Save The Gay Canadian Whales
Okay, they're not gay *that we know of*. It's not like they're penguins.
Long before Pinkfong’s “Baby Shark” doodoodooed its way into our collective consciousness as the first YouTube video to reach 10 billion views, there was “Baby Beluga,” a cheerful little song about “a little white whale on the go” from children’s entertainer Raffi.
The Canadian singer/songwriter — an activist, neighborly Fred Rogers type, and former vocal Bernie Bro — wrote the enduring kiddy ditty in 1980 after seeing a newborn beluga up close and personal at the Vancouver Aquarium, one of the first North American tourist attractions to display whales and dolphins. The facility voluntarily stopped breeding cetaceans or bringing in new ones in 2017 due to a sea change in public opinion about sticking these highly intelligent creatures in tiny swimming pools for our entertainment. This was two years before the feds made it illegal while grandfathering in captive animals who wouldn’t survive being returned to the wild, leaving Marineland in Niagara Falls as the only remaining guaranteed whale-watching experience in Canada available on dry land.
At least for now because their whales keep dying, including yet another one this past summer under unknown circumstances, and the theme park’s future remains uncertain.
Marineland isn’t as big or as infamous as SeaWorld became after the release of the documentary Blackfish about the dark plight of captured killer whales, but you might’ve seen footage last year of Kiska — known as the world's loneliest orca due to spending the final 12 years of her life without a companion — beating herself in despair against the side of her tank.
Maybe she finally got word Keiko, her former cellmate, had gone on to star in the hit film Free Willy and parlayed his newfound fame to escape back to sea. Kiska made her final lap of the pool last year after 43 years of doing hard time and joined the list of 17 other whales — all of them belugas — who gasped their last breath at the amusement park since 2019. (For comparison, that’s four more dead whales than the number of Marvel superhero movies released over the same time period.) Not to mention the three out of five belugas it sold to an aquarium in Connecticut that perished after being shipped there three years ago. They’ve gone through so many white whales you’d think Captain Ahab was running the ship.
The Canadian side of this particularly scenic stretch of the world’s longest international border is the closest thing the country has to the theme parks of Anaheim or Orlando, and Marineland has been one of the Niagara region’s biggest draws after the waterfalls themselves for more than half a century. The now-struggling park’s founder, a Slovenian immigrant named John Holer, made his fortune after selling his idea for an underwater theme park ride to Disney, and he ran the place from it’s opening in 1961 up until his death in 2018, when the reins were handed over to his wife Marie, who died herself this past summer. New ownership was announced last year but the deal evidently fell through, and the troubled 1000-acre facility is once again on the market.
Maybe Matt Damon could be enticed to diversify his portfolio for real this time. But for now the park operates with a skeleton crew and was only open to the public this season for two months instead of the usual six.
The most recent death has brought new attention on Marineland, which earlier this year was found guilty of animal abuse and fined $85,000 CAD for its mistreatment of three bears kept in cramped conditions with inadequate access to porridge drinking water after an investigation by Ontario's Animal Welfare Services. But an investigation into the wellbeing of the remaining cetaceans is moving so slowly surely even Merrick Garland would be unimpressed.
The province began looking into the problem in 2020 and found all of the captive marine mammals were suffering due to poor water quality. Marineland was ordered to fix this shit pronto but nobody seems to know if they ever actually did, and we only know about the ruling in the first place because they appealed the decision and reporters found a paper trail left by court documents.
The Canadian Press filed a freedom-of-information request last year seeking the documents but were told tough titties because releasing the overdue zoo review would somehow be an “unjustified invasion of personal privacy.” The newswire took it to the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, which ruled in its favor, but Marineland successfully appealed the decision. A third kick at the can last May resulted in a promise to release the documents but it likely won’t come as a surprise their lawyers appealed that decision too. The legal battle has since gone to adjudication and it could be months or even years before anything is made public.
Which won’t be much consolation to the few dozen remaining belugas who are literally circling the drain. A reporter who visited the previous summer counted 37 of them, which resulted in being banned for life from the premises. Using drones within the park is prohibited but Phil Demers, a former Marineland worker who now runs the animal advocacy group UrgentSeas and provided the sad aerial footage of Kiska linked above, evidently doesn’t give a shit about his old boss’s rules and counted 33 in an illicit flyover last month.
“Marineland has normalized dead whales,” said Demers, whose French surname translates roughly as “of the sea” so he’s probably legit on this front. "What concerns me is when you normalize things like this, people become apathetic, and the government is guilty of that, too."
The typical lifespan of a beluga whale is between 35-50 years in their natural Arctic habitat, and it’s hard not to think Marineland stakeholders’ concept of a plan is to wait out the clock for them to die of natural causes since simply selling them is no longer an option. Nor is dumping them upstream of Horseshoe Falls, although surely footage of THAT would give Pinkfong a run for their money.
But looking the other way ain’t a good look for Canada, the country that started Greenpeace and the whole “save the whales” thing in the first place.
Demers is probably right about the corrosive apathy though. If society is willing to mostly shrug at the murder of thousands of Palestinian children, what’s a few dozen albino sea sausages? At least they’re being fed and don’t have to put up with deadly hurricanes like they do at the SeaWorld down in Florida.
[Canadian Press / CBC / UrgentSeas]
We've just had our first meeting with our new social worker regarding our hopes to adopt. It seemed to go well.
Now, we wait.
The Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta is the largest such facility in the Western world. They are self-funded and have made amazing use of generous corporate donations. A reality show was filmed there, a much needed relief to the global goings-on in 2019 and 2020. We visited in 2019 and were blown away. A behind-the-scenes tour revealed amazing care units; labs, surgical theaters, rehab sections, etc. Their mission is to rescue, rehabilitate when possible and return to the wild. However it's still large creatures in tanks. Granted, they're enormous but they aren't the open sea. We paid an up-charge for the Beluga experience. Five of us donned wet suits and walked into absolutely freezing water of a holding tank behind the main exhibit. The suit didn't help much. There was one main trainer and a couple others on opposite sides of the tank. We met our Beluga, a female, and she was guided through a number of behaviors which included launching herself vertically so we could see exactly how big she is. Very, very big. We touched her, kissed her, hugged her. Many pictures were taken. It was a great time, though I have mixed emotions. They're taking great care of the animals and releasing them when possible but it's still captivity. What we left with was a deeper knowledge of the Beluga whales and an appreciation of the mission of the Georgia Aquarium. The question of morality remains, though this isn't SeaWorld by a long shot.