S5. E8: Lori Marino: Intelligent Life on Earth
“In a natural setting, these animals would be swimming maybe a hundred miles a day, diving deep. They have their social lives, their social networks, roles to play in very tightly-knit family groups. They raise their children. They have cultures, different ways of doing things in different populations. They can explore and play and come together.
None of that is available in the concrete tank. None of it. They don't have any place to go. They don't have any place to dive… what you see is a lot of mortality, a lot of sickness, a lot of behavioral abnormalities. Everything that makes life worth living for a dolphin or whale is absent in marine parks and concrete tanks. None of it is available.”
– Lori Marino
Lori Marino is a neuroscientist and an expert in animal behavior and intelligence. Much of her work is focused on whales and dolphins. She's currently the president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, which will be a seaside sanctuary for former performing orcas and belugas that have spent their entire lives in concrete tanks.
Lori is also the founder and Executive Director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, an organization that bridges the gap between academic research and on the ground animal advocacy efforts.
She has appeared in several films and television programs, including the documentaries Blackfish, Unlocking the Cage, and Long Gone Wild, which is a 2019 documentary that picks up where Black Fish left off, and is also where the Whale Sanctuary Project begins.
The Whale Sanctuary Project is going to change the world for the lucky orcas and belugas that will end up there. They will also be a model for future sanctuaries for cetaceans – as we need a ton of them, there are way too many of these animals living in captivity.
It stuns me that even after documentaries like Blackfish, people all over the world (including many in the US) still visit marine mammal parks. Mostly, people go because they don’t know. They don’t know how miserable life is for the whales and dolphins and they don’t know how intelligent and emotionally complex these animals are. Keeping them in tanks is cruel, inhumane, unjust, and it needs to stop.
Lori has made it her life’s work to not only study their intelligence but to advocate and fight for their lives. This conversation is an important one, after listening to Lori, I think it’d be very difficult for anyone to give another dollar to a marine park anywhere on Earth.
I hope that you learn as much as I did.
Learn More About The Whale Sanctuary Project
Like The Whale Sanctuary Project on Facebook
Follow The Whale Sanctuary Project on Twitter
Learn More About The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy
You can listen to our podcast via our website or you can subscribe and listen on Apple, Spotify, or Google Play. If you enjoy listening to the Species Unite podcast, we’d love to hear from you! You can rate and review via Apple Podcast here. If you support our mission to change the narrative toward a world of co-existence, we would love for you to make a donation or become an official Species Unite member! You can learn more about this here.
As always, thank you for tuning in - we truly believe that stories have the power to change the way the world treats animals and it’s a pleasure to have you with us on this.
Transcript
Lori: [00:00:14] Everything that makes life worth living for a dolphin or whale is absent in marine parks and concrete tanks. None of it is available.They don’t have any place to go, they don’t have any place to dive. None of that is available in a concrete tank. None of it. They don’t have social networks to live in. You can’t have a culture in concrete tanks. It just can’t exist.
Elizabeth: [00:00:49] Hi, I’m Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show.
Elizabeth: [00:01:17] Species Unite will be back with season 8 on June 2nd. Until then, we’re resharing some of our favorite episodes. Today’s is a conversation with Lori Marino. Lori is a neuroscientist and an expert in animal behavior and intelligence. Much of her work is focused on cetaceans, whales and dolphins. She's currently the president of the Whale Sanctuary Project. They’re in the process of building the first seaside sanctuary for orcas and beluga whales in North America. This place is going to be incredible. It will be a home for former performing orcas and belugas, who spent their entire lives in concrete tanks. Lori is also founder and Executive Director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy. They focus on bridging the gap between academic research and on the ground animal advocacy efforts. Lori has appeared in several films and television programs, including the documentaries Blackfish, Unlocking the Cage, and Long Gone Wild, which is a 2019 documentary which picks up where Black Fish left off, and that’s also where the Whale Sanctuary Project begins.
