Kiska the whale with her baby at Marinelands' Friendship Cove in Niagara Falls.The Canadian Press
Forty-five years ago, a Toronto resident submitted a letter to The Globe and Mail taking issue with a glowing story the paper printed about Kandu the killer whale, star of the orca show at what was then known as Marineland and Game Farm. “As of April 1, 1974, out of 48 killer whales kept in captivity, 52 per cent had died,” the letter writer, M. Lakin, noted. “It seems the owners of the Niagara Falls Marineland do not give a damn about the rapidly depleting numbers of killer whales.”
This sort of letter would be unremarkable on a contemporary Letters to the Editor page, but at the time – when a businessman could just fly out to the Gulf of Mexico and scoop up half a dozen wild dolphins to bring back to his Ontario tourist attraction – it must have been a distinctly radical opinion. These cetacean shows were viewed as great entertainment, after all, and people flocked to them to marvel at how interspecies communication could function between human trainer and aquatic beast.
Public opinion has shifted markedly in the decades since, as our collective sensitivity to the suffering and exploitation of animals has become more acute. In the case of Marineland specifically, the process has been helped along by dozens of media reports, investigations and exposés about the treatment of animals in the park including allegations of seals going blind because of poor water conditions, the story of an injured deer being brutally and violently killed instead of humanely euthanized and, more recently, videos of the last surviving Orca at Marineland, Kiska, thrashing against her enclosure and floating listlessly, which is uncharacteristic for a killer whale.
Legislation is catching up with public opinion. In 2018, nearly half of respondents polled by Angus Reid said they believed that keeping cetaceans in captivity should be banned. The next year, the federal government passed the Ending the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins Act, which did exactly that, though it included a clause that allowed parks and aquariums to keep whales such as Kiska that were already in captivity. The legislation also prohibited using cetaceans “for performance for entertainment purposes” without specific authorization. Earlier this month, Marineland was charged under that law for allegedly using dolphins and whales in shows for entertainment, though the park denies the allegations and says the shows are “educational.”
Conceptually, most of us can understand why it is wrong to remove an animal from its natural habitat and confine it to an artificial environment where it will be deprived of normal social interaction. But perhaps the past two years of pandemic living has provided us with a taste of the experience firsthand, though in a much more moderate way. Still, the observable effects of the unnatural and limited ways we have been living have been profound: seniors in isolation have experienced cognitive and physical decline; eating disorders have skyrocketed among adolescents; babies born during the pandemic are showing language and motor delays; and young adults, especially those who live alone, have reported increased rates of anxiety and depression.
This is not really news, of course. We’ve long known by studying inmate populations, particularly those subject to solitary confinement, that prolonged deprivation from meaningful social interaction can result in profound psychological distress, including psychosis. Kiska is a whale, obviously, not a person, but whales are nevertheless distinctly social creatures that are capable of forming dynamic and complex social relationships (recall the orca who made headlines around the world in 2018 when she carried around her dead calf for 17 days in an apparent act of mourning).
Many of us humans are figuratively banging our heads against a wall after nearly two years of varying degrees of social deprivation. Kiska has been alone at Marineland for the past 10 years; she has given birth to five calves, and all five of them have died. It should not be unexpected, then, that she would be literally slamming herself against a wall after a decade of solitary confinement. A New Zealand researcher quoted in The Toronto Star went so far as to suggest she could be suffering from psychosis.
Decades of evolving thought on animal captivity, combined with a few horrific allegations and exposés, have lessened the public’s tolerance for animal exploitation and abuse. But perhaps the experience of living like captive whales for a while – albeit with phones and video calls and food delivery on demand – will lessen that tolerance even more. The least we can say for our quarantine experience is that no one is hauling us out of solitary to make us dance for our dinner.
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