Not a tub toy. Storage in bathtub not recommended:
I went to Sea World once, and I never forgot it. Unless you have seen it firsthand, you cannot believe how small the tank is which holds the gigantic orcas.
What's shocking is that more people aren't killed by captive orcas.
Look at the whale below:
Look at how his dorsal fin droops from being in captivity. I noticed that the orca from yesterday even had such a curvature in his fluke that it actually looked oval-shaped. I've never seen that before.To release them would almost certainly be a death sentence, they say.
To keep them captive already seems like one.
The orca they call "Tilli" was captured off Iceland in 1983, probably as a young juvenile. Stripped away from his pod, he was housed in a tiny enclosure and his main function was as stud. He has sired 17 calves, 10 of which are still alive. He was never social (unheard of for orcas) and always displayed stress. If you want to kill a few minutes, check out this whale's "MySpace" profile, last updated back in April. Every bit of it, from his "favorite movies" to the information about him being a stud now seems tragically ironic.
Don't patronize theme parks that hold captive killer whales. They will only make you feel terrible. These animals are not toys. They are not cute. They are not friendly. They do not love us, and they certainly don't love their miserable lives.
If you have a burning desire to go to a theme park, make it Disney World or Epcot, where the entertainment is human and the indentured servitude is self-inflicted. (See, that there was a dig on WDW employment practices...)
Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.
-Pope Benedict XVI
His Holiness rejoices to know that the object of your Society is in perfect accord with the doctrine which the Church has always taught and the Saints have always followed, leaving us innumerable beautiful examples of compassion and tenderness. It is for them [priests of the Church] nobly to train souls in sentiments of enlightened gentleness and fostering care and guidance, so that they may offer to the animals refuge from every suspicion of roughness, cruelty or barbarism, and lead men to understand from the beauty of creation something of the infinite perfection of the Creator.
-Pope Benedict XV to the head of the Italian SPCA, 1915-Pope John XXIII
All creatures are created from the same paternal heartbeat of God. Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission — to be of service to them whenever they require it.
-St. Francis of Assisi
If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man.
-St. Francis of Assisi
All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?
-Buddha
You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them.
-Malcolm Forbes
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
-M.K. Ghandi
Since an animal's natural life is a gift from God, it follows that God's right is violated when the life of his creatures is perverted. ... The de-beaked hen in a battery cage is more than a moral crime, it is a living sign of our failure to recognize the blessing of God in creation.
-Rev. Andrew Lindzey
The wild, cruel animal is not behind the bars of a cage. He is in front of it.
-Axel Munthe
3 comments:
so sad........
totally agree. Orcas are extremely social, highly intelligent animals, but they can't be squeezed into a certain social framework. Tillikum was taken from his social network, his pod, when he was two. They don't re-establish pods just because they are put in a tank with two other orcas.
It really is a miracle more of them don't kill their trainers. And I would never go to a park that exhibited one.
They are called KILLER whales for a reason. I've seen them in the wild - fabulous! I've seen them in tanks - so sad.
Post a Comment