The executive director of the Marine Mammal Commission has stunned animal advocates by injecting some rationality into a long-standing and contentious debate regarding the tank size of Lolita, an orca who is said to be the world’s loneliest.
In a letter to the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which enforces the Animal Welfare Act, Dr. Rebecca Lent argued that a large cement island in the center of Lolita’s tank encroaches on her space – a fact that APHIS has long denied. Currently, the AWA mandates minimum tank dimensions for marine mammals, yet it does not account for so-called obstructions. Dr. Lent states that these should be taken into account, and the fact that they do not renders safeguards in the AWA “meaningless”.
"We are 100% behind U.S. Marine Mammal Commission Director Dr. Rebecca Lent's statement that all the current minimum space requirements must be unobstructed,” stated IMMP director David Phillips in the New Times. "Any allowance of ‘partial obstructions’ render the space requirements meaningless and must be prohibited.”
Dr. Lent’s statements could carry weight in a court, despite the MMC not having enforcement powers, and many are now calling for a re-measurement of Lolita’s tank in light of her statements. Recently, animal welfare organizations, including IMMP, requested that APHIS disallow partial obstructions from minimum space requirements, among other suggested amendments to the AWA.
Phillips further stated: “The Miami Seaquarium should be ashamed of itself for subjecting Lolita to this inhumane and substandard pool for more than 40 years. It is worse than the pool where Keiko lived in Mexico City and should be shut down.”
Captured from the Southern Resident orca pod off the coast of Washington in 1970, the now 50-year old Lolita has been living and performing at the Miami Seaquarium in a tiny tank some call the “whale bowl”. She has not seen another orca since her wild-caught tank mate, Hugo, died in 1980.
Sign the following petition to force changes in the allowable standards for captive orca pools, and to stop cetacean captivity for good.
