Sunwing Airlines Ends SeaWorld Ticket Sales After PETA Appeal
Canadian Company Cuts Ties With Abusement Park After Canada Moves to Outlaw Whale, Dolphin Captivity
For Immediate Release:
January 31, 2019
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
After more than 155,000 PETA supporters e-mailed Sunwing Travel Group—the largest tour operator in North America—requesting that it stop selling SeaWorld tickets, Sunwing did the right thing and scrubbed that option from its website. PETA is sending vegan, whale-shaped chocolates to the company to thank it for the move, which comes as Parliament considers Bill S-203, which would make keeping cetaceans in captivity or breeding them criminal offenses in Canada.
“Sunwing soared, in the estimation of everyone who’s upset that SeaWorld confines animals to tiny concrete cells and deprives them of a real and natural life,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA encourages everyone to stay away from marine abusement parks and to support only travel providers that avoid animal-abusive facilities.”
More than 40 orcas, over 300 other dolphins and whales, and approximately 450 seals, sea lions, and walruses have died at SeaWorld’s parks. Captive-born orca Kayla died at the age of 30 at SeaWorld Orlando just this week—after years of being hauled from park to park and forced to perform tricks in chemically treated water—even though orcas in nature can live to be more than 100. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—had long pushed SeaWorld to ban orca breeding, which it eventually did, and is urging the company to close its tiny tanks and move the surviving orcas and other animals to seaside sanctuaries where they could finally enjoy some semblance of a natural life.
Sunwing joins a growing list of companies—including Air Canada, WestJet, Panama Jack, World Travel Guide, Mattel, Taco Bell, Mott’s Applesauce, Thomas Cook, and JetBlue, Southwest, and Alaska Airlines—that refuse to promote SeaWorld, and PETA is now calling on Maritime Travel and Transat A.T. to follow suit.
For more information, please visit SeaWorldOfHurt.com.
