BLACKFISH

[BuddyThomas]

If a poster screams in an empty room.. does it make a noise? Some people can't be rationalized with.. either due to emotion or simple lack of objectivity. it's best to just let them talk to themselves and then they bore of it and go quiet. The prophet needs responses just as much as the troll does to give their message legs, visibility, and energy.

Using wdwmagic's search result weight won't do much when people find the posts are just some guy talking to himself.

Oh my God, you people are so obnoxious with your personal insults. I can't believe you get away with this. You are the ones doing the screaming. If anyone dares to question your beloved Sea World in any possible way, the bunch of you flip out. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

 

[unkadug]

...Oh, and Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas to you also.

 

[Preston Chatsworth]

If anyone dares to question your beloved Sea World in any possible way, the bunch of you flip out.

No, we are just voicing our opinion which is in the majority and are fed up with the minority spouting their PC crap all over the place. Very similar to the Duck Dynasty thing. We have had it with the loud-mouth few making demands that counter our upbringing.

 

[englanddg]

I don't see any of those who have different opinions repeating the same "catch phrase" at the end of every other post or using colors or unrelated pictures in their posts. Both actions are like yelling, and are a plea for attention.

 

[OFTeric]

@JPatton better stop before he "Lance Armstrongs" himself in this thread.

 

[JPatton]

Let me run a hypothetical situation by you.

It is really hard to argue that whales in captivity have done a huge amount for raising awareness to the whales plight in the wild. Commercial whaling was not banned by the IWC until 1986 partially as a result of this awareness. Would you rather have a very small number of whales in captivity, or a number of whale species go extinct simply because the general public either did not know or care?

"My name is Lori Marino and I had the distinct honor of being interviewed in the film [Blackfish]. I’ve been studying dolphins and whales now for over 20 years. I’m a faculty member at Emory. I’ve studied dolphin and whale intelligence as well as self-awareness and had a chance to see killer whales in the wild and can tell you it is really quite an experience."

"Yes, we did learn a lot about these animals when we studied them in captivity. I did work with captive dolphins for a number of years until I decided about ten years ago to give it up because I didn’t want to contribute to their suffering. We did work on mirror self-recognition in which we found that bottlenose dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors. And that really made me think, gosh if they’re that self-aware what is their life like being in a concrete tank? At that time they were housed in the New York Aquarium at Coney Island."

"So we learned a lot. But it’s time to move on. The really exciting stuff that’s going on now in the science of studying marine mammals is going on in the field---in the wild. We’re learning about the fact that they are cultural---they use tools---they have signature whistles. These animals are extraordinarily complex. And all of that is coming out of studies of animals in their natural habitat. There’s hardly anything coming out of captive facilities anymore. That’s because most of the animals are---dead. They don’t survive very well in captivity."

"As to the issue of, well, you know we need to find some way to be educated and appreciate these animals... It’s really interesting because we’ve all been fed the line that if we go to see these animals we’re going to come to appreciate them and then when we leave we’re going to be more attuned to conservation and we’re going to care more about them."

"In fact I’ve done a lot of work on this researching the papers that make this claim and there’s no evidence for this. There’s absolutely no evidence that if you go to visit a dolphin or a whale show that you learn anything of any meaning or significance. Certainly no attitude change. So that’s a claim in search of evidence at this point."

"We need to move on. As one of the trainers said in the film, he wouldn’t want his child to learn the lesson that the way we treat other intelligent animals on this planet is by insulating them, controlling them, and tormenting them. That’s not a lesson I would want any child to learn. So, yeah, it’s time to move on."

"There was a killer whale that died at SeaWorld and I was able to get the brain through my connections. I did, with my colleagues, the first magnetic resonance imaging study of orca brains. No one had really been able to do that because the brain is huge."

"They took the brain out of the dead whale and we put the brain in an MRI and what that allowed us to see, and you saw them up there [in the film] these sections---these 3-D sections--- allowed us to determine and measure precisely how big is this brain---how big are the different structures of the brain---what does it look like—how is it put together? What we learned from that is that this is really a brain to be reckoned with. This is an enormously complex and highly elaborated brain. And it is elaborated in the areas that in all mammals are involved in higher cognition, emotional processing, and social cognition---the neocortex, the limbic system, and the paralimbic system. So does that prove anything? No, but it allows us to infer that if orca brains are mammal brains---and they are---then this is an animal with a lot of intelligence and a lot of social and emotional sophistication. In fact, I saw parts of their brain that were more elaborated than they are in the human brain."

"The collapsed dorsal fin. Because the tanks are so shallow they don’t really have anywhere to go so they generally just sort of ‘log’ on top and float on top and over time the dorsal fin flops over in captivity because it doesn’t have the support of the water. In the wild, killer whales spend a lot of time submerged. And it’s that amount of time submerged that allows the dorsal fin to remain up. Without that level of submersion it just basically flops over."

"The question was how many miles do orcas in the wild swim in a day? It depends on the population. They can swim over 100 miles in a day. So when you realize that it allows you to realize that there’s no way that a tank---even the biggest tank in the world which is at SeaWorld Orlando---that doesn’t even come close to allowing them to exhibit these natural behaviors."

