Orcas In Captivity Essay

Navarrete 1 When most people are told to think of a whale, they do not immediately think of a whale swimming in the ocean with the rest of it’s pod. Instead, they usually imagine a whale inside a compact glass tank or performing in front of a huge crowd of people who are on vacation. Killer and Orca whales have been found in captivity since the early nineteen sixties and are still found in captivity to this day.
Although many of these amusement park and aquarium visitors would agree that these shows and displays are entertaining, they would think otherwise of the attractions if they were aware of the methods in which the very same whales are captured from their own homes in the wild. Although there are many methods to capturing whales in the modern world they all involve the same simple technique: herding them into an oversized net. Usually they are herded into the nets by using explosives, speedboats and other devices to scare them into the nets. From …show more content…
SeaWorld California alone has ten whales in captivity which amounts to approximately twenty percent of the remaining whales in captivity in the world. According to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, at least forty-four whales have died at SeaWorld’s amusement parks alone.(The Fate Of Captive Orcas in 2014)
Another major statistic that show the effects of the harsh living conditions of whales in captivity is the differences in the life spans between whales in captivity and whales in the wild. SeaWorld has claimed that the average life expectancy for a female is thirty years while it the average male lives for just nineteen years. This information was gathered by SeaWorld from a paper that studied whales in the Pacific NorthWest under the most unfavorable