This week Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park officially announced the birth of Dora's calf. The yet-to-be-named male calf was born on December 5, 2023 and weighed 196 kilograms and was 2.43 long. The park says that after giving birth Dora became very weak due to excessive physical exertion. The care team immediately went into the water to assist in adjusting the swimming direction of the calf to prevent him from hitting the walls of the tank. Now the calf is healthy and lively, and weighs 273 kilograms and is 2.8 meters long.

https://weibo.com/5553190582/5011609231818878

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/S_WStRZFQgbvTVy6zJMq9A

hey, it's me. i'm not coming back to tumblr permanently, but i figured i'd post this here as a virtual diary entry of sorts (and because i don't know anyone irl that wants to talk about cetaceans at the moment). maybe this post will change people's minds, or at least get them thinking. this isn't directed at anyone or anything; it's more to clear my mind and hopefully inform others about orca captivity, seaworld, etc.

the past six months have been very difficult for me. i'm doing better now, but i'm just not at the place in life i thought i would be at right now. throughout my struggles, one of my biggest sustainers has been my passion for animals, and orcas have been my predominant obsession for a while now. the felidae family, especially lions, will always have my heart—they're the first animal i fell in love with, and they will always be incredibly fascinating and awe-inspiring to me. however, orcas have seized hold of me in a way that i can't really describe. everything i've learned about them has blown me away, from their uniquely stable, mostly nonviolent and matriarchal social structure to their incredibly diverse hunting techniques to their cultural behaviors to the wide diversity of their physical appearance. i just love them so much.

as such, it is inevitable that i would encounter debates about captivity in the course of my internet travels in search of ever more information about these animals. for most of my life, i was unapologetically pro seaworld, viewing them as no different from any other zoo or aquarium and their critics as simply having been bamboozled by the film blackfish (although i staunchly refused to actually watch the film until a few months ago, only listening to how seaworld and its supporters depicted the film to me). by the time i started this blog, i had grown more critical of them, as reflected in my pinned post. at that time, i was more critical of killer whale captivity in general than of seaworld specifically. however, after i had to leave my former college in the middle of the semester due to my mental health, i found myself with a lot of time on my hands before the start of the semester at my new college, so i started doing some more research. as a history nerd, i have always been interested in the history of human interactions with wildlife, and the history of human interaction with orcas is unique from an anthrozoological perspective. i became particularly interested in the era just before and after the release of blackfish in 2013—how seaworld, the scientific community, the animal advocacy community, and the public at large responded, and the lasting reverberations of that era today. i fired up the wayback machine and began painstakingly examining any website i could find from that era that had to do with that topic, from awesomeocean.com to seaworldofhurt.com (neither of which are credible sources, btw: awesome ocean is basically a seaworld-funded buzzfeed clone and seaworld of hurt is run by peta). what i found blew me away in the worst way possible.

the website i spent the most time on was askseaworld.com/ask.seaworldcares.com (https://web.archive.org/web/20160110084856/http://ask.seaworldcares.com/). i cross-checked the information posted there with a little-known website i urge everyone to check out, https://www.seaworldfactcheck.com/ (which i didn't have to use the wayback machine to access, because seaworld has attempted to purge pretty much everything related to the blackfish era from their websites whereas anticap websites haven't). only a handful of the sheer volume of questions they received were fact-checked by seaworldfactcheck, so i had to check a lot of them myself. i was flabbergasted by the responses seaworld posted on askseaworld. they ranged from just your typical corporate pr messaging to outright lies. a common thread running through all of them was a complete refusal to admit that they ever did anything wrong in their entire history. that's something that the entire zoological field has trouble doing, but never had i seen it on such clear display. for example, they audaciously claimed that kohana's calves weren't inbred, and that the degree of relatedness between kohana and her calves' father, keto, is standard practice in ex situ breeding programs. meanwhile, the aza says that inbreeding is to be avoided here and here. additionally, these two pages, while they focus on pedigree dogs, stress that a coefficient of inbreeding (the likelihood of having identical alleles from a common ancestor on both sides of the pedigree) over 5% leads to problems, and kohana's calves had an inbreeding coefficient of 6.25%. i'm no geneticist, but sw's response to that question is questionable, to say the least. when asked about the whales they captured from the wild, they only used the word "collected", which came across to me as corporate doublespeak attempting to obfuscate the trauma and utter cruelty of ripping these complex, cultural, family-oriented animals from their families permanently for the primary purpose of entertainment—which, regardless of their current messaging, was undeniably the purpose of seaworld when it was founded (see page 9 of that link, which is also an incredibly well-researched and well-referenced argument against marine mammals in captivity that cannot be dismissed out of hand just because it comes from an anticap source). they refused to offer even a semblance of regret for how those captures were carried out—even a halfhearted "society's standards for animal welfare were different back then" or "at the time, we had no idea how this sort of thing could impact these animals" would be better than what they said, which was simply that "those were a long time ago". ok, but just because we didn't know it was wrong back then doesn't mean it wasn't wrong. it was just as wrong then as it was now, and seaworld doesn't even say it would be wrong for them to do so now; they just repeat the same line over and over about their last captures being decades ago.

