#Belugas

[orcinus-veterinarius]

Learning anything about marine mammal training will make you re-evaluate so much of your relationship with your own pets. There is so much force involved in the way we handle domestic animals. Most of it isn’t even intentional, it just stems from impatience. I’m guilty of it myself!

But with the exception of certain veterinary settings where the animal’s health is the immediate priority, why is it so important to us that animals do exactly what we want exactly when we want it? Why do we have to invent all these tools and contraptions to force them to behave?

When a whale swam away from a session, that was that. The trainer just waited for them to decide to come back. If they flat out refused to participate in behaviors, they still got their allotment of fish. Nothing bad happened. Not even when 20-30 people were assembled for a procedure, and the whale chose not to enter the medical pool. No big deal. Their choice and comfort were prioritized over human convenience.

It’s almost shocking to return to domestic animal medicine afterwards and watch owners use shock collars and chokers and whips to control their animals. It’s no wonder that positive reinforcement was pioneered by marine mammal trainers. When you literally can’t force an animal to do what you want, it changes your entire perspective.

I want to see that mindset extended to our domestic animals.

[starheartworkshops]

Hello, Sweethearts! I have new redesigns of some of my stim and fidget pals tab! I hope you enjoy and will bring home these redesigns - reminder that my entire shop is 31% off until Halloween, so the base prices below at the date of posting this are a little lower than usual!

Axolotl and Whale Shark Bracelet - $16 USD

Whale Shark School Bracelet - $16 USD

Rainbow Beluga Bracelets - $13 USD

Every US order $35 has free shipping, I ship internationally, my inbox is always open if you have questions, and boosts are appreciated!

[leoparduscolocola]

Happy Empty the Tanks Day! There’s no beauty in stolen freedom🐬

Image credit: Empty the Tanks, Animal Welfare Institute, and Oceanic Preservation Society

[antiqueanimals]

Walt Disney's White Wilderness: Animals of the Arctic. By Robert Louvain and the Staff of the Walt Disney Studio. 1958.

Internet Archive

[aquatic-batt]

character design dump!! shoutout to @drofpoop for suggesting I make the last two :3

[moonwatcher3]

Rant :3

INLOVE THE OCEAN SO MUCH OMG

it’s so pretty!!! i love love love it! seawings are one of my favorite dragons because they live in the ocean after all but anyway

BELUGAS.

I HATE THEM.

they’re so creepy. they make me mad 😭 i’m watching one of those ocean videos that records sea animals in aquariums and stuff, they’re showing belugas as i type this. THEYRE SO WEIRD. the way they look when they swim just makes me so freaking mad and uncomfortable and genuinely upset. they want to be whales so bad but jokes on them they got a big giant head a small mouth and ugly way too long bodies. ICK. they look so weird and bony and ew ew ew.

in darkstalker Indigo was so real for preferring to think of Fathoms “beluga” as a dolphin. those guys have horror stories sure but they’re like a billion trillion times cuter and cooler looking than belugas. the video is playing dolphins not in-fact, they’re just so much better than belugas 🥰 if i had to pick one animal to remove from the earth without any consequences i would pick beluga. they might be cool and all to some of yall but i would live my life gladly knowing that belugas had never existed, actually no i wouldn’t BECAUSE THEY WOULDNT EXIST 😡😡

[quillusquillus]

can we talk about how everyone says beluga whales are "called canaries of the sea" literally every time they're talked about in documentaries but nobody actually calls them that except the documentaries

[scooby-doo-exploration]

cristalplanetheart

[blackandwhiteproductions]

Beluga Whales uwv at SeaWorld in San Diego 17 September 2024

[thestars56]

I love belugas so much LIKE JUST LOOK AT THEM

[orcinus-veterinarius]

Are dolphins still being captured for aquariums/parks and is it ethical (or complicated?)

