Joan Jett Blasts SeaWorld’s Sexual Abuse of Animals at Annual Meeting

For Immediate Release:
June 13, 2022

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

The iconic Joan Jett will attend SeaWorld’s virtual annual meeting of shareholders today on PETA’s behalf to take the abusement park to task for its repulsive and indefensible sexual abuse of whales and dolphins. She will pose the following question to executives:

“SeaWorld has caused public outrage by continuing to forcibly breed bottlenose dolphins and beluga whales in order to create generations of animals who then suffer in cramped tanks, deprived of any semblance of a natural life. In the park’s breeding program, unwilling female dolphins are taken from the water and sometimes even drugged so they can’t fight back while SeaWorld staff thrust tubes filled with semen into their uteruses. Some must endure this process repeatedly, only for their babies to die or be taken away and shipped off to other marine prisons. We can all agree that sexually abusing dolphins and whales who must carry out their forced pregnancies is disrespectful to these forms of intelligent life, heedless of these wonderful animals’ rights, and just plain wrong. My question is this: When will SeaWorld end its sordid breeding program?”

Forcible impregnation isn’t the only misery sensitive marine mammals endure at SeaWorld. In nature, these intelligent animals would be swimming dozens of miles a day with their family pods, exploring their vast ocean home, and maintaining close relationships within their dynamic social structures. At SeaWorld’s abusement parks, however, approximately 140 dolphins are packed together into just seven small tanks, where they suffer from the stress of years of intensive confinement. Incompatible dolphins have no way to escape from one another, resulting in fights and injuries. More than 40 orcas, 300 other dolphins and whales, 400 pinnipeds, and countless other animals have died in SeaWorld’s tiny tanks.

Jett joins a long list of celebrities—including P!nk, Noah Cyrus, Bella Thorne, and Steve Aoki—who have teamed up with PETA to speak out against cruel marine parks.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.