however, none of these are as bad as the askseaworld response that appalled me the most. it genuinely made me question every positive thing i had ever heard about seaworld. unlike most of the questions, the name of the person who asked it was not stated, giving the impression that seaworld perhaps posed it to itself as a sort of preemptive strike. this was their response:

this is one of the most unacceptable and heartrending things i have ever seen written by any person or entity related to animals. nonhuman animals are not a monolith; there are millions of species of animals out there, each one with its own unique behaviors, social structures (or lack of social structures), role in the broader web of life, and ways of thinking. to suggest that the social dynamics of all the animals in the world are so similar that they can be crammed into the word "most" is utterly presumptuous and incorrect. at the risk of sounding like a vegan activist, i will dare to say that this statement enforces a harmful anthropocentric worldview that implies that humans are the only species that could experience distress at the loss of a loved one. by declaring that most animals just get over a member of their social group dying without a second thought, seaworld dismisses years upon years of science revealing the social lives of animals from cows to rabbits to, yes, orcas. including parents in this statement is especially ironic, considering that mother orcas undeniably demonstrate some of the strongest bonds with their children in the animal kingdom, arguably even stronger than humans—after all, when's the last time you met a human who has never left their mother's side their whole life? with this statement, seaworld revealed a callous indifference to the rich inner lives of their animals, focusing on the grief their human employees feel when an orca under their care dies over the far greater grief the orcas themselves probably feel when a member of their actual family dies. orcas have inherent worth and dignity and that deserves to be acknowledged, not dismissed so we can all go back to empathizing with the trainers. i'm not dismissing the trainers' grief in any way; i'm not trying to say the reverse of what seaworld said. rather, i'm saying that their grief shouldn't be seen as more important or more valid than the grief of the orcas.

some might say that this single response, no doubt composed with the help of a public relations firm, should not be taken as representative of seaworld or its trainers as a whole. to that, i would say that while individual employees (i.e., orca trainers) of seaworld may not agree with this statement, it can be presumed that this is or was at the time the official stance of the corporation that is seaworld parks and entertainment, incorporated. personally, i do not think it is possible to separate support for the trainers from support from the larger corporation running the show, as financially supporting seaworld inevitably supports the corporation (which has asked its employees to do some pretty unethical things) and its stakeholders, not just its employees. customers' money is not going into the pockets of trainers; it's going into the corporation first and foremost to pay the CEO and stakeholders before a paltry amount per dollar is redistributed at the company's whim to their trainers and rescue efforts.

as i processed this response, i decided to do some more research into the anti-cap side of things. i found that, despite seaworld's constant claims that they are a science-based organization, i could not find a wild orca biologist (meaning somebody who researched orcas exclusively in the wild, without a personal connection to seaworld or any other captive entity) who supported keeping orcas in captivity in general or seaworld specifically. of course, i don't know all of the wild orca biologists in the world, so i could be missing somebody, but all of the big names who conducted the most groundbreaking research on orcas in their natural habitats condemn orca captivity, as these links show: michael bigg, alexandra morton, ken balcom, deborah giles, naomi rose, paul spong, erich hoyt, and ingrid visser. these are not peta activists—they are experts in their field with phds and decades of experience! pro-caps often accuse anti-caps of only listening to their emotions instead of science, but how is it valid to dismiss all of these esteemed scientists as being biased when their research and experiences in the field with orcas are the reason why they are against captivity? seaworld tends to portray itself as objective and rational and their opponents as emotional and irrational, but how can all of these orca experts who have nothing to gain financially from opposing seaworld be completely incorrect when it comes to captivity and the corporation that profits off of having them in captivity be completely correct? the most praise directed towards orca captivity from a wild orca researcher i could find was robert pittman referring to them as "sacrifical animals" who display obvious signs of poor welfare but need to be kept in captivity anyway so the public will fall in love with their species; hardly a glowing endorsement. in her presentation at the california coastal commission, naomi rose said something (starting at 10:36) that really opened my eyes. she said that she does not believe that seaworld and its trainers are being intentionally cruel to their animals, but that they simply do not understand them: "if they don't know what normal is, then they cannot know what abnormal is." she's saying that in order to build a solid foundational understanding of a species' normal behavior, one must spend as much time as possible observing that species in its normal, evolutionary, default way of living, i.e. "the wild". without doing this sort of firsthand research or drawing upon the scientific literature produced by those who have, one cannot claim that an animal of this species in totally abnormal conditions is displaying normal behavior. the aim of captivity for any species should be to replicate an animal's normal way of living as much as possible to allow the optimal amount of normal behaviors to be expressed, and what the scientists i have mentioned claim is that orca captivity is failing at replicating this way of living.

