Imagine being taken from your family and kept in a tiny room – for the rest of your life. Why? So you could be put on display for ‘entertainment’, and even made to perform.
This is a reflection of the sad experience of many animals kept captive in marine parks and aquariums in Australia, and around the world.
Dolphins and seals forced to perform unnatural ‘tricks’… Sharks forced to swim in endless circles in crowded tanks… Baby orca calves separated from their distressed mothers and sold to other marine parks. Sadly, animals in marine parks never have the freedom to express the full range of their natural behaviours.
There are many tragic stories from marine parks of family-oriented animals like orcas and dolphins being separated and sent to different parks. The eye-opening documentary Blackfish exposed the suffering that mother orcas – who would usually spend their entire lives with their calves – experience when they are separated.