Elizabeth: [00:02:42] Hi Lori, thank you so much for coming on today.
Lori: [00:02:45] Thank you very much for having me.
Elizabeth: [00:02:47] So I wanna go back. I really wanna talk about whales and dolphins and your work, way back when. What was first, neuroscience or whales and dolphins?
Lori: [00:02:58] Well actually neuroscience was first. I’ve always been interested in the brain and how it relates to cognition and behavior. It was only when I was in graduate school that I became interested in dolphins and whales. And the reason I became interested in them is because I saw a picture in a book of a dolphin brain. I really got hooked looking at that brain and seeing how elaborate it is, and how different it is from a primate brain. That set me on a course of studying dolphin and whale brains for the next 25, 30 years.
Elizabeth: [00:03:30] Will you talk a little about their brains? When you first saw what a whale brain looked like in an MRI.
Lori: [00:03:37] I discovered the levels of intelligence when I started to get into studying the brain and analyzing the different components of the brain and how elaborated they were in certain regions. And I knew that there was a lot of evidence that these were very complex animals. In the brain studies, they pretty much allow me to explore the neuro territory that’s the foundation of the intelligence that we know these animals to have. There was a lot of work being done with captive dolphins during that time by people like Louis Herman who were showing that dolphins are pretty capable of pretty sophisticated levels of cognition, and we knew from field studies that orcas and other cetaceans are also very complicated and very intelligent. And so the brain studies allowed me to take a look at the brain that was the foundation for all that complicated cognition.
Elizabeth: [00:04:44] I’ve heard you say before that orcas at least, their gray matter is more convoluted than ours. But I don’t really understand what that means. So when you say that, what does that mean?
Lori: [00:04:57] So when we talk about gray matter, we’re talking about brain tissue. And typically we’re talking about the brain cortex, and the cortex is the outer part of the mammalian brain, and it’s the wrinkled part. So when you look at a human brain, you see that it has wrinkles on the surface, and the reason it has wrinkles is because over evolutionary time, a lot of brain tissue has been stuffed into a small skull, a small cranium. And so in order to fit it all in, it gets wrinkled up. The number of wrinkles, or the density of wrinkles, tells you something about how the cortical tissue has had to been packed into that cranium over evolutionary time. And when you look at primates, like humans and great apes, we’re the most. We have the most wrinkled brains. But actually, when you look at cetaceans, some of them have more wrinkled brains than us, meaning that on the surface, the density of those wrinkles suggests that they’ve had to pack in more cortical tissue that even humans have over evolutionary time. And the reason the cortex is important is because it is the part of the brain that is most associated with high-level cognition, self-awareness, problem-solving, analytics, language, you name it.
Elizabeth: [00:06:30] Are they more self-aware than us then?
Lori: [00:06:34] Not sure I would say more self-aware. I would say that whatever it is that the cortex does, they’re doing a lot of it.
Elizabeth: [00:06:41] Right.
Lori: [00:06:43] Obviously, their cortex, the cetacean cortex, is different in terms of how it's structured, so you have to take that into account as well. And so how those differences and similarities come together to make psychology in dolphins and whales and in primates for instance, that’s the real question.
Elizabeth: [00:07: 12] So then their emotional lives are also very complex?
Lori: [00:07:17] We know their emotional lives are complex for their behavior. And then when we look at their brain, what we see is that they have a limbic system, so they have the same area of the brain that’s involved in processing emotions as we do. In fact, that area of the brain is found across mammals. And not only that, they have their region next to the limbic system called a paralimbic lobe, and that connects the limbic system to other parts of the brain that do thinking. So that tells me that they’re doing something very interesting with emotions.
Elizabeth: [00:07:57] But we don’t know exactly what it is?