the institution of orca captivity in its current form takes away almost all elements of what would be considered an orca's normal lifestyle, from hunting to staying in their matrilines to communicating with other orca pods to moving large distances on a daily basis to choosing who they mate with and when to experiencing changes in water depth, light level, pressure, salinity, currents, waves, and weather. they destroy their teeth , exhibit increased aggression levels with each other (compared to their remarkably stable social structure in their natural habitat), and experience dorsal fin collapse, a phenomenon that seaworld has declared has no implications for these animals' well-being despite conducting zero research on it (seriously, imagine if all male lions' manes fell out in captivity and zoos shrugged their shoulders and said it was fine without ever exploring why). manmade enrichment and training can supplement this, but in my opinion it can never replace it entirely because these animals live such active and complex lives in the wild. basically the only natural thing that they are allowed to do in captivity is breed (but again, they can't always choose when they mate and with whom). i and the above scientists believe that orcas' welfare is already so compromised in captivity that removing this element is worth it to protect future orcas from having to endure this and to reduce demand for wild captures as genetic diversity in breeding programs runs out (to my knowledge less than 30 orcas worldwide are part of captive breeding programs) and, as we're seeing in china, new parks opening demand more orcas faster than they can be born. more and more and more breeding (chimelong has been breeding especially rapidly, forcing katenka to have 3 calves in just under four years when a wild orca would only have one calf in that time frame, and shanghai and kamogawa sea world are breeding as well) does not quell the need for wild captures; it drives it. the success of seaworld parks in the usa is likely a major factor in why businesspeople in other countries (china, russia) have started majorly investing in capturing orcas in the past decade.

that brings me to something that has really disturbed me lately. over the months since chimelong spaceship opened in china, i have seen a continual backwards shift in what the pro-cap community has considered acceptable. the number of pro-caps that i have seen praising chimelong while giving mere lip service to the fact that most of their orcas were traumatically ripped from their families is astounding. you cannot praise a facility while ignoring the source of their animals, and you cannot condemn the fact that these orcas were wild-caught while throwing your support behind the industry driving demand for these captures. i highly doubt people come to a theme park that is literally shaped like a giant spaceship with any intention of being educated or supporting conservation; they come there to be entertained, just as people came to seaworld solely to be entertained for much of its history. also, pro-caps must not ignore the fact that spaceship's parent company, chimelong, operates a deplorable circus, chimelong international circus, that abuses wild animals and forces them to perform dangerous and demeaning tricks. chimelong also operates zhuhai chimelong ocean kingdom, at which cruelty and neglect have been documented (china cetacean alliance may be connected to animal rights groups, but that doesn't mean the results of their investigations are completely invalid). this report about chimelong and shanghai, including concerning animal behavior and misinformation being spread by chimelong trainers, is also incredibly concerning. even if no outright orca abuse has been recorded at shanghai, chimelong, or other new facilities yet, it is still concerning that their sister facilities engage in such blatant abuse with other animals. if three out of four restaurants in a chain have been caught on camera serving moldy, spoiled food to their customers, it's a pretty safe bet that the fourth one will eventually be caught doing so too.

