As many of you might know, the documentary ‘Blackfish’ was released early last year, 2013, which stirred up a lot of emotions among its viewers. Blackfish follows the stories of several orcas, who are held captive in various Seaworld arenas around the United States.
The orcas have histories of attacking their trainers however Seaworld has leaped to cover these stories up. This results in trainers working with animals that are considered dangerous, but because Seaworld has covered all of this up, the trainers have no knowledge of this and are putting themselves in dangerous situations. In the wild orcas have not been reported as dangerous, with zero cases of any orcas attacking humans.
However there have several incidents within the park of aggressive nature: “The park’s own records contain 600 pages of incident reports documenting dangerous and unanticipated orca behaviour with trainers, consisting of more than 100 incidents in which killer whales bit, rammed, lunged at, pulled, pinned, and swam aggressively with SeaWorld trainers, many of which led to human injuries”. From all of this, the question still remains, why would Seaworld be allowed to continue with this mistreatment of animals, resulting in human injury, or in some cases death? The reason is this; the orcas are multimillion-dollar animals, with hundreds if not thousands of people visiting the park daily. The profit made from these animals is huge, and selling these animals would be a major loss to the parks. The only way of preventing this kind of injustice from continuing is by not supporting the parks and boycotting them. That means doing everything you can to help these animals. Signing petitions, not visiting the parks, and encouraging people you know to not go to these parks. From this I decided to interview a few people about their opinions before watching the documentary and then after.