Скачать или смотреть Poor Old Lonely Marine Park Orca Is Sick And Drugged Up To The Point Where She Can Scarcely Even See

This is the sad case of Lolita the killer whale. It is reportedly one of the more extreme examples of a marine park in the United States taking advantage of an orca in captivity for financial profit at the expense of the animal’s welfare. Yes, for the past 46 years, Lolita has been confined to a small marine park pool in Miami and has not seen another of her kind in 26 years.

Originally born to one of the now endangered pods of resident orca whales that live in the waters around Washington state, Lolita now probably knows little of her native home. After all, she was taken from the wild when she was only four years old.

This happened in early August 1970 when men in speedboats surrounded a pod of killer whales in Puget Sound. The men allegedly used a plane, nets, ropes and explosives to separate the adults as they captured the infants, one of which was a female calf that locals called Tokitae. During the struggle, however, the adult whales refused to leave their young. Therefore, the men apparently killed four babies and an adult killer whale.

Tokitae, renamed Lolita, then left her life in the wild to begin a new one in captivity as the star of the Miami Seaquarium. Her captured cousins had similar experiences, as marine-themed amusement parks in Texas, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom and France also reportedly paid the whale herders for their services. Unfortunately, this industry-wide practice resulted in a generation of orcas removed from their native population.

In fact, Lolita would be Seaquarium’s second orca and a companion for the park’s older male, Hugo. Unlike Lolita, however, Hugo was practically a teenager when he was captured in 1968.

To better prepare for housing a pair of orcas, then, the park kept Hugo in what is now the manatee pool while they built a larger, 80-foot-wide pool for Lolita. Apparently, as soon as Lolita arrived, Hugo began calling out to her from his nearby swimming hole.

After a few weeks of allowing the whales to communicate with each other from a distance, the park moved Hugo to the larger pool to be with Lolita. However, the park had reason to be nervous about the pair’s first physical encounter together.

Indeed, Hugo had not adjusted well to life in captivity, perhaps because he was slightly older than Lolita. For example, he was aggressive and would constantly hit his head against the glass.

But there are no reports that he ever showed any kind of aggression toward Lolita. Instead, he would sometimes target his trainers, refuse to perform altogether or, per his usual routine, bash his head against the pool’s deeper viewing windows.

Ultimately, Hugo died of a massive brain hemorrhage in 1980, and the park did not purchase another orca as a companion whale for Lolita. By that time, fortunately, wild captures of orcas in the Pacific Northwest had ended, due primarily to a change in public sentiment over the practice.

Neither did Miami Seaquarium find a replacement companion through a transfer with another marine park or a purchase of a captive orca from Iceland, which was still common at the time. Instead, Lolita was introduced to a pair of dolphins as pool mates.

Another reason why Lolita never received an additional whale companion might have been that Lolita’s pool isn’t really big enough. The park claims otherwise, but others state that an island in the middle of the pool reduces its swimmable size below today’s legal minimum requirements. It has been further claimed that, though the pool is 80 feet long, it is only a tiny 20 feet deep in certain places.

This is even more shocking when you consider that Lolita weighs in at 6,000 pounds and stretches to 21 feet long. Indeed, Lolita would swim up to 100 miles a day in the wild, but in her pool she can apparently swim only a little more than the length of her own body. What’s more, the lonely whale takes a stream of medications for various ailments, including chronic kidney infections.

Not only that, but she is also slowly losing her vision due to pterygium, or “surfer’s eye,” which is an uncomfortable condition caused by excessive exposure to UV radiation. A lack of shade above Lolita’s pool is claimed to be the likely cause.

And if her physical health isn’t bad enough, her reported mental health is not much better. Recently, for example,