Thanks for the ask! Yes, captures unfortunately do still occur in unregulated countries, though far less frequently than in the past. One of the most infamous examples is the annual dolphin drive in Taiji, Japan. While the main purpose of this hunt is to kill animals for meat, a small number of young, attractive dolphins are kept alive each year for sale. Nowadays, only unaccredited institutions purchase these dolphins, and even the Japanese Association of Zoos and Aquariums now prohibits its members from acquiring captured dolphins. Although Taiji is the most well-known, the majority of cetaceans captured from the wild in the 2000s/2010s came from Russia, which recently prohibited the practice.

Western parks and aquariums have not purchased wild-captured cetaceans in decades. The last captures in US waters occurred in 1989, and the last foreign imports were in the early 1990s (long before widespread public sentiment turned against dolphinariums). I do not believe the practice was ethical, and almost all my colleagues would agree with me. Some of them were indeed brutal affairs, such as the infamous Penn Cove captures, in which several young Southern Resident killer whales (including the famous Tokitae) were taken. Multiple animals were inadvertently killed, and the hunters clumsily attempted to hide the deaths by stuffing the whales’ corpses with rocks. The bodies resurfaced, and following public backlash orca captures were no longer performed in the US.

As awareness of animal welfare grew amongst scientists and the general public in the 70s and 80s, collections of smaller cetacean species became considerably less vicious. They were typically supervised by a veterinarian, and care was taken to ensure animals were not physically harmed. However, these were still undeniably stressful to the animals.

I’m glad the practice stopped. Dolphins are not endangered, and I don’t think we can justify the trauma of removing healthy young animals from their pods. Of course, I make exceptions for individuals that are ill, injured, or a danger to themselves or humans (like Clearwater Marine Aquarium’s Izzy)—and these situations are never taken lightly. And if a species ever became endangered (highly unlikely for bottlenose, but a possibility for belugas), that would also be cause for reevaluation.

Dolphins do quite well in modern accredited aquariums. In the United States, all managed dolphins were either born in human care or have been out of the wild for over 30 years (excluding non-releasable rescues). While there are valid concerns about cetacean captivity, ongoing wild capture is not one of them.

[dykescooby]

I kissed a beluga whale

[leoparduscolocola]

the thing i fear pro-caps will never understand is that no matter how luxurious a captive cetacean’s surroundings are, it’s still fundamentally wrong to hold them in captivity due to their socioemotional capacities and their clear sense of self. one could argue that no animal should be forced to meet an arbitrary human-made definition of “personhood” in order to qualify for liberty, and i would agree with that. however, in order to start the massive task of bringing about a paradigm shift in the way the general human public views nonhuman animals (from “something” to “someone” and worthy of equal consideration instead of being legally considered underlings), we should start by achieving that shift for nonhuman animals that are charismatic and that humans easily relate to before tackling the more difficult task of enacting that shift for animals that we’ve been taught all our lives to view solely as curiosities, pests, or sources of food. no matter if a cetacean is being held in a cramped solitary confinement pool barely bigger than their body, a spacious lagoon with plenty of conspecifics and enrichment, or somewhere in between, their status as a captive is still inherently immoral. that’s not to say that all captive situations are the same; the cetaceans in the lagoon are definitely happier than the lonesome one in the tiny pool. rather, i’m saying that even the best possible captive situation is still wrong, so perpetuating the institution of cetacean captivity is also wrong. most captive cetaceans probably can’t be released, but we must try to prioritize their autonomy and make their lives as similar to the wild as possible. i find it deeply ironic that pro-caps claim to love these animals on a deep level that can only be achieved by interacting with them in confinement rather than observing them in their natural habitats, but their love consists of denying them everything that’s important to them. pro-caps refuse to acknowledge their personhood, eagerly attempt to “debunk” cetacean intelligence studies, and support the violation of cetaceans’ freedom of choice through capture, artificial insemination, transfers between facilities, et cetera.

[antiqueanimals]

Walt Disney's White Wilderness: Animals of the Arctic. By Robert Louvain and the Staff of the Walt Disney Studio. 1958.

Internet Archive