Campaign to highlight captive animal cruelty

Cetfree, a coalition of local and international non-governmental organisations, is calling on the public to stop supporting activities that involve captive animals.

Since tomorrow is World Day for Captive Dolphins, Cetfree launched a campaign to make people more aware of the darker side of captivity as supported by the entertainment business of dolphinaria.

Yesterday it unveiled a billboard geared at sensitising the public who unknowingly support the cruelty of captivity by visiting leisure parks that made use of captive animals such as dolphins, seals and sea lions.

"If the public does not visit these parks such commercial ventures would not exist, and dolphins would not need to be kidnapped and imprisoned," it said during a press conference.

Over the past year Cetfree has been active in educating younger generations on the life of dolphins and their natural home - the sea.

Behind the rosy image portrayed by the adverts of dolphinaria, lies the real and sad story of wild animals that are torn from their habitat and their social groups and deprived of their priceless freedom to give way to a life locked up in concrete prisons.

"A dolphinarium cannot offer more than an artificial, boring and barren alien world which often leads to physical and mental disturbances in the animals," it said in a statement.

The very nature of these animals makes them unsuited for confinement. In the wild, dolphins live in large groups, often in tight-knit family units. Their capture disrupts social groups and splits up families and the trauma can be very severe and many times fatal.

"Dolphins travel long distances each day, and can stay underwater for up to half an hour. They normally spend only around 10 to 20 per cent of their time on the surface. All this is denied to them in a pool. Apart from denying dolphins their normal family bonds, pools only allow them to swim a few strokes in any direction before coming to a wall," the statement pointed out.

For dolphins, pools were the cetacean equivalent of human prisons where they can become depressed, aggressive and even suicidal.

Cetfree expressed its concern about the local situation among them the fact that after more than a decade of keeping dolphins in captivity, there were still no standards set in terms of depths of pools, the movement of animals from one site to another, noise levels allowed, shade requirements and the like.

For more information send an e-mail to Cetfree on: ntsec@waldonet.net.mt or send a fax to 2131-3150.