Next Steps for the Orca Welfare and Safety Act

Lori Marino on April 15, 2014

On April 8th, at the California legislature, the Orca Welfare and Safety Act went before the Water, Parks, and Wildlife Committee. Passage of the bill would require the phasing out of captive breeding of orcas and their continued use for entertainment purposes.

After hearing testimony from scientists and advocates for the orcas, including from Dr. Naomi Rose of the Animal Welfare Institute and Dr. Deborah Giles of University of California, Davis, and then from SeaWorld officials and lobbyists, the committee requested an interim study and undertook to revisit the bill in 2015.

The Kimmela Center worked with Dr. Rose to craft a Scientist Statement that was presented in support of the bill and signed by 35 prominent members of the marine mammal scientific community.

Kimmela will continue to work over the next year to strengthen scientific support for the bill, including bringing to bear scientific peer-reviewed papers and more marine mammal experts.

By the time the bill goes before the committee again next year, and having heard the arguments of the SeaWorld lobby, we are confident that we can make a very strong case, and one that will gather the support of large numbers of California voters.

How I Became an Elephant

Lori Marino on March 28, 2014

When she was 14 years old, Juliette West set out from California on a quest that would take her through Thailand to learn everything she could about the elephants and their plight. A small camera crew joined her, and the result is a movie that’s touching hearts and fueling action in the United States and around the world.

Early on in her journey, Juliette meets Asia’s famous “Elephant Lady,” Lek Chailert, who has risked her life and freedom for more than 30 years to protect elephants from illegal trade and abuse. Together, these two determined women from opposite ends of the earth work to save elephants, stopping at nothing to expose the dark secrets within entertainment and logging industries that are steeped in greed and corruption. Together, these two determined women from opposite ends of the earth have had some impressive successes protecting elephants.

The two women have had some impressive successes. But elephants, as we know, are still being captured to meet the demands of increasing tourism and entertainment in countries such as Thailand, where they are severely mistreated and suffer malnutrition. Thousands more are pressed into hard labor in Myanmar to support the logging industry. As a result, wild populations are plummeting – from 100,000 at the start of the 20th century to a mere 5,500 today.

For Juliette, now 18 years old and still at high school, the elephants have become her life’s work. She gives talks around the country, providing youth with the tools they can use to develop their own leadership abilities as effective animal advocates. On her own website, JulietteSpeaks, young people can find answers to their biggest question: “How Can I Help?”

Back home in Los Angeles, she has been part of the successful campaign to ban bullhooks from the city, and part of the ongoing campaign to provide better living conditions for Billy the Elephant in the LA Zoo.

How I Became an Elephant has become the cornerstone of an inspiring program to save the world’s elephants before time runs out on them. Here at the Kimmela Center, we’re delighted to be able to provide the movie to you at less than half the price of commercial sources. Just click on any of the links on the video above. You can rent the movie (subtitled in numerous languages) for $5.99 or for $10.99 for the Director’s Cut Deluxe edition with deleted scenes, etc. Or buy the physical DVD professionally packaged for $19.99 (also subtitled in numerous languages).

The Giraffe on Your Plate

Lori Marino on February 16, 2014

Millions of people are rightly outraged over the Copenhagen Zoo’s recent killing of Marius, a young giraffe. It is wrong to end the life of any sentient being. But what was done to Marius is just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of “surplus” animals in zoos are killed every year – either at the zoo or, worse, sent to “canned hunt” facilities where they are hunted down, shot, and killed as trophies.

But, on the heels of the Marius tragedy, I cannot help but bring to light another important point. Giraffes have a close bovine cousin whom we kill and eat by the millions every year – and without a second thought. Those animals are cows.

There are striking parallels between giraffes and cows. Here are just a few of their shared characteristics:

  • They are both even-toed ungulates (two-toed hooved animals).
  • They both have a natural lifespan of about 25 years.
  • Their brains are about the same size relative to their body (with the cow having a slightly larger than average relative brain size).
  • Their brains contain the same emotional processing system found in all mammal brains, including humans.
  • Mother giraffes and cows nurse and nurture their children for months.
  • Both giraffe and cow mothers call their children by bellowing to them.
  • Adult giraffes and cows babysit youngsters who are not their own.
  • Giraffe and cow youngsters “moo” to find their mothers and friends.

There are other similarities, too, between what happened to Marius at a zoo and what happens to all his cousins, the cows in factory farms.

Marius was killed in exactly the same manner (shot in the head with a stun gun) as 39 million cows are killed every year.

