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Jason Hribal Biography

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“Sea World orcas work as many as eight shows a day, 365 days a year. In the ocean, these whales can swim up to ninety miles a day. In captivity, the tanks are measured in feet. In the ocean, orcas have highly evolved and cohesive matriarchal cultures. Generations of family members, combining both females and males, spend their entire lives together—with each family, or pod, communicating its own unique dialect. In captivity, little to none of this exists. Orca culture is effectively destroyed.”

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Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“In the late 1960s, a park could purchase an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin for about $300. Today, that same species will cost more than $100,000. Indeed, this spike in price has forced zoos to change their entire philosophy. “The attitude was these marine mammals were an expendable commodity,” a former vice president of Sea World confided. “If these animals perished, you’d just go out and replace them. The ease didn’t drive a great deal of research of what they needed to keep them healthy.[...] Yet if “expendability” was the industry’s previous philosophy, “reproduction” came to be its new one.”

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Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“The zoo industry is full of such contradictions. It helps people learn about the importance of animals, but not what is vitally important to the animals themselves. Sea mammals, elephants, and primates are capable of so many amazing feats, but they are incapable of demonstrating their intentions and making their own choices. The industry encourages you to think that these animals are intelligent, but not intelligent enough to have the ability to resist. The industry encourages you to care about them, so that you and your children will return for a visit. But it does not want you to care so much that you might develop empathy and begin to question whether these animals actually want to be there.”

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“At the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, the dolphins developed stress-induced ulcers. Shopping malls are enough to drive most individuals insane, given enough time spent in them. For Edmonton’s dolphins, though, there was no escape. Every day was the same. Shows were performed twice a day. The water tanks never got any larger. The light always remained artificial. The crowds of shoppers never stopped coming. The enervating elevator music never stopped playing. So it was hardly surprising that all four of the mall’s dolphins suffered from stress-related afflictions.”

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Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“Tragically, the average life expectancy during this era for captive orcas stood between one to four years. Aquariums often went through a whole series of whales before just one of them made it into adolescence. Today, the life expectancy of captive killer whales has improved: rising to about ten years. Yet this is still a far cry from the thirty to sixty years that orcas can live in the ocean.”

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“Sea World was treading carefully. Park officials stated repeatedly how essential and valuable Tilikum had been to their operations. This is true. Zoos and circuses are a business, and Blackstone paid 2.3 billion dollars for its purchase. The most productive employees in that business, in terms of labor and revenue, are the orcas themselves. Tilikum has performed for almost nineteen years in Orlando, sired thirteen calves, and produced in the range of a billion dollars in revenue. Nevertheless, Sea World did not believe that Tilikum had earned the right to retire. None of that billion dollars would be used to build an ocean sanctuary for older captive orcas. They do not deserve it.”

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Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“Large glass windows had been installed in the exhibit, and the orangutans took to pitching rocks at them. San Diego officials, thinking quickly, instituted an exchange program. One non-thrown stone would get you a banana. But the orangutans were not interested and kept trying to break the windows. The park finally had to bring in a contractor to dig up the entire ground floor of the exhibit in order to remove all of the rocks, as each shattered window cost the zoo $900 to replace. What happened next? The orangutans began to tear the ceramic insulators off of the wall and threw them instead. Evidently, these animals really wanted out.”

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Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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“Organization and mutual aid are essential aspects in many animal cultures, including elephants, gorillas, and chimpanzees. Zoos, however, are places wherein that culture is restricted, altered, or even destroyed. This is done, whether intentionally or not, through the removal of autonomy, the break up of the family unit, restrictions on corporeal movement, continuous transfer of animals from one facility to next, and in the alteration of other living patterns. Psychologists call this a process of alienation and institutionalization. Hence, within these species, what we tend to see in zoos is a much more individualistic-based community.”

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Book:Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
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