“Empty the tanks!”

“SeaWorld is SlaveWorld!”

The cries of animal rights activists have been strong for decades, and they have finally been heard.

On March 17, SeaWorld announced the cancellation of its orca breeding program, making this generation of orcas the last to live in captivity at the parks.

SeaWorld’s orca breeding program started almost 40 years ago, but not before capturing  five younglings from Puget Sound, Wash. and separating them from their mothers. When all of the orcas died prematurely due to stress and poor conditions, Washington sued SeaWorld in 1976 and won the case. 

With the capturing of wild orcas outlawed, SeaWorld had to turn to other means — breeding the orcas in captivity. As it turns out, this program differed little in cruelty from the capturing of the whales.

“Whales were becoming baby machines for profit. Inbreeding started becoming common: SeaWorld had a male, Taku, who bred with his own mother, Katina, resulting in the birth of a calf named Nalani. They also cross-bred the orcas, making hybrid species,” said John Hargrove, one of SeaWorld’s past employees, who quit after 12 years of being an orca trainer.

The horrors of the breeding program do not stop there. According to Hargrove, the calves are often separated from their mothers and shipped off to other parks when they are as young as 20 months old. In the wild, orcas spend their entire lives traveling the seas with their families, making SeaWorld’s separation of whale families all the more cruel.

The way that SeaWorld was breeding orcas is just one part of what makes their orca program truly unethical.

SeaWorld’s parks currently house 23 orcas, all of which are kept in tanks much too small for creatures their size. For example, Tilikum, the largest orca in captivity, lives in only 0.0001 percent of the quantity of water that he would travel in a single day in nature.

However, if it were not for SeaWorld’s mistreatment of the whales, they would actually have many more than 23 orcas. As of 2014, 37 orcas have died in captivity at SeaWorld, many of them prematurely, at an average of 13 years old. Orcas live an average of 50 years in the wild, and can even reach 100.

Gallery • 6 Photos

Leea Ivanel

This is Tilikum, one of SeaWorld's well-known orcas. He was captured over 30 years ago in Iceland and brought to America, where he killed three people (including two of his trainers), due to frustration, stress, and mistreatment. Despite this, SeaWorld has continued to use him in their shows and to breed him with other whales.

Despite all the years of abuse, SeaWorld continues to defend its orca program, arguing that the orcas have helped inspire over 400 million guests to see them as the fascinating creatures they are.

SeaWorld was one of the first places I visited when I moved to America in 2010, and seeing the orcas was like a dream come true. They were big, powerful, intelligent, and utterly breathtaking. Tilikum, up to that point, was the biggest creature I had ever seen.

SeaWorld achieved its goal of inspiring me to love these creatures. Ironically, that is exactly why I believe that SeaWorld is a marine park that is ultimately harming these beings for the sake of profit, keeping them in small tanks and forcing them to entertain their guests, causing them to suffer from devastating health issues and live under constant stress.

Plus, the happiness and dreams of a 10-year-old are not worth the lives and misery of another being that should be free in the wild instead of in an iron-barred tank.

Overall, it is wonderful news that this generation of orcas will be the last to ever live in the cruel and inhumane conditions that the park’s 23 whales are currently enduring. However, these remaining orcas will spend the rest of their lives in the park, as they most likely cannot be released into the wild.

There must be something done to make the lives of these remaining 23 orcas as comfortable as possible.

Changes must be made to better accommodate them such as bigger tanks, netted-off coves, and the termination of shows for the sake of the entertainment.

For all the money that the orcas have made SeaWorld over the past 50 years, it is time for SeaWorld to give something back to them.