UCF Students to Bring Virtual Reality Orca to Campus in Push to End SeaWorld Ticket Sales

peta2 Supporters Will Invite Students to Put Themselves in an Orca’s Place in Stunning Empathy-Building Experience

For Immediate Release:
December 3, 2015

Contact:
Sophia Charchuk 202-483-7382

Students at the University of Central Florida (UCF) want to stop on-campus SeaWorld ticket sales, and they’re making their campaign high-tech. As they gather signatures to petition the school’s administration, student group Body of Animal Rights Campaigners and Hunter Menning, the campus representative of peta2—PETA’s youth division—will invite students to experience peta2’s “I, Orca” empathy project, which uses Google virtual reality goggles to immerse participants in a world where they can swim freely in the ocean with their orca family and learn how orcas suffer physically and psychologically in SeaWorld’s concrete tanks of chemically treated water.

Where:           The Student Union patio, University of Central Florida, Orlando

When:             Friday, December 4, 12 p.m.

“peta2 wants students to experience for themselves exactly why the University of Central Florida should sever its ties with SeaWorld,” says peta2 Director Ryan Huling. “‘I, Orca’ gives a whale’s-eye view of what SeaWorld means to marine mammals, and that’s a lifetime of suffering and loneliness that’s an ocean away from the freedom and family that they enjoy in nature.”

peta2—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—is calling on SeaWorld to develop ocean sanctuaries where the orcas could be rehabilitated and finally have the opportunity to engage in natural behavior.

For more information, please visit peta2.com.