PETA Statement re SeaWorld Abu Dhabi Opening

For Immediate Release:
May 15, 2023

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Below, please see a statement from PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman in response to SeaWorld’s opening of a park in Abu Dhabi:

If SeaWorld can build an abusement park in Abu Dhabi, it could build a seaside sanctuary, and the only reason it doesn’t is corporate greed. With even the notorious Miami Seaquarium planning to send the orca Lolita to a sanctuary, PETA is calling on SeaWorld to stop finding new ways to squeeze money out of captive animals and new continents for its tawdry dolphin-exploiting shows.

Among the 24 dolphins SeaWorld secretly shipped to Abu Dhabi is a female named Alice, who was “rescued” in 2007 and imprisoned in a concrete cell at SeaWorld San Antonio. Alice was forcibly bred in the company’s dolphin-breeding program, in which staff pull female dolphins out of the water—sometimes after drugging them so that they can’t fight back—and shove tubes filled with semen into their uteruses. Alice gave birth to two calves after being impregnated via this forced insemination.

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