are entertained by animals doing learned behaviours as part of their usual enrichment of the day and can be educated by that, I don't see that as a bad thing. Provided that the welfare of the animals is prioritised.

Unfortunately the rhetoric anon is applying here is not helpful to actually improving animal welfare. I noticed pretty much the entirety of this message is cut and paste talking points from the organisations that rely on you being convinced that orcas in human care are suffering so they can obtain financial and legal support.

So I would encourage anyone curious about cetacean welfare to diversify their sources and watch out for any social media post that gives you a strong feeling/reaction.

You can also check out this collection of papers based on data collected in one of the largest multi-instiution studies ever undertaken on cetaceans:

"Kaori Sakamoto saved Women's Figure Skating. She saved it. Because she was the shining star in the dark cloud of Beijing, and then she pushed every woman in the world to skate better. She pushed every woman in the world to jump higher, to jump further across the ice on their double Axels. And frankly, to be nicer to each other too. She sets the tone. She sets that tone we're talking about with the way they treat each other. I think her legacy is going to be so multifaceted, but the fact that she will be leaving this figure skating world a better place than what she found is amazing. Amazing." - Adam Rippon, Ashley Wagner and Sarah Hughes via The Runthrough podcast