PETA Statement re SeaWorld Abu Dhabi Opening

Below, please see the following statement from PETA Senior Vice President Jason Baker in response to the opening of a SeaWorld park in Abu Dhabi:

While the world has started to reject exploitative animal displays – a marine park in China sent captive beluga whales to a sanctuary, facilities in the US plan to send a captive orca and several dolphins to sanctuaries, and governments worldwide have banned the practice of keeping cetaceans in captivity – SeaWorld has shipped dozens of dolphins, harbour seals, and California sea lions halfway around the world on a long, terrifying journey to its newest abusement park. The United Arab Emirates is world-famous for innovations such as the Burj Khalifa and the Yas Marina Circuit, but by inviting SeaWorld to confine marine mammals to concrete tanks, the country’s views on animal welfare appear to be anything but modern.

SeaWorld is part of an industry built on the suffering of intelligent, social beings who are denied everything that’s natural and important to them. In nature, dolphins live in large, complex social groups and swim vast distances every day. In captivity, they can only swim in endless circles inside tanks that, to them, are the equivalent of bathtubs, and they’re denied the opportunity to engage in almost any natural behaviour.

Among the 24 dolphins SeaWorld secretly shipped to Abu Dhabi is a female named Alice, who was “rescued” in 2007 and imprisoned in a concrete cell at SeaWorld San Antonio. She was forcibly bred in the company’s dolphin-breeding programme, for which staff pull female dolphins out of the water – sometimes after drugging them so that they can’t fight back – and shove tubes filled with semen into their uteruses. Alice gave birth to two calves via forced insemination.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment or abuse in any other way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETAAsia.com or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.