New PETA Billboard Zings SeaWorld’s ‘Friendship’ Ad
Captive Beluga Responds to Company’s Cozy Claim With ‘Close the Whale Jail’
For Immediate Release:
July 31, 2020
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
In response to a billboard disingenuously advertising “friendships” between a captive beluga whale and SeaWorld circus-show trainers, PETA has placed its own billboard right down the road from it showing a beluga at SeaWorld and slamming the idea that friends keep their friends prisoner for life in a concrete cell.
“Forcibly breeding and imprisoning marine mammals in tanks a millionth of the area they would naturally travel in their lifetime is exploitation and abuse, not friendship,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA urges everyone to see through SeaWorld’s phony ads and stay a league away from this shameless abusement park.”
In nature, belugas maintain dynamic relationships with large social networks, choose their own mates, and swim freely in the ocean. But at SeaWorld, they’re used as breeding machines, and some have been repeatedly impregnated, only to lose their babies. One beluga mother named Martha gave birth to four calves who are now dead—and her one surviving calf was taken from her and shipped to parks around the country. Dozens of belugas have died at SeaWorld parks, including an infant who died just moments after being born in 2017.
PETA’s billboard is located at the intersection of Telegraph Road and S. Maple Avenue in Commerce and is visible from I-5.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit SeaWorldOfHurt.com.
