and the birds go north again

June 4th - Strong Duck

No functioning “sea sanctuary” currently exists for cetaceans. No sea sanctuary is currently being utilised by dolphins or whales. If you "empty the tanks" there is no where for these animals to go, which is why we have two shutdown facilities with dolphins and whales living in limbo: Marineland Antibes and Marineland Ontario

"Tricks" are just learned behaviours, which the dolphin or whale only chooses to do because there is a reinforcing outcome for them. If the behaviour was uncomfortable or caused them pain, they simply don't have the incentive to do them.

Dolphins and whales in accredited facilities are not being "made to perform" or "starved". If that was the case, you'd be seeing it in their body condition and behaviour. There are facilities where outdated training methods are still used but these are not the places where Empty the Tanks are demonstrating in front of.

"Shows" are basically high energy exercise sessions put to music and the animals can always choose not to participate if they don't want to. You being entertained by an animal is not inherently unethical if their welfare is prioritised. The animals don't care whether a show is "educational" or not. Or if they're doing "natural" behaviours.

Dolphins and whales in human care are all individual animals with individual personalities, learning histories, genetic histories ect. There is no one size fits all solution to welfare.

Just "make the tanks bigger" or "put them in the ocean/sea sanctuary" are not viable or reasonable welfare solutions. And the Empty the Tanks organisers are not qualified to assess cetacean welfare in any meaningful way.

I have personally witnessed poor welfare in a sea pen habitat in bottlenose dolphins - welfare issues do not go away in a sea pen. In fact, sea pens create a lot of other stressors and uncontrollable environmental factors such as pollution/oil spills, weather/currents/tides ect.

If you have any questions or concerns about the welfare of cetaceans in human care, you're welcome to message me questions or have a chat to trainers and caretakers at your local zoological facility.

Genuinely we would not be working minimum wage jobs and sacrificing financial security to scrub buckets and be elbow deep in frozen fish at 5am if we didn't care about these animals.

“At least he died free” apparently also applies to whales that strand now.

These people will tout whales as these incredibly intelligent beings and then think that they’re stupid enough to strand while being healthy.

Sure, some healthy whales and dolphins strand due to storm surges, hunting techniques and misadventure. Or for social reasons, like mass strandings of pilot whales.

But it’s far more likely that a whale that strands is a whale that was either too weak to swim against the currents pushing them ashore or they chose to swim into shallow water. Because it is much safer to be in shallow, calmer waters than in the deep sea.

People have this idea of the deep ocean as this idyllic place. The sun beats down mercilessly out there - if you’re too weak to swim you’re too weak to dive. Depending on the ocean, it can be extremely choppy and hard to keep afloat in if you have no energy.

It’s also a very vulnerable place to be as a sick animal. Easy prey for pelagic sharks and killer whales. They might even start getting picked at by seabirds if they’re logging at the surface.

Not to mention this was a lone juvenile humpback without a social group, competition pod or nursery pod to keep him safe in numbers.

The ocean is beautiful but it is indifferent to you. It doesn’t care if you live or die, it won’t protect you if you’re out there.

Timmy didn’t care about the human concept of “freedom”. We can only assume that he was sick and dying and looking for a peaceful place to die. His vocalisations and rapid rasping exhales showed us he was stressed and sick. But the people who painted themselves as his saviours decided it meant he was happy. Because they were Saving him.

Because apparently he was too stupid to get himself stranded but somehow intelligent enough to be able to know what humans were and that their hands all over him and their loud and noisy barge and their cheers and laughter were good actually!

And I have no doubt that these people will keep telling themselves they did the Right Thing and that the experts and scientists were still wrong.

There’s this bizarre crossover between anti cap speak happening here. This idea that a stranded whale is “captive” and that they must be “freed.”

As if the whale themselves didn’t move to shallow waters to die. Or as if it wasn’t simply the natural ocean currents that pushed the weakened whale ashore.

Timmy had remnants of a gill net in her mouth, which would have made it very difficult for her to feed. The only forces that are to blame here are the dumping of fishing gear in our oceans that entangle and kill marine life.

The same force of nature that killed Timmy is ultimately the same that brought her to that sandbar. Yet these detractors of marine mammal science speak as if she was forced to strand by some intangible means.

That they had to “free” Timmy by dragging her back out into the open ocean, quite literally, because she didn’t know what was best for her. And the heroic humans saved her from what she had likely chosen to do.

Photo by Marc Mol / Caters News.

Hippos and oxpeckers generally have a symbiotic relationship in which the birds eat ticks and other types of parasites from the hippo’s body — the hippo gets free grooming while the bird gets free food.

Naked mole-rats:

One of my earliest forays into watercolour painting with realism, closely referencing photos. In fact, they were part of a challenge I set myself to create something with watercolours every day for the month of May in 2019!

A very pretty pair of peafowl!