anyways, that about wraps up what is by far the longest post i have ever made on tumblr. nobody i know irl really cares about cetacean captivity, so i wanted to vent here. i am not the most anti-cap anti-cap out there for cetaceans, but i definitely am more so than i used to be. heck, i'm not even universally opposed to something like the whale sanctuary project being constructed—wikie, inouk, and keijo are likely going to be transferred out of marineland antibes soon, and even though the sanctuary model is totally unproven, i can't help but feel that their welfare would be better there than at the places they are rumored to have been sold to: kobe suma sea world, kamogawa sea world, and port of nagoya public aquarium. the former two feature tank complexes that are barely bigger than tokitae's infamous "whale bowl", and kamogawa still does waterwork. also, it is rumored that marineland antibes wants to split up their orcas between these facilities, which wouldn't happen at the wsp and would make the stress of the move even worse. however, i absolutely cannot stand the wsp's messaging; they spread a lot of poor-quality information. as many others have said before, the sanctuary model could be super risky, and it's doubtful they could construct it in time if the french government allows the orcas to be moved, considering marineland antibes wanted these orcas gone yesterday. as usual, captive orcas are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

however, i want to make one thing clear: i'm not an expert or a scientist, nor do i wish to portray myself as such. i'm just a bored college student who is obsessed with animals and has too much time on her hands. i try to get as much of my information from experts and scientists as possible, but i do not claim to be an expert and i'm always willing to learn from the scientific literature and from people who can engage in respectful discussion. in regards to captive orcas, i would certainly love to be wrong.

What's wrong with the facility the orca massage video is from?

They purchased their orcas from recent wild captures (2015 I believe), which I don’t find acceptable in this day and age. Their actual husbandry and habitats appear to be fine as far as I can tell, particularly compared to other aquariums in the country, and their whales are in good shape.

Also, way to go, whoever is managing COK's Wikipedia page! 😂

There has only been killer whales on public display in China for the last four years and ten months in Shanghai, and we've only known about Chimelong's orcas from news reports for a measly six years and seven months, but whatever!

recent picture of pànghǔ! he’s huge!

LPNPM 656

To enter the music show click on the link below :

Blogger - Luis Plantier

Duration of the music show = 48 m

Photo - Tianjin Haichang Polar Ocean World, China

He is magnificent. Just the sight of him has the ability to drop mouths and silence everyone. But such a shame his regal beauty and power will never flourish and prosper where it was meant too: The Sea he was taken from. His dorsal fin is tall and impressive now, but like all captive male orca, (and even some females) it is only a matter of time before it begins to fall. Now, the largest male orca at Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park, is a spectacle, a breeder, an entertainer, and a massive financial commodity for this facility that mirrored their training techniques and business model from the likes of U.S. based Seaworld. Name: Dylan, Dillon or Pànghǔ. Irish for "loyal", Welsh meaning "Son of the Sea." Age: 18. Captured in: 2014, Russia's Sea of Okhotsk. Ecotype: Russian Transient. Offspring: Pàngdòudīng or Chip. Male. Born September 2021. Mother is "Cookie." 📷 Weibo @ningyo_la_mar_daprop (at Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnpZpu-KbzY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

Lift-off!! Maiden Launch of Long March 7a from Haichang Wenchang Spaceport, China. Carrying XJY-6 Payload to GTO Source: LWRSTS, China . . #longmarch #longmarch3b #longmarch7a #wenchang #haichang #chinaspace #china #xichang #chinaaerospacescienceandtechnologycorporation #shangai #rocket #rocketlaunch #aerospace #xjy6 #xichang #lc39 #spacex #spaceexploration #casc #nasa #esa #isro #nkknspacepage (at Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site) https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zD02KJ-HO/?igshid=12si1w9evov39

lol here's me making up for not posting in ages

1. Trainer working with the oldest boy, photo by Chengsj11

2. Both boys doing bows together, photo by 少了颗兔牙-

3. Solid ID photo of the youngest girl's belly! Photo by 悦悦今天要开心

4. The oldest girl, rumored to be pregnant (I don't buy it), and probably not actually named Dora (a trainer on instagram has called both females Dora, it's probably a stage name). Photo by 蝶梦翩翩D

Construction of Zhengzhou Haichang Ocean Park’s killer whale show could be complete as soon as July 2024.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/EDsUs381s3ZKfQsW5rp6Cw

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Opdk1G8kqyc_vjyvq7Yjrw

My Twitter conversation with someone who went to Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park in a nutshell:

Them: The orca show had a beautiful conservation message

Me: Do you remember it?

Them: No

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Following a period of trial operation, Sanya Haichang Fantasy Town has held their grand opening on January 20th, 2019. The park houses at least one walrus which arrived to the facility earlier in the month.

