#pro-cap

As kids, most of us watched or heard of the movie Free Willy. What most people don’t realize however, is that Free Willy was based on a real Orca named Keiko. Keiko was taken from his family in Iceland when he was very young and then kept in a small, chlorinated and unshaded  pool at an amusement park in Mexico City. Fortunately for Keiko he was removed from the Mexican amusement park and placed in a rehabilitation facility at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. After six years Keiko was completely healed and released into the wild.  Keiko was lucky to have his happy ending, while many of the Orca’s still in captivity today, may never have theirs.

Imagine having to live in the average suburban swimming pool for the rest of your life, because that’s what the Orcas at Seaworld face. In order for the captive Orcas at Seaworld to swim their wild counterparts daily distance each day, they would have to swim the main show pool more than 1,400 times. Most Orcas don’t get this chance as they are kept in even smaller pools in the back. Even the Orcas that are lucky enough to be kept in the show pool would rather spend their time laying on the bottom of the pool or floating listlessly near the surface, a behavior called logging. This cramped environment leads to a condition called dorsal fin collapse, which is when the dorsal fin of an Orca falls over. This is caused by the Orcas spending too much time by the surface where gravity pushes down on their fins. While less than one percent of wild Orcas have dorsal fin collapse, 100% of captive Orcas have dorsal fin collapse.

Cramped conditions are not even the worst of what these captive cetaceans face. In the wild, Orcas, particularly males, spend their entire lives with their mothers and the rest of their family pod. Seaworld destroyed these natural relationships by tearing more than 25 calves away from their mothers and shipping them off to other parks or moving them to other pools. This has great repercussions as many of the calves that have been taken never learned how to be mothers. On top of the Orcas not learning to be mothers, female Orcas are bred at an incredibly young age, around age eight while wild Orcas start breeding around 14, this combination leads to the disastrous result of many mothers rejecting their calves. This rarely happens in the wild but many times at Seaworld female Orcas have given birth only to swim away from their calf or even shows aggression towards it.

Orcas in the wild eat a wide range of food, from sharks and seals to fish and seabirds. Captive Orcas however, eat dead fish, up to 83 pounds of gelatin, and a valium like drug. These Orcas need gelatin because the cetaceans mainly get their water from their food, but the fish Seaworld feeds their cetaceans are very low in water content. On top of this, the water the Orcas live in is too pristine for them to drink, causing them to need water supplements in the form of gelatin to prevent dehydration. Orcas are the ocean's top predator, in areas where they meet Great Whites, they kill Great Whites, so it’s no surprise that these captive animals can get aggressive. To combat this Seaworld gives their Orcas a valium like drug to help curb their aggressive tendencies and cure their depression, as some captive cetaceans have tried to commit suicide by throwing themselves over the sides of their tanks. Any animal that needs drugs to be safe around humans in captivity, should not be in captivity.