There are striking parallels between giraffes and cows.His mother lost her child when he was 18 months old. But it’s even worse for the 9.3 million dairy cows in factory farms who have their babies torn from them just hours after birth.

Marius’s mother is not afforded the decency of being allowed to make choices about her life. She is simply a commodity whose behavior and even reproduction is controlled by humans. And millions of cows in factory farms are also denied the same fundamental consideration: intensively confined, repeatedly impregnated, and bred for high milk production and meat as nothing more than unfeeling objects.

The frequent argument that factory farming is justified because cows, unlike giraffes, are “bred for” our plates is not supportable because domesticated cows still exhibit the same behaviors and characteristics of wild ungulates – as these parallels with giraffes show.

The fact that so many people are angry at the killing of Marius while they’re still quite comfortable eating his close relatives from a factory farm should make us think about the inconsistencies in how we treat animals.

Marius’s death is about much more than the killing of one young giraffe, however sad and shocking that is. It is a reminder of our unjustified prejudice toward another animal who is extremely similar in every way that matters – the “giraffe on your plate.”

The Scala Naturae: Alive and Well in Modern Times

Lori Marino on January 26, 2014

Three thousand years ago, in Ancient Egypt, people generally believed that the sun god Ra rose from the darkness each day and rode across the sky. Observations – by sailors, for example, who could watch mountains slowly sinking below the horizon as they sailed from shore – gradually disproved that notion.

However, for another 2,000 years it was still mostly agreed that the Earth was at the center of the universe and that all heavenly bodies revolved around it. Indeed, it could be quite dangerous to suggest otherwise. But scientific data kept showing that this view was indisputably incorrect. And despite persecution from the Catholic Church, Galileo’s model of the universe eventually won out.

Over time, the dynamic self-correcting nature of science has led us to an increasingly better understanding of the world. We no longer accept Earth-centered astronomy, flat-earth models, or the idea that disease is based on imbalances in bodily “humors”.

But there is still one domain that we cling to despite all the evidence to the contrary – a view of nature known as the Scala Naturae or Great Chain of Being. The Scala Naturae is a philosophical view of nature attributed to Aristotle in Ancient Greece. According to this view, nature is arranged on a kind of ladder or hierarchy of increasing “advancement” and value, moving up from inorganic objects like stones, at the very bottom, to plants, through the “lower” animals such as sponges, to vertebrates such as fish, then to “higher” animals such as mammals, then to monkeys and apes, and finally humans.

While we’ve rejected every other inaccurate model of the world, like the flat Earth, we continue to embrace the Scala Naturae.As Christianity grew, the church added spiritual beings to the ladder, placing angels above humans, and then, at the very top, God, who was seen as perfect and all other natural forms as progressively less perfect as one moved back down the ladder.

As this view of nature spread, humans were increasingly seen as being separate from animals by virtue of being “part-animal” and “part spiritual.”

Darwin’s discoveries showed conclusively that there is no ladder, but that all life is instead connected through branching evolutionary relationships – known as phylogeny. Even though he demonstrated that there is no “up” and “down”, Darwin’s insights were relabeled as the “phylogenetic scale”, which continued to preserve a hierarchical system in which “higher” organisms were more “evolutionarily advanced” than “lower” ones.

To this day the phylogenetic scale leads many people to claim the impossible: that some modern species are ancestral to other modern species. For instance, modern fish are viewed as ancestral and “more primitive” to mammals, and modern great apes are viewed as ancestral to humans, who are considered the most “advanced”. And while we’ve rejected every other inaccurate model of the world, like the flat Earth, we continue to embrace the Scala Naturae.

The effects of this belief system continue to be disastrous for us, the other animals, and the planet. That’s because there are consequences to upholding incorrect and archaic views of the world – like when doctors recommended plunging sick people into ice cold water to get rid of the yellow bile. The seductive quality of the Scala Naturae is that it places us at the top of a hierarchy and tells us that we are not only better than all the other animals but that we are qualitatively different and that we enjoy some of the perks of being spiritual, like being closer to God and the angels.

As long as we view ourselves as “higher than” or “qualitatively different from” the other animals, we will continue to make assumptions about them that promote abuse and exploitation. The Scala Naturae gives us license to exploit other animals because they are seen as being further down the ladder. It also helps us to view ourselves as not being fully part of nature, and therefore to disconnect from empathizing with other animals. It seems to give us a “right” to treat them as commodities for our own use. Even seemingly well-intentioned ideas about stewardship and dominion are ultimately just manifestations of the same hierarchical view that leads to abuse and exploitation.

