Page 37 - the NOISE June 2016

THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH
DOLPHINS IN THE DESERT?
... continued from page 12 ...
In 2013, the documentary film Blackfish brought attention to the continued plight of orcas in captivity. It featured another orca named Tillikum who was taken from a wild pod in Iceland in 1983. Upon capture, the three year old orca was placed in a small tank with other whales that harassed and attacked him. It is speculated that this experience contributed to the aggressive nature he developed as an adult.
While Tillikum has continued to perform at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, the orca has been responsible for killing three people, including the 2010 death of his trainer, Dawn Brancheau. Tillikum suddenly grabbed Ms. Brancheau by the arm and pulled her under water during a routine portion of a show where the experienced senior trainer was rubbing his head and lying beside him on a platform. Her death ended SeaWorld’s practice of allowing trainers to enter the water with captive orcas. Tillikum has sired 21 offspring, 10 of which are still alive. In 2014, several popular musical groups cancelled performances scheduled at a SeaWorld festival in protest to the whale’s continued captivity. Earlier this year SeaWorld Orlando announced that Tillikum’s health is deteriorating and he is suffering from a bacterial infection for which they have not found a cure.
So now, Dolphinaris wants to bring dolphins to Arizona for folks to swim with. Ventura is the second largest theme park operator in Mexico. According to a 2015 investigation by Delfines En Libertad (which translates to Dolphins Free), a Mexican non-profit organization committed to
“the abolishment of dolphin captivity,” there are 29 captive dolphin facilities in Mexico that hold more than 340 cetaceans, primarily bottle-nosed dolphins. Dolphinaris owns five of them. These facilities operate “swim with the dolphins” programs like the one Dolphinaris is building near Scottsdale.
In these facilities, multiple dolphins are kept in a single concrete tank. Visitors to “dolphinariums” pay a fee to enter the tanks and swim with the dolphins. In a leak from an unidentified employee of the Arizona project’s construction company A.R. Myers, David Kirby of TakePart.com was told that the facility will house eight dolphins in a million gallon tank.
In the wild, dolphins are constantly on the move and can swim a hundred miles a day or more. Their natural territories are often hundreds of square miles in area. Captive environments can’t come close to simulating the cetaceans’ natural territory, activists protest.
Animal rights demonstrators have been campaigning under the slogan “Empty the Tanks!” and have held several rallies around the construction site of the new facility. The online petition cites stress-induced physical and psychological problems endured by dolphins forced to live in captivity, the small size of captive tanks, and being fed a diet of dead fish as reasons to block the new attraction from opening. In addition, it cites the hot and dry desert weather, dusty air and strong sunshine among reasons why Arizona is not the place for these animals. The skin of dolphins and whales can burn when overexposed to the sun, just like in humans.
Compounding the problems with efforts to halt the $20 million Arizona attraction from using captive dolphins is the fact that the land is on the Salt River Indian Reservation which, as a sovereign Indian nation, has its own rules and regulations for permitting this type of business. According to Courtney Vail of Whales & Dolphins Conservation, “There is no accessibility to permitting and licensing documents and procedures that have occurred over the past two years. The public only became aware of this at the eleventh hour.”
TakePart.com reported that a representative of the Indian nation said they would not comment on a business that they do not own. In addition, several environmental organizations including WDC and the Animal Welfare League have written letters to the nation but received no responses. Attempts to contact Dolphinaris directly by several media outlets have also gone unanswered.
WDC and Dolphins Free have both noted captive dolphin
facilities using training tactics that involve withholding food from dolphins to keep them hungry and more eager to perform for food rewards. WDC has also logged numerous incidents associated with “swim with the dolphins” activities that include bites, broken bones and internal injuries to the participants.
In an interview with Arizona’s Fox 10 News, Grey Stafford, a manager associated with the Dolphinaris project told reporters that “Because they do so well in human care, Phoenix is a perfect destination. We have some 5 million residents and tourists each year, so it’s a great audience to reach out and educate and inspire young people of all ages about the need to protect and preserve our ocean.”
