Lolita - An Orca has died

It isn’t uncommon to hear about the death of a captive animal. Captivity isn’t the friend of any wild animal to be honest. But Lolita epitomised the very reasons for why captivity is a bad decision. As an Orca she spent 50 years in captivity. She was taught to perform and essentially became a business asset for driving visitor attendance. (Screenshot from Seaworld Website)

Something that overtime reduced as the amount of lobbying to free her increased. Film’s such as Blackfish (https://www.blackfishmovie.com) showed people the terrible price of captivity. Some claimed it was biased, however for the majority of free thinking intelligent people the film and Lolita became the emblem for a shift in opinion that stopped future commercial plans. The Orca is a dolphin (not a whale), and is certainly not a killer as many tabloids like to say. The J, K , and L pods of the Salish sea prefer and do eat salmon! Before anyone tries to argue that the Orca’s feature in the documentary were killers, they wouldn’t have been if they had been left in the wild.

Lolita was caught in 1966, the year after I was born! Her home was the Salish sea, and her family was the L Pod. She was captured and taken away from her family unit. In 2023 the current combined pod numbers (J, K, and L) are about 84 in total. We simply don’t know if her family members either remember her or not. But one thing is for sure. It was another life lost in the continuing struggle between moral awareness that captivity is not a good thing, and the greed of commercialism.

Having said that, and I realise these are strong words. There is a place for our need to understand how WE fit into their world. Understanding the animals that have every right to roam the seas because it is their home. We should strive to make every effort to invest in knowledge that helps them. If everything was equal we should pay reparations to the nature we have destroyed; but we live in a world where the indigenous tribes that held the “Blackfish” in their hearts as part of their culture and respected them and nature have been the subject of attempts to eradicate them as well. What chance do they have?

The chance comes from you. We should never take these mammals out of their habitat to perform. There are still holiday companies that offer trip add-ons to holidays where you can swim with Dolphins that are actually still in captivity and we should not give money to perpetuate this practice. The companies that sell these options will soon stop if they realise you are making commercial decisions to spend your money somewhere else.

If you don’t believe in the 21st Century this is still happening. Visit the Seaworld Website, or check out the deals on TUI’s website.

Here are some screen shots to prove that this is still happening RIGHT NOW!