A Letter to Clint Wright, Owner of the Vancouver Aquarium

If you look at an x-ray of a cetaceans pectoral fin, you will see that the skeleton of their fin looks just like my hand. Hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, whales and dolphins left behind land and went to call the ocean their home. Through the miracle of adaptation their hands are now encased in flippers. We live in different environments but that doesn't change the fact that beneath my skin and theirs, we share the same hand. Our blood runs warm, we breathe the same air, we are born to mothers that love us deeply, that nurture us, protect us, and teach us how to speak our language. We belong in families and communities that teach us the skills needed to survive and to thrive in our environments. As well as to adapt when it is needed, so that all may flourish. We belong to cultures that pass on traditions, songs and stories. We develop strong friendships and bonds with those we care about, we are individuals that feel deeply a wide range of emotions from happiness and joy to pain and despair. We are all members of the same biosphere. Many adults want to believe that humans aren't a part of the biosphere. That somehow money has removed them from the natural world I cherish so deeply. An ecosystem that is disappearing and dying so that money can be made.

Somehow, to billions of people worldwide, making money is more important than making healthy ecosystems. Ecosystems where all beings, like whales and dolphins, are valued for their contributions to the biosphere and treated with compassion and respect, ecosystems that we literally depend on for our lives. Whales and dolphins are my relatives in the sea. Even though they don't know me, they help make the oxygen I need to breathe. As I am now seventeen, I know this all to be true. I fail to comprehend why so many others don't. 

There has been much said by the Vancouver aquarium in the news, in the papers, and on the radio about the importance and benefit of keeping cetaceans prisoners in the artificial environment of their concrete tanks. The Vancouver aquarium hired a PR firm. Meaning, they have spent a large portion of their money to make sure that information was spread and managed in order to persuade the public to agree with them to maintain their point of view. -That holding another species against its will for a profit is okay. Especially if you say it benefits the whales and dolphins themselves, the importance of marine biology and other educational research. I think what the aquarium means to say is that it is important to them and beneficial to them since these marine mammals make them millions of dollars per year. 

I don't believe you when you say, “it is okay because they were not taken from the wild” you tell me. The wilderness that is their rightful home, the wilderness that you the scientist, you the CEO of a facility that makes millions of dollars off their imprisonment, want me to believe they have no memory of. 

Let me tell you a story. Let’s say, my mother’s mother was forcibly taken from her home, because she was young and appeared to be “trainable”, hauled screaming onto a boat against her will as her family and community was slaughtered in front of her eyes. Let's say, she was taken to a holding area where, because of her youth and compliance, she was sold to the highest bidder and trafficked across the world to a prison where, in concrete tanks, she would either die from the trauma and stress or learn to cope and survive. Lets say, unlike so many others, she survived. She survived by doing what she was told, tricks for food, performing on command for her captors. Individuals who paid large amounts of money so that people could entertain and pleasure themselves at her expense. 

Do you think she forgot what happened to her? When she became part of the captive breeding program and had a child of her own, my mother, do you not think she passed on this history to her child?  What came before, what life was like when she was free, how it was that she ended up swimming, landlocked, in circles, never giving up hope for a way out? Do you not know that she wished for a life different for her child? Do you not think her story was passed on to the next generation? Mine. My mother would not want this life for me. We know cetaceans speak to each other. You can not tell me that cetaceans born in captivity do not know that there is something better out there. The oral history passed on. Not only that- they feel it from deep within.

In our language we call it instinct. A way of behaving, thinking, or feeling that is not learned. Despite conditioning within their concrete cells, they exhibit behavior, they think and feel from deep within the cells of their being. Cellular memory- their home is imprinted upon their very DNA. They know home is not an aquarium. This story we humans tell ourselves to be true because it makes us feel better, more importantly it is a story we tell ourselves because it makes more money. What I have learned is people care more about money than doing what is right. Whales and dolphins do not care about money.

Whales and dolphins are not dollars, they are not objects like a doll or a stuffed toy, they are beings just like you and just like me. I am now 17 years old and I know this to be true. What you are teaching me, someone yet not even of age, who will most likely see the collapse of the oceans ecosystem in her lifetime, is that another living being can be imprisoned and exploited for money. That rather than fix all the wrongs we have committed to our ecosystems, we should buy a ticket to see whales and dolphins in your pretend pool of an ocean while we ignore what is happening in the real one. I want you to look at me and see them. My relatives that are imprisoned in aquariums, not not because they did something wrong, but because we have done something wrong. Something very wrong.The catastrophes in our oceans, endangering cetaceans and humans alike, will not be solved by studying whales and dolphins in captivity. That is a lie. The only hope we have is to look at ourselves, to study and examine ourselves. To take in all the mistakes we humans have put on display in this world, all the wrongs we have done to the ecosystems of the planet, and to change them. I want to change them. I want you to look at me and see my cetacean relatives that are dying because of all the horrors humans are inflicting upon the oceans. I want you to look at me, knowing the challenges I will have in the future because of you. I want you to think of me before you make any further decisions to allow the aquarium to deprive more whales and dolphins of their right to be free. 

Take 3 breaths, two of which were made for you by the cetaceans exercising their basic right to swim freely in their homes and with their families. A freedom that contributes to the health and wellbeing of OUR ecosystem. Producing 50-80% of the air we breathe. So before you decide the fate of individuals who may not look like you, but I am telling you from my heart to yours, are very much like you, remember what the true cost is. To cetaceans, to me, to you, to our ecosystem, to all of us if you allow the aquarium to take away the freedom of more whales and dolphins. What does that teach me? What does that teach all of us?