While it is quite certain that captive animal facilities have contributed to the preservation of certain species — even occasionally saving them from extinction — where do we draw the line between education and sheer entertainment? Sometimes animals are kept in captivity after they have been injured and deemed unable to live in the wild. Without human intervention, these animals would not survive. In addition, encounters with animals at zoos and aquariums that an individual might otherwise never see can certainly ignite a desire to preserve and protect the natural environments where these animals still live wild. But it seems sometimes that interaction with trained and performing animals and those whose confinement is in natural-looking habitats where no bars or restraints are visible can lead to a false sense of security and even misplaced concern when people encounter their wild and free counterparts.
During the time this article was being written, several stories of human/animal encounters made the headlines. These encounters had tragic results, or the potential for them.
On May 9, a well-meaning Canadian man and his son encountered a lone bison calf in yellowstone National Park. After observing the animal for a time, which was wet and shivering and did not want to leave the area around their car, they picked up the calf and placed it in their SUV. They then drove the calf to Lamar Buffalo Ranch and reported their find to law enforcement. The man was issued a citation that came with a $110 fine for interfering with wildlife and then was asked to show park rangers where he had picked up the calf. They attempted to reunite the calf with its herd but the other buffalo they found in the area would not take it in. After observing the calf’s repeated approaches to people and citing an inability to provide long-term care for the animal outside a wild herd, park rangers decided the only course of action was to euthanize the animal. Later it became apparent that the calf may have been separated from its mother during a river crossing earlier that day. Had it been left alone, it likely would have died anyway due to predation, hunger or exposure.
On May 15, a group of snorkelers off the coast of Boca Raton, Florida were reportedly harassing a small nurse shark that eventually bit a woman on the arm. She exited the water with the shark still attached. Even after the shark died from being out of the water, it did not release its bite. The woman was taken to the hospital to have the shark surgically removed. Nurse sharks are normally docile but sometimes attack when provoked.
On May 19, a story was released on the AP Wire that researchers had discovered that three crocodiles that had been captured in the Florida Everglades near Miami between 2009 and 2014 were actually deadly Nile crocodiles. The captured crocs were all related but do not genetically identify with any animals in captivity in the state, indicating they may have been illegally imported into the US. Nile crocodiles are responsible for around 200 deaths a year in their native territory of sub-Saharan Africa.
| Cindy Cole would follow her seafaring mamalian friends on twitter or facebook, if only they knew how to type. cindy@thenoise.us
Sestina for Life in the Painted Desert
The cloud burst a few drops at a time with the pit-pat-patter of splash-down on the parched ground, a teasing taste
of the drink that soon drowns the desert. No mud can be made from this sand, but absorption looks like a sucking sound
that makes no sound as the drops soak in, dozens at a time. Drizzle turns to torrents fast beating the sand
like thousands of hands hammering down on the desert, setting the pace, giving just a taste of the flood to come.
I can taste the rain before it makes a sound, behind my teeth, in the desert of my mouth.
Time turns in fast forward, rain racing down in lead sheets to the sand.
Beneath the sand something waits for a taste of the rain, deep down, trying so hard to make a sound in the tiny time
it takes to transform the desert.
Like an olive branch in the desert sea, green grows up from the sand like peace. Stand away for a time
(short time) to see redecoration in another taste, in colors so bright they almost make a sound. But don’t look down,
it fast fades away, a day and a sundown stretching quiet, cat-like across a desert being repainted
brown.
A last effort thunder sound rolls in waves over the sand, digging in its claws for the dry taste
of another drought in no time to come.
And it comes, to stop time, dropping down, with a sand like sound, and a salty taste that reaches and spreads dry across the desert.
— Jen turrell | poetry@thenoise.us
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• JUNE 2016 • 37