1. When I'm training my dog, I tell him to do a trick once in a while and reward him when he does it. The difference is, the tricks are part of the whales' daily routine. The whales expect to do these tricks at these times and get rewarded in this way. They expect to get treats at these times of the day. For example, if you ask your child to go different random odd jobs throughout the day, and pay them for the tasks they do, that's positive reenforcement. When you start giving your kid a set list of chores that they have to do each week, and a set amount of money they get each week, it turns into a punishment when you take away their allowance.
I honestly hate how blunt I have to put it, but whales are nowhere near as intelligent as humans. They're capable of amazing things, don't get me wrong, but on the scale of animal intelligence, they're closer to smart dogs. The reason I mention it is because when this happens, people tend to put human traits on animals and perspective is lost. If there's one thing I really don't like Sea World and places like it doing, and animal rights people are just as guilty of this, but it's humanizing animals to the point that they have. This isn't supposed to be condescending and I hope you believe me, but it's really difficult to explain how animals thing to somebody who hasn't worked with them for a while. Animals don't grasp concepts of "reward" or "punishment", at least not to the extent that humans grasp it. The wolves at BGW are trained exactly the same thing, when they fail to perform a behavior they will not get the reward, the trainer will try again like in the video. If the animal still doesn't do it right, or in a way that's not close to what the trainer wants, the trainer will give the signal to move onto to the next behavior to try this. The only thing going through the animal's mind is "I want food" not "This bitch didn't give me food, I'm going to cut her." If the whale was rewarded for a behavior it wasn't supposed to do, the whale would think that it could do anything it wanted, which would be bad.
2. Notice I completely stayed clear of the whole saftey of the trainers thing. I don't pretend to have enough information on that to draw a conclusion.
I didn't touch on this, am I missing something?
3. I have not learned a single thing from Seaworld about Orcas. I have been several times, as recently as less than a month ago, and all I have learned is that they can do backflips. Seaworld doesn't do any research on their whales that I know of, they don't depict the whales as the predators they are, and they don't give you any information about them. They breed the whales, but not for the purpose of preserving an endangered species or any other noble reason, they simply want to add more whales to their collection.
If this is true (I don't doubt you since I heard the one world show is awful), then this needs to be fixed desperately. An educational show designed as an entertainment show would be the best option, because learning bores most people. I've told this story before, but the reason I got involved with learning and ultimately working and caring for animals is because Sea World inspired me to care, which I think they deserve some credit, because the environment needs more people to care more than anything.
I don't think Sea World does research themselves, they do give access to scientists so they can do research because there are very few scientific facilities able to hold whales.
As far as the breeding goes, this is a very touchy subject understandably. Since they are in captivity and that's probably not going to change (which is the root of the issue, and I'll address that below), I would actually rather see them bred in captivity than caught out in the wild. Breeding has zero environmental impact, is less stressful on the whales themselves because the calves don't have to adjust from the wild to captivity, and there's always staff to provide medical care if need be.
4. You mentioned that Seaworld tries very hard to give the whales stimulation, and that it is impossible for any park to give whales an ocean like habitat. That's my point. I don't care if it's Seaworld, Disney, and aquarium, or anywhere else that is hosting the whales. It is impossible to give them a habitat like an ocean!
Objectively, this is true, nothing can simulate the ocean. However, the enrichment is designed to simulate what they would be doing in the ocean. Even the movie states that these whales respond well to these things. I get what your saying, but it's not like the whales have nothing to do in captivity. Animals can adapt surprisingly well to captivity under healthy conditions, and while not every place is healthy, and those places should be shut down, not everywhere is that bad.
5. Finally, I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't saying that Seaworld was wrong in how they captured their animals, that was a long time ago. I was simply saying that the whales have no injuries to keep them from surviving in the wild. If they younger healthier whales were released they would probably do just fine. Granted their would have to be a transitional period where the whales were fed live prey at Seaworld and leaned how to hunt, but I believe that they could get there eventually.
I didn't address this either, but a vast majority at attempts to release whales back into the wild have resulted in death. Look at Keiko, the whale that in the Free Willy movies. After years of rehabilitation training he was released, but it was a disaster. He never really joined a pod, he would seek out humans to do tricks for, and a little after a year, he died from pneumonia. Animals are lazy, once they figure out that jumping out of water a bit can get them food easier than tracking down and hunting something, they'll pick the easier route, and that's something that can't be trained out of them. There's also the fact, and this is double for the whales bred in captivity, but the water in those tanks are the cleanest they can get without chlorine, which means that they are at risk for diseases in the wild (to be fair, they're just as vulnerable in captivity, but they have a full medical team if they do get sick) and these animals just aren't able to adapt on a physiological level back into captivity. Sea pens would solve the first problem, but not the second.
Now, as for the big question (because that's ultimately the issue here), whether having any animal in captivity is ethical or not.... I honestly believe that the question is a lot bigger than a "yes" or "no" answer. Yeah, they're not able to live normal lives in captivity, but the environment is getting where they can't live normal lives there either. What about sharks? They're just is as important to a healthy ecosystem and are actually endangered, but nobody is saying that they should be released. What makes whales more special than sharks when the both have critical roles in the enivorment? What about all the money Sea World has spent rescuing and releasing animals? What about the people who get inspired to care because they're able to see these animals somewhere that doesn't require thousands of dollar and a flight half way across the world? What about the animals dying in the wild? Why aren't they getting full PETA support or emotional documentaries?
These are all very valid questions that everybody who cares about animals should be asking, which is why it would be an extreme disservice to sum up that question with such a short response. My view is that in a perfect world, no animals should be in captivity, the world is not perfect, and there are more important things that need help, and if that requires a very small amount of whales to be in captivity to get that help, then so be it. I think that if all the time and effort being spent on Sea World right now is spent on other issues, issues that affect way more animals, it would ensure that there's a place that whales can actually live at in the wild, which is what you guys want, right?