Lori: [00:08:00] No, we don’t. Obviously we can look at their behavior, and the way I always put it, is that we know exactly what it’s like to be like them, and we don’t know anything. And the truth really is in between, right? So they’re mammals like us, they have the same brain structures as us. I think it’s a pretty good inference that when they feel certain emotions that we know what that feels like. But of course it’s a different version of that because it’s in a different brain. In a brain that echolocates, that has a different kind of body, that has a different lifestyle. But the idea that, you know, their emotions may be so dissimilar to ours that we could never understand them I think is a stretch. I think we totally understand what emotions are in all mammals because we all have the same brain mechanisms that produce them.
Elizabeth: [00:08:56] 20 years ago, when you did this study– well, first, will you explain what the study is, the Mirror Recognition Study?
Lori:[00:09:02] Sure. So the Mirror Recognition Study came out of the fact that before 2000, or the late 1990s, the only other animals who showed the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors were chimpanzees and some great apes. And I was working with Gordon Gallup, who was the person who first demonstrated mirror recognition in a non-human being. In chimpanzees. And so I thought well, you know, dolphins would be a great candidate. The mirror self recognition is something we all have and we take for granted. So you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, and you see that you have a pimple on your face, and you do things in front of the mirror to attend to that. What that does is demonstrate that you know that’s you in the mirror. You’re using the mirror to check yourself out. Well, we can ask that kind of question to other animals. And we have. And of course, chimpanzees, when they are marked on their body and they look in the mirror, they touch the mark with their hands. With dolphins they don’t have hands, but there’s other ways that we can get at the question. So, Diana Reiss and I decided that it would be interesting to see if they too could recognize themselves in mirrors because it’s a fairly rare capacity in the animal kingdom, and we devised a test that would allow us to control a lot of variables. And we did that study at the New York Aquarium with two bottlenose dolphins, and they both independently showed the capacity to recognize themselves in mirrors because when we marked them in different parts of their body, they’d go up to the mirror and they’d orient that part of their body to the mirror. So it’s very much like going down a hallway and you have a new dress on, and you see a wet paint sign, and what do you do? You go into a restroom, you look in the mirror, and you turn around to see if you have paint on you. It’s that same idea that we employ to study dolphins.
Elizabeth: [00:11:21] Are there other animals that we know of that can recognize themselves?
Lori: [00:11:24] Yes. Elephants, there’s a bird that also does. It’s kinda interesting because there have been some claims that certain fish and other animals can recognize themselves in mirrors. It’s very interesting because I don’t think anyone really fully understands what it really means. We just know that certain animals respond to mirrors the way humans do. And other animals may respond a little differently. So, for instance, monkeys use mirrors to find food that’s hidden, but they don’t exhibit the classic marked directive responses. This is a very complicated literature, and it’s really controversial. But what is clear is that we can say that when a dolphin uses a mirror the same way that a human does, that they share some aspect of self-awareness with us.
Elizabeth: [00:12:07] After you did this study– I read this, so tell me if I’m wrong– you kind of came to a moment where you said hey, if they are this smart, why are we keeping them in tanks?
Lori: [00:12:18] Sure. I mean it didn’t come the day after. It came a while later, maybe a year or two, a couple of years later, but I started to really think about being that self-aware and living in a concrete tank. And these two dolphins were living in this small tank in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and it was going around and around, and I thought, you know, what kind of life is that? And then what happens is that they would transfer to other facilities, and then independently they both died. And when that happened, I really started to look into this whole captivity enterprise. And it was really an eye opener. I started to discover where a lot of these dolphins came from, like the Taiji Drive Hunts, what they endure in concrete tanks, and what their welfare is like. And one thing led to another, and I just literally could not imagine going back and doing another study with captive dolphins, as much as I wanted to, you know intellectually. The next thing I wanted to do was to study orcas, and determine if they could recognize themselves in mirrors. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that and sleep at night because I really felt that I owed something to these animals.
Elizabeth: [00:13:40] So then what was your next move?
