Nate Speech

Nate Dutch

Logsdon Speech

          Hello, fellow classmates. As the youngest of three brothers, things never really went my way. Although now that the other two are in the real world things are pretty great, but that’s a topic for another time. Anyways it seemed like I never got my fair say but no time was my opinion ever as disregarded as in the topic of family vacations. Orlando was a favorite destination for my family, but we never did Orlando the right way. We’d take a brief stop at Disney world for 2 days, a day at Universal, and then 4 days at SeaWorld. Let me say that gain. 4 days at SeaWorld! You can exhaust every interesting attraction there in about 2 hours and then you’re stuck watching the (god damn) penguin show. But we’d never actually do any other attractions but watch Shamu’s Fun Time Friend Show. I never really got the appeal of watching animals do tricks, but it apparently brought tears to my parents’ eyes. Today, it brings tears to my eyes for a different reason. Because Shamu and his fun-time friends are not happy and are a danger to everyone around them. The unethicality of whale shows, the problems faced in captivity, and the threat of human loss all warrant the release of Orca whales back into the Ocean.

          First, let me interrupt this speech to first present you a brilliant idea I had for a business. How about we steal children from their mothers and chain them up in dark areas and then use them for entertainment. What could go wrong? I really hope you guys know me enough to know that I’m just kidding. But in reality this is no joke. Replace the word children in the previous sentence with baby Orca whales and you have the business plan for SeaWorld. The treatment of killer whales is far from humane in almost all Orca whales show parks. In the 2013 documentary Blackfish, the holding tanks for killer are shown and they are depressing. One park called SeaLand boasted a tank that was 26 feet in diameter and 20 feet in depth holding 3 Orcas. An can be as small as 20 by 12 feet. The average adult Orca whale is about 28 feet long. Imagine being crammed into a bathtub with a stranger and being asked to live there. That’s just wrong. According to Blackfish, Orca’s in the wild swim around 100 miles every day. Needless to say, they don’t swim a hundred miles in their tanks at SeaWorld. The concept of using them for entertainment is just wrong too. This is an intelligent open ocean predator, not a parrot.  Even many of SeaWorld’s trainers, like Pirtle, have voiced their concerns about using sentient animals to do tricks for an audience. But what’s most wrong is that baby Orcas get separated from their mothers. Killer whales have an amygdala, which is the brains seat of emotion, that is even larger than humans relative to the rest of the brain. They may even experience more passionate feelings than humans. They are emotional animals for sure, and the footage I’ve seen shows that they often never recover from the loss of family.

          Pirtle had some very admirable points, but she also claimed that Orcas were no less healthy in captivity than they are in the wild. Sorry Bridgette, but you are way off. Killer Controversy: Why Orcas Should No Longer Be Kept in Captivity, a report on the subject revealed that Wild Orcas lived on average 31 years for males and 46 years for females. Their captive counterparts, they rarely make it past their late teens or early twenties. Only 2 captive females have ever surpassed the age of 40 and no male has lived past 35. In a paper published in Marine Mammal Science researchers discovered that only 27% of captive Killer Whales live until they are 15 as opposed to an estimated 80% in the wild. Also, many sad deficiencies and injuries have been found among captive Orcas suggesting poor health. In captivity, 100% of male Orcas have a collapsed dorsal fin that flops to one side or the other. This was claimed to just be genetic and non-important by SeaWorld but the same collapsed dorsal fin is a rare find in the wild. Also many whales in captivity are found bleeding from teeth marks due to a form of fighting that is the result of being packed into small spaces together. So any way you slice cake, Orca whales are definitely worse off when you shove them in tiny pens.

          Now, I would like to appeal to those of you that don’t care about animal rights. If you don’t care about Shamu then please care about all the people he’s murdered. According to Killer Controversy there has not ever been a recorded instance of an Orca whale killing a human in the wild. There a 4 deaths on record of humans interacting with amusement park whales. Blackfish went in detail on these deaths. 1 took place at SeaLand where a trainer was dragged down and drowned by 3 Orca whales. One of these whales, named Tilikum, was then sent to SeaWorld. He then proceeded to drown a member of the public who snuck back into the enclosure at night. His final act was to drown his head trainer who had been with him for 11 years. Tilikum still does shows today. No one for sure knows why these drownings occur. It could be pent up stress from being in the enclosure. It could be that they thought they were playing. One thing is for sure though and that’s that Orca whales are complicated and dangerous animals. Like I said before, Shamu is an open ocean predator, not Fluffy the dog.

          Well I guess you could say one good thing came of all the terrible treatment. Now when my family goes to Orlando, we go to Disney World for 6 days and that’s definitely a win. But  every time I’m in Orlando I can’t help to think about how sick the treatment of Orcas is, how sad the differences are in health between wild and captive Orcas, and how many more people will die before people will do what needs to be done. So even if you heard all of this and don’t care I still urge you not to go to SeaWorld. If not for the whales, at least don’t go because you could go to Disney instead.