Dolphins in Captivity + Sea Shepherds

Hey everyone!

So for many years I was fascinated with the sea, growing up as a baby on the coast of Kemptown in Brighton, then moving into Portslade which is Latin for way to the port, that led to my grandparents home up from Shoreham Port, called Mile Oak which had an Oak tree one Mile from the Port. So I am a person that really has grown up with the sound of giant seagulls, the smell of sea, the view of the sea from the downs. It’s something that I used to accept as my everyday. Brighton has a weird thing about it, because people used to sell sea water here as a tonic. I don’t know what sinister poisoning happened as a result of this, because it was never clean, but there is a reset that happens when you get off a train or a car after being somewhere else. The air has a salty reset quality in it.

In Brighton, there is a structure that was once known as the dolphinarium, it is now called the Sea Life Centre which focuses on environmentalism now. It’s the oldest Aquarium in the UK, but once upon a time it was an open roofed dolphin exhibit and I think at one time there was a whole pod there. My partner, my mum and my grandparents raised me on stories of the dolphins and my way of thinking, is I’ve seen a shark in a tank there, the sharks probably 3 foot at the most, that’s the size of a dolphin. It makes absolutely zero sense but that’s just how I work. I loved the idea of being with a dolphin, my grandma used to get me calendars of dolphins, and I just was fascinated by them.

I went to a trip to Spain a few years ago now, and we decided to go to a zoo, and in the zoo was a huge tank full of dolphins and I was horrified because they were bigger than me. I was so shocked to see the way in which they were kept, it was an enclosed tank which was sort of divided into three small pools, and then the show went on where they were basically flipping in unison with some person. They had scratches on them, they were all different ages and it was just disgraceful. If you’ve ever been to a hospice, or a care facility for people with dementia, which I have, it gave me the energy of people with dementia. I don’t know why, there was one young dolphin which was being trained I think by the rest of the pod which were forced to do this ridiculous show, but it’s just not a normal thing. It felt sinister, they were far too big animals. They’re not fish, they have live young and they communicate in sophisticated ways. They know which herbs treat ailments, they have powerful relationships with their young. They give off a massive energy to anyone who’s sensitive to it, and it’s just not how things should be in 2020.

I’m not familiar with the type of dolphin these were, I presumed bottle nose, but I could be wrong. It’s really one thing to have a conservationist style zoo which protects endangered species from cruelty when in the wild, or rehoming animals mistreated or abused, there is another thing taking an animal from the open waters and insisting via a cruel training pattern that they perform on command in a small tank.

We’ve got too much time on our hands on a global scale if this is something that’s considered a means of entertainment, this is really not cool with me and it was after this incident that I decided that I would do something that involved bringing attention to animals in captivity. The year I got back, I started to question this stuff and I visited the Vegan Festival in Brighton which I included on my blog. There, I found out about the incredible organisation Sea Shepherds, who not only have an international fleet of massive boats, they go out there and they disrupt culling festivals in places like the Faroe Islands, where it is a Nordic ‘right of passage’ to herd up and kill different whales. They have so many awesome awareness campaigns on ocean waste impacting on wild life, and the global fleets have interrupted killings all over the continent of Africa, in Japan, it’s just something that really was amazing to see and I reached out to them this year.

I’m going to link to there website here - https://www.seashepherd.org.uk/

Check out what they do, and read up on some of the other things going on in the UK, I am very passionate about this and I will be updated more information on my future plans.