Eight dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore will no longer be on display at the popular tourist attraction in the heart of the city and will move to a yet-to-be-built seaside sanctuary in Florida or the Caribbean.
The move comes after concerns from animal-rights activists, who believe it is not humane to keep large animals, such as dolphins and elephants, in captivity as part of entertainment shows and attractions at aquariums and zoos.
In an op-ed piece Tuesday in the Baltimore Sun, the aquarium’s chief executive officer John Racanelli referenced the 1993 movie “Free Willy,” about an orca that is taken to an amusement park after it gets caught in nets, and said “through feedback painstakingly gathered over 10 years, we have learned that the American public is increasingly uneasy with the notion of keeping dolphins and whales in captivity.”
Officials at the aquarium said the sanctuary will be a “new option for human care of dolphins.” Details of when the dolphins would actually move from Baltimore have not been worked out, officials said, but they expect the new facility to be done by 2020.
A few years ago, the aquarium changed its popular dolphin exhibit from more of a performance-based show into more of a display where visitors walk through and see the animals swimming in tanks.
The aquarium, which attracts more than 1 million visitors a year, had been contemplating for about five years what to do with the dolphins. The aquarium sits at the Inner Harbor, a hugely popular tourist attraction for the city of Baltimore.
Officials said the eight Atlantic bottlenose dolphins range in age from 7 to 44. Seven were born at the aquarium, and the eighth was brought over from another facility that was closing. Six of the dolphins are female, and two are males.
Aquarium officials are touting the new home for the dolphins as the “first-of-its-kind protected, seaside habitat.” The dolphins will be cared for full-time by a veterinarian and other experts. Officials said, on their website, that they have no plans for breeding the dolphins at the new sanctuary.
On their website, officials said they were considering Florida or the Caribbean for the new sanctuary because those areas had “excellent seawater quality, a protected seaside site, and appropriate air and water temperatures in a year-round climate.”
The aquarium did not say what the new sanctuary for the dolphins will cost but has said it will seek donations to fund it, according to The Baltimore Sun.
The dolphins’ new home will still have a “digital connection” to the aquarium in Baltimore, officials said. It described the sanctuary as having a mission to “advance understanding and protection of cetaceans by offering a natural environment in which the colony of dolphins in our care will thrive.”
Racanelli, the aquarium’s CEO since 2011, also wrote in his op-ed piece that the decision came about in part because of “emerging science and consultation with experts” on dolphins.
Through that, he said, officials believe that “dolphins do indeed thrive when they can form social groups, have opportunities to express natural behaviors and live in a habitat as similar as possible to that for which nature so superbly designed them.”
The aquarium’s move to end its dolphin exhibit comes as other attractions that feature animals have made changes.
The long-running tradition of having elephants perform at the circus ended in the spring when Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus said the animals would no longer be in their shows. The end of the elephants in circus shows came after years of litigation, protest, shifts in public opinions and criticism from activists about having wild animals in entertainment venues.
The aquarium isn’t the only one to change its use of animals in shows and exhibits.
SeaWorld, in Orlando, has said it will stop breeding orcas. Animal-rights activists had called the captive-breeding program inhumane. In announcing its move, SeaWorld had said in a statement, “SeaWorld has been listening and we’re changing. Society is changing and we’re changing with it.”
SeaWorld has 29 orcas. The entertainment park had been under criticism after a 2013 documentary “Blackfish” showed the animals’ living conditions and how dangerous it was for their handlers.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Dana Hedgpeth
