No, it's okay, we've got a permit for this! That makes it totally ethical.
I took the opportunity to watch the movie Blackfish right before it aired on CNN. I had been meaning to see it ever since it premiered at Sundance, since I happen to be an odd combination of a movie enthusiast, theme park geek, and corporate activist. The movie piqued my interest because A) It’s a documentary, B) about a safety incident C) at a theme park C) run by a corporation. I was expecting an animal activist propaganda piece about how whales (and dolphins as well) are incredibly intelligent creatures, and therefore shouldn’t keep them in captivity and set them free & let their fins flow in the water as they swim through the glen. I got what I expected sure, but in a very tactful & deft way – the filmmaker managed to find multiple former SeaWorld trainers to criticize their former company (of course the expectation of getting current SeaWorld employees to blow the whistle on their employer is absurd). I was naturally immediately skeptical about the level of interaction these interviewed trainers had with Tilikum, slash editing techniques used in the film, but thought no further on it afterwards. Overall I found the activism aspect of the film neither eye-opening nor interesting.
But there was more to the film than the activism, and that’s what interested me. The movie delves into the history of 20th century whaling, as well as the investigation into the incident with video of witnesses on the stand. I wasn’t aware of SeaWorld’s role in capturing whales in Penn Cove, Puget Sound, and Budd Inlet, nor that they actually had a government permit to do so. Like many major corporations in the 60’s & 70’s, the ends always justified the means, and the ends were always Profit. It was before Earth Day was globally recognized, before “Nader’s Raiders” & “Unsafe at Any Speed” became popular, before PETA even existed to shift the Overton window on animal cruelty. It was also before SeaWorld was sold to three successive companies, from Books to Beer to Banksters.
No, it's okay, we've got a permit for this! That makes it totally ethical.
And the Banksters (called the Blackstone Group, winner of the “Most likely name to be mistaken for a Bond Villain Organization” award) aren’t any more likely to take responsibility than their predecessors. In September SeaWorld announced that it would continue to screw its employees by cutting their part-time employees from 32 to 28 hours / week, to
avoid their responsibilities under the ACA. Additionally, in David Kirby’s book “Death at Sea World” he notes that the Labor Department cited SeaWorld for discriminating against black & Hispanic job applications. SeaWorld has even resorted to
Freeping an online CNN poll to try to shift their image.
