Seaworld: The Prisoners of the Show

“If people knew what I know, or saw what I have seen, [Seaworld] wouldn’t sell another ticket,” Says Sarah Fischbeck. She was one of the workers at the aquatic park in Orlando in 2007 who, to note, voluntarily left in 2013. Sarah was a tank cleaner for the animals, specifically the orcas.

To begin with, the environment for the killer whales is very stressful. In the wild, packs of killer whales typically swim up to an impressive 100 miles a day and can dive up to 1,000 feet. At Seaworld? They can only dive up to fifty feet and can hardly swim a mile. On top of that, there are other orcas with them. Many animals in Seaworld captivity resort to fighting to relieve their stress, but the most dangerous animals are the killer whales. Don’t be confused by their name, Orcas in the wild aren’t nearly as hostile as they are in the concrete bathtubs that they are trapped within.

“You’d be diving at the bottom of the tanks and you’d find these long strips of, what looked like, black rubber,” Fischbeck explained. “And it was skin that they had peeled off eachother.”

Many divers actually took home whale skin as souvenirs for their families. Think about that. They kept the skin of these animals in distress, because it, of course, didn’t affect them. Divers couldn’t swim within arms reach of the gates without whales trying to suck them in. It was very common to find teeth marks along the sides of these animals, and no changes had been made to make their conditions more comfortable. In fact, in order to keep the trainers safe, they took away space in the tanks. It was also a regular occurrence for these whales to swim rapidly around the edges of these tanks, being chased by the other orcas. Trainers knew this. Everyone who worked there knew this.

It wasn’t just the physical effects of the continuous harassment of these creatures that was an issue. Orcas are very smart, and have emotional capacities relating very close to a humans. So naturally their health was affected. In fact, one orca was being picked on so much that her only option was to push herself over a gate to another pool to escape. She was found the next morning with her stomach torn apart from the barrier she climbed over. Of course, Seaworld did nothing but return her to her old tank; fully aware of the stress that she was experiencing.

One of the most famous whales kept in Seaworld captivity was named Tilikum. From a very young age, Tilikum was taken from his family in the wild in 1983 and was raised from then on, in the very high stress environment. At one of the shows in 2010, trainer Dawn Brancheau was pulled by Tilikum into the water by her ponytail. Her autopsy revealed that he broke her jaw, fractured part of her vertebra, dislocated her knee and elbow, before drowning her. Part of her scalp, described by the autopsy as well, was “forcibly torn from the head”. How can one argue that it is okay to use these animals for entertainment when hundreds of people were involuntarily “entertained” by mutilation?

Seaworld made it seem as if Tilikum was a safe, sane whale. While in fact, he had been involved in two deaths before. In 1991, Tilikum and a few other whales drowned a trainer by keeping her from climbing out of the tank. Then again in 1999 a homeless man was found dead in his tank as well.

Other animals were also affected by Seaworld. In order to train the animals, like dolphins and whales, trainers withheld food until they could do the trick correctly. Often times the animals were neglected, left to swim around in concrete containers with other agitated animals.

Seaworld is still thriving today. As of 2014, Seaworld made a yearly revenue of 1.377 billion dollars. How can we thrive as a society when our source of fun is watching psychologically tortured animals “perform” for profit?