Does captivity educate our children to care

Dolphinaria like the Hotel Los Delfines exhibit dolphins performing “tricks” that are exaggerated variations of their natural behaviors. These tricks prevent the audience from contemplating the stark concrete and Plexiglas enclosures, so different from the environment from which these animals were taken.

Despite arguments that such entertainment makes the experience of seeing marine mammals more memorable, in a survey of 1,000 U.S. citizens by researchers from Yale University, respondents overwhelmingly preferred to see captive marine mammals expressing natural behaviors rather than performing tricks and stunts. In fact, four-fifths of the public in this survey stated that marine mammals should not be kept in captivity unless there are major educational or scientific benefits.

In a 2003 survey of members of the Canadian public, 74 percent of respondents thought that the best way to learn about the natural habits of whales and dolphins is by viewing them in the wild, either directly through whalewatching tours or indirectly through television and cinema or on the Internet. Only 14 percent felt that viewing cetaceans in captivity was educational.

Almost nothing is taught about natural behaviors, ecology, demographics, or population distribution during marine mammal shows. Indeed, the one thing that virtually all marine mammal public display facilities consistently avoid is providing in-depth educational material concerning marine mammal natural history or how the animals live and behave in their natural habitats.

Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the information facilities present is sometimes scientifically incorrect or distorted to portray the facility in a better light.

Traditional dogma states that the display of live animals is required to educate people about a species (and therefore to care about the species and its habitat). It is true that people may respond on a basic emotional level to seeing a live animal on display, and performances may also reinforce the bond with an individual animal felt by members of the audience. But because of the nature of these performances, the perceived bond is not with an actual creature but with an idea of that creature that has been crafted by the facility. Evaluation of the performances’ scripts and settings, as well as observation of the audiences’ reactions reveal that a performance is not an educational vehicle but a show in which miseducation (in the form of inaccurate representation of such things as normal behavior, life span, appearance, and social structure) occurs more often than not. To illustrate, many actions performed by dolphins in shows that are portrayed as “play” or “fun” are actually displays that in wild animals would be considered aggressive, akin to a dog growling or snarling.

Mere exposure to live captive animals does not translate directly into practical action or even heightened ecological awareness, as public display rhetoric claims. Some in the display industry recognize this; the president of the Zoological Society of Philadelphia stated in a welcoming speech to a conference on education: “The surveys we have conducted … show that the overwhelming majority of our visitors leave us without increasing either their knowledge of the natural world or their empathy for it. There are even times when I wonder if we don’t make things worse by reinforcing the idea that man is only an observer of nature and not a part of it.”

In our opinion exposure to live captive animals does exactly the opposite of what the industry rhetoric claims: instead of sensitizing visitors to marine mammals and their habitat, it desensitizes humans to the cruelty inherent in removing these animals from their natural habitats and holding them captive.

Alternative educational means such as animatronics (robots), DVDs, videotapes, IMAX® theaters, interactive and traditional museum-type displays, and virtual reality simulations could and should replace dolphin shows.

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Hotel Los Delfines – Dolphin jail or conservation project?

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Page author: Stefan Austermühle

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