While I have no further information on this individual at this time, it is worth noting that Haichang has ownership over one of, if not the, largest known collection of walruses in the world across their parks, numbering 21 individuals in 2013.

I literally thought this was SeaWorld for a second... but it’s Shanghai Haichang Polar Ocean World.

Remember when we said that it wasn’t enough that SeaWorld no longer captured cetaceans* because other people and countries would still try to emulate SeaWorld?? Yeah we were right, it’s even called fucking OCEAN WORLD

*by that I mean orcas... SW definitely didn’t seem to mind helping GA try to capture those belugas a few years ago...

China has "defeated" the coronavirus and declared "victory," Communist Party media tells us. A funny thing happened on the way to victory, however. The virus is hitting China in a second wave. The second wave is claiming victims, including the Party's propaganda narratives. The most dangerous of these narratives is that ruler Xi Jinping, with heaven's mandate, has an obligation to dominate the international system.

China, after reporting no new infections on March 19, said the virus had been contained. Since then, Beijing has been reporting dozens of new cases each day but has maintained that virtually all of them were "imported" -- in other words, the infected were individuals arriving from other countries.

Of the very few in-country transmissions, most, Beijing maintained, were transmissions from the imported cases. China's official numbers of deaths and new infections, however, must be bogus. Chinese officials are taking actions that are, as a practical matter, inconsistent with the no-new-infection reports. For instance, on March 27 Beijing closed all theaters nationwide, after re-opening them just the previous week.

In Shanghai, tourist attractions that had just resumed operations were shut again. For instance, the municipality re-closed the observation deck of the Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China, and the nearby Oriental Pearl Tower. The Jin Mao Tower is now shuttered "to further strengthen pandemic prevention and control." Madame Tussauds, the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium, and the Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park are now dark, along with the indoor portions of another 25 attractions.

Shanghai Disneyland? "Temporarily Closed Until Further Notice."

Shanghai is not the only metropolis turning out the lights. In Chengdu, karaoke bars and internet cafes were also shut just days after Sichuan province opened up all entertainment venues. Fuyang in Anhui province ordered the closure of "entertainment spots" and indoor swimming pools. Henan province locked down internet cafes. Henan even quarantined an entire area, Jia county, as doctors there tested positive for the bug.

On March 31, ESPN reported that the Chinese central government had delayed the resumption of team sports. The nationwide university-entrance exams, the gaokao, have been postponed a month, to July.

The regime has also not rescheduled its premier political events, the annual meetings of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, both originally scheduled for early March. Finally, the authorities in Jiangxi province are not allowing people from next-door Hubei to enter, indicating they do not believe the epidemic in that disease-ridden province is over.

Does any of this matter? It does: Xi Jinping thinks he should rule the planet. "China, the country where the virus first appeared and claimed its first several thousand lives, is now using the global spread of the disease to bolster an increasingly vocal, assertive bid for global leadership that is exacerbating a yearslong conflict with the U.S.," the Wall Street Journal wrote on April 1.

As the Communist Party's Global Times on March 30 triumphantly put it, "COVID-19 Blunders Signal End of 'American Century.'"

To push America aside and seize global leadership, China got Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), to say that China's response to the coronavirus showed the "superiority of the Chinese system and this experience is worthy of emulation by other countries." Then Beijing set about making a big show of "donating" medical equipment and diagnostic kits, most notably to stricken Europe.

Finally, Xi Jinping, beginning around the first week of February, forced China back to work to demonstrate that China had ended the epidemic.

None of these showy displays will convince anyone, however, if the virus ravages China again. Unfortunately for Xi, that is what is happening: people in China are re-infecting each other. For instance, in industrial Dongguan in southern Guangdong province, workers returning to their jobsites have been carrying the coronavirus, and this has forced health officials to quarantine other workers. China's leader can jump-start the economy or throttle the coronavirus, but he cannot do both at the same time.

When the second wave of coronavirus infections hits China hard, Xi Jinping's boasts about the superiority of Chinese communism will begin to sound hollow, absurd even.

Xi's initial policies turned a local outbreak into a pandemic, and now they are making even more people sick and forcing China into another pit of disease. China's inaccurate diagnostic kits and substandard protective gear donated around the world along with the new infections will show the truth: communism is incompetent if not downright malign.

Incompetent and malign communism in turn means Xi's predicted decline of America will again have to be pushed back to another day. China can lie with statistics, but the virus gets the last word. "Victory" over both COVID-19 and the United States is still far out of sight.