Professor Leslie Similly
English 1213
June 18, 2017
Captive Killer Whales There are currently a total of sixty-two orcas held in captivity as of May 2017. Thirty-four of these whales were born in captivity and twenty-eight of them were captured from the wild (Robles). The popular marine park, SeaWorld, is home to the majority of these captive Killer Whales. Even though the park has announced that its days of breeding the Orcas is over, the whales are still mentally and physically abused as a result of ---. In 2013, a now popular documentary, was released known as “Blackfish.” This created the present issue of what is right for the whales and many other animals in captivity. Blackfish was just the beginning of this acknowledgment …show more content…
This only helps to show why the orcinus orca belongs in the wild.] Every pod of whales is diverse from each location. If you were to take them out of the living that they were normally in, their whole life would change. Humans take away these whales rights and torture them for their own entertainment purposes. When training the whales to do tricks for their shows they do not feed them until they perform the given task with no mistakes. In some cases none of the whales were fed unless each of them performed correctly. This also caused aggression between the whales. hey were not fed unless they went into smaller pools at night either. This causes them to be in an even tighter space for multiple hours of the day creating more aggression that they cannot escape. Often the whales scrape their teeth along each other because of their constant stress (Blackfish). Captivity completely takes away their freedom and forces them to become slaves. As people, we do not understand the needs these animals have and we definitely have not learned anything about them in the past fifty years of having them in captivity.
EDUCATION
Keeping the Orcas in captivity provides the public to get a closer look at their lifestyle and day to day activity. People most likely wouldn’t have the opportunities to see them otherwise, especially not in their natural habitat. Some killer whales were originally brought into captivity for research reasons even though more precise data could be collected from those in the wild since captive whales behaviors do not resemble those of the wild orcas.