Persuasive Essay On Sea Killing

This higher brain function can account for attacks such as the one by Kasatka who on two occasions, 1999 and 2006, attacked veteran trainer Ken Peters during live shows in SeaWorld San Diego (Hardgrove 97). In 1999, another whale named Tilikum made headlines when the mutilated body of a twenty-seven year old man was found floating in the water after he’d snuck into the facility and Tilikum attacked him (Hardgrove 98). Tilikum had previously killed a trainer in Sealand of the Pacific in 1991 before he was moved to SeaWorld, but that wasn’t cause to keep him away from performing. In 2010, Tilikum, now weighing 12,000 pounds, pulled trainer Dawn Brancheau by her ponytail, a standard for SeaWorld’s female trainers, and pulled her into his pool. He isolated her in the center of the pool by dunking her underwater and dragging her by her leg which he gnawed on. He bit at her until she died, throwing her up into the air like a ball, while an audience looked on and cameras filmed. He would pull her to the pool
While they are not an endangered species, they are hunted mercilessly by the fish industry especially off the coasts of China, Japan and parts of the North Pacific by the Russians (Ivashchenko 73). This extreme hunting has left the oceans with an unknown number of whales and thus, keeping them in facilities such as SeaWorld helps to replenish their numbers. However, since SeaWorld no longer catches or buys wild whales and instead breeds them for the very purpose of continuing the gene pool as Hardgrove describes in his book, it doesn’t help any animals still left in the wild. In fact, having such high numbers in captivity, while still allowing whaling practices to continue, we encourage whaling to go on. We can’t both praise whale captivity, and leave whales in nature to fend for themselves if we are really worried about