It’s time to add the Scala Naturae to the list of archaic and disputed ideas like the Flat Earth, and to adopt the science-based view of nature as an interconnected tree of life forms, branching in many directions, and where we humans live.

SeaWorld’s Act for Dolphins

Lori Marino on January 22, 2014

SeaWorld wants to put as much distance as possible between itself and the infamous dolphin massacre at Taiji.

In a position statement, the company says it’s “opposed to these drive hunts in Japan and elsewhere,” and, in another statement, that it’s committed to “see it stop.”

I believe them. The Taiji drive hunts, with 41 dolphins dead this last time, along with 52 being shipped to marine circuses from Dubai to China, and another 140 injured, orphaned and traumatized as they’re driven back out to sea, are a public relations nightmare for the whole captivity industry.

To support the notion that they’re against these massacres, SeaWorld is identifying itself with an out-of-date campaign called Act for Dolphins, which was put together eight years ago by marine mammal scientist Diana Reiss, Dr. Paul Boyle (then CEO of The Ocean Project) and myself. And while SeaWorld played no role in Act for Dolphins, by linking to its website they are implying that they were involved.

That, in itself, is fine by me. But SeaWorld has now caught itself in a snag. On the one hand, it tries to co-opt the Scientists Statement Against the Japanese Dolphin Drive Hunts that Diana Reiss and I co-wrote. Yet at the same time it’s claiming that “there is not a shred of scientific support” for my statements in the film Blackfish, and attacking me and my scientific colleagues who are featured in the movie with ad hominem comments depicting us as “advocates masquerading as scientists.”

You can’t have it both ways, SeaWorld. If you want to “Act for Dolphins”, you need to get your own act together first.

Animal Rights and Wrongs

Lori Marino on November 30, 2013

Two events are happening this month that capture, in one case, what is right about animal advocacy today and, in the other, what is wrong.

For the first time ever, today, December 2nd, an animal rights organization, the Nonhuman Rights Project, has gone to court on behalf of a nonhuman animal, asking a judge to recognize him as a “legal person” who has the fundamental right to bodily liberty.

Later this month, the 2013 Biennial Marine Mammal Conference in New Zealand and the Society for Marine Mammalogy (SMM) Ethics Committee will be hosting a special session on the humane killing of marine mammals. The committee states that these are “complex technical, ethical and cultural issues” and there will be an expert panel with the capacity to represent a diversity of viewpoints.

One of these two events represents a potentially transformative effort towards actual enforceable rights for nonhuman beings, and the other represents a fall back to the ethical muck and mire and perpetuation of nonhuman animals as commodities.

One effort says that there is no question about the fundamental nature of nonhuman beings as individuals with a right to live their lives autonomously. The other continues to equivocate on this question, suggesting there is some room for differing viewpoints on the issue of whether marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, even have a right to life.

The fact that the words “ethical” and “killing” can even be spoken in the same breath about marine mammals reinforces how sorely we need enforceable rights for them.

The fact that the words “ethical” and “killing” can even be spoken in the same breath about marine mammals reinforces how sorely we need enforceable rights for them.

Precisely because the premier marine mammal organization in the world thinks it is worthwhile to spend time considering how to kill marine mammals is why we need enforceable rights for them.

By conceding that there is such a thing as “humane” killing of marine mammals and that this issue is “sensitive”, the SMM undermines any credibility it might have as an organization that takes the science of marine mammal intelligence seriously. If it actually did, then the very notion of killing autonomous individuals who have a sense of self, can think about their own thoughts, possess sophisticated memory and communicative capacities, and, in their own habitats, develop varied cultures, would be unthinkable.

The SMM continues to hide in the conservative shadow land of concepts like “management” and “conservation” with no acknowledgement of the individuality and inherent value of the nonhuman beings in their purview. I understand why the SMM, as a global organization, takes the tactic of incrementalism, careful not to offend any of its constituents. It is what an organization does when it has become the reason for its own existence.

But none of the marine mammals being killed every year in Taiji, Japan or in the Faroe Islands, or in captivity can afford the time it takes for the long, slow creep of “progress” defined by the SMM and other organizations who refuse to take a real stand.

Thankfully there are some efforts, like the Nonhuman Rights Project, that represent the vanguard of animal advocacy and recognize the parity across all rights issues – human and nonhuman.

Martin Luther King said: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

Here’s hoping for more animal rights and fewer animal wrongs in 2014.