"Are there differences in the whales depending upon whether they were caught in the wild or they were born in captivity? The fact of the matter is there doesn’t seem to be."

"All of the science tells us that the welfare of wild-caught as well as captive-born dolphins and whales is equally poor. They still live the same short, stressful lives, die of the same diseases, show the same behavioral abnormalities. What that tells you is that captivity is fundamentally incompatible with what these animals need to thrive. And it doesn’t matter if they are born in captivity. That doesn’t make them domesticated. They’re still wild."

"What kind of diseases do these animals die from in captivity? I’ve done a tremendous amount of research on this. And what it shows is that they tend to die from diseases that have to do with stress. Gastro-intestinal ulcers, infections from immune systems being completely put down by the fact that they are in chronic stress. We know their stress hormone levels are high and if you have chronic stress hormone levels high that beats up your immune system. Your immune system goes down and then everything goes down."

"We also see a lot of animals who are self-mutilating---who are aggressing against others---and literally just lose the will to live after a while. So a lot of this is psychological, and it has to do with the chronic stress of captivity."

"If you saw some of Tilikum’s teeth [in the film] they were very, very flat. A couple of the trainers, John Jett and Jeff Ventre, just released a peer-reviewed scientific paper. And what they showed is that these animals are, one, dying from diseases that have to do with mosquito bites from ‘logging’ on the surface but also that the teeth of killer whales are often very, very bad. What they do is they break their teeth on the gate or on the wall or on the ledge and they do this because it’s a behavioral abnormality---or they are trying to escape, or they feel angry or frustrated. And so a lot of them have broken teeth. What they have to do with these animals is they have to haul them out and drill their teeth and flush them out several times a week because of how damaged their dentition is. A lot of people don’t know that but if you ever get a chance to see a film like this take a look at the teeth. It’s very telling."

Lori Marino, Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University
Faculty Member in the Emory Center for Ethics
Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History
Partial transcript from audience Q &A in Atlanta, Georgia
August 3, 2013

 

[wm49rs]

Do you ever use your own words? Or are those just saved for Twitter?

 

[Hakunamatata]

" There’s absolutely no evidence that if you go to visit a dolphin or a whale show that you learn anything of any meaning or significance. "

Well I for one learned that I had no interest with getting in a tank with a killer whale after visiting SW. That's pretty significant.

 

[Preston Chatsworth]

SeaWorld has not taken a killer whale from the wild in over 35 years and so through generations of breeding, domestication of this animal is almost complete. Once the two remaining "taken" whales expire, there will be no "suffering" of these animals that you radial extremist refer to in your propaganda.

 

[The Mom]

I discovered that many 'tricks" that I thought were learned behavior due to reward by trainers were actually spontaneous in the wild.

 

[englanddg]

I'm surprised we haven't seen Free Willy quotes or clips.

You have.

Seen this poster?

It's from this picture (go ahead, compare)

That's a picture of Keiko (Willy).

 

[Gabe1]

I discovered that many 'tricks" that I thought were learned behavior due to reward by trainers were actually spontaneous in the wild.

Indeed. I've stayed out of the debate until now but Blackfish band wagoning is becoming irksome.

Two of my adult children's friends are working or have worked at Sea World, Disney and Clearwater.
For all the good that is done at all of these facilities and caring for injured and rescued creatures, that seems to be lost now with Blackfish. That is disappointing. Anyone can pick at a tiny scab, from Animal Kingdom's creatures to any local zoo, to animal shelters without genuine understanding of the entire system.

As an owner of a small business for dogs, I've actually been accused of torturing animals for trimming toe nails because that is not what nature intends. Dear Lord.

 

[englanddg]

Or this poster?

That's also Keiko. It's from this picture.

So, the two main posters they are using to advertise the movie...show a whale that was released (and died shortly thereafter). <sigh>

 

[Hakunamatata]

You have.

Seen this poster?

It's from this picture (go ahead, compare)

That's a picture of Keiko (Willy).

That kinda got me to wondering. Why are they referring to whales as fish. One would think that anyone who has so much respect and concern for an animal that they create this piece of work, would know that whales are not fish.

 

[englanddg]

That kinda got me to wondering. Why are they referring to whales as fish. One would think that anyone who has so much respect and concern for an animal that they create this piece of work, would know that whales are not fish.

They would also know that Orca are not whales.

 

[Hakunamatata]

They would also know that Orca are not whales.

Then why are they referred to as Killer Whales?

 

[englanddg]

Then why are they referred to as Killer Whales?

Size, I would suspect, but I really don't know. They are in the Dolphin family )along with some other whales, like the melon-headed whale).

 

[Hakunamatata]

Size, I would suspect, but I really don't know. They are in the Dolphin family )along with some other whales, like the melon-headed whale).

Interesting to know. That's some big mahi mahi.

 

[Gabe1]

"My name is Lori Marino

And sadly, this is the redundant rhetoric that looses my interest. The need for a moment in the sun, absent of original thought or heartfelt opinion. While I have respect for both sides of the debate, rhetoric just harms instead of helps that point of view.

 

[lazyboy97o]

That kinda got me to wondering. Why are they referring to whales as fish. One would think that anyone who has so much respect and concern for an animal that they create this piece of work, would know that whales are not fish.

Blackfish is just another name that has been used like killer whale.