Lori: [00:13:41] Well my next move was to bring in my work with, obviously, brains, because all of that work is non-invasive, and the main thrust of all the research I’ve done has been neural navigating and brain evolution, but I also decided to take on an advocacy component to my career, to my profession. To continue my science work, but then to use my science work, and my position, if you will, to advocate for these animals. Because I really felt that at that point in my career, I owed them something. It wasn’t even a choice, it was just something that I had to do. And then I started the Kimmela Center, and that was the center that focuses upon scholar advocacy for other animals. Using science, academic scholarship, to empower advocacy efforts for other animals.
Elizabeth: [00:14:38] Which is just an incredible way to do advocacy. I think one of the best because it’s not only hey, these guys are suffering, but it’s really the science behind it. People who don’t normally pay attention to this kind of stuff have to when they hear it.
Lori: [00:14:54] Exactly. It’s very powerful, and the power of a peer-reviewed study, you know, is just unmatched.
Elizabeth: [00:15:02] Yeah.
Lori: [00:15:03] So it’s not enough to just say, well I don’t feel good about keeping these animals in this tank. You need to say why you don’t feel good about it, and what is happening to these animals. And I think that's when scholar advocacy steps in.
Elizabeth: [00:15:20] Talk a little bit about some of the things the Kimmela Center has done.
Lori: [00:15:23] There have been a few things that we focused on, and probably the most prominent thing is the Someone Project, and that we've done with Farm Sanctuary, where we created peer-reviewed papers that discuss and review the cognition and emotions and social complexity of farm animals, like cows and pigs and chickens. And that's been great. It’s called the Someone Project because it's meant to introduce people to who farmed animals are. They're not something, they’re someone. There is a growing body of evidence to show that a lot of things that we think of when we think of intelligence and emotional complexity that we see in great apes and monkeys and our dogs and cats at home are shared with farmed animals. We need to start seeing them for the beings that they actually are.
Elizabeth: [00:16:27] Have you been surprised by anything you've learned since you started working on this?
Lori: [00:16:31] I'm always surprised, you know, because getting into that literature, I think some of the things that really surprised me are that a lot of things that are talked about in the primate literature, you can find in the literature on pigs, for instance. Things about perspective taking, tactical deception, the use of symbols to understand a communication system, the self-agency, the use of a mirror, you know, all of these things that are in the primate literature have counterparts in the farmed animal literature, but they’re talked about differently. Why are we talking about them differently if they exist in great apes or monkeys and cows and pigs and chicken and sheep? It's because we eat one group and we don't eat the other.
Elizabeth: [00:17:24] Even there, though, it's interesting that it's so different.
Lori: [00:17:29] It is so different. When you look at the studies done in social psychology on how people view farmed animals, it’s stunning. They don’t even view them as animals. I mean, they don’t view them as real animals with an evolutionary history, a set of species-specific needs and adaptations. They don’t even see chickens as birds. We have a long way to go for people to start to see the actual someone on their plate. And because it's much more convenient to put them in a category that we don't have to worry about. We don't have to feel concerned for. Because otherwise we probably wouldn't do what we do.
Elizabeth: [00:18:18] When I was talking to Carl Safina, he was talking about before people cared about whales. And he said everyone just viewed them as these giant things of blubber. And then when they got such good PR, and people learned they had these emotional complex lives, the whole world kind of flipped. It is a weird, almost PR thing.
Lori: [00:18:35] It is a PR thing. But it's still something that we're still fighting, because, you know, dolphins and whales, of course they are respected more than they were when there was just no bans on hunting them. You know they're still hunted around the world, they're still used for entertainment, still confined, so we still have a long way to go for them as well.
Elizabeth: [00:19:02] I read that you were a part of Canada's bill to ban captivity for whales and dolphins.
Lori: [00:19:07] Yes
Elizabth: [00:19:08] What did you do? How were you involved?
Lori: [00:19:11] I was asked to be an expert witness. So, this was for S203, the bill to end captivity for dolphins and whales in Canada put forth by Senator Wilfred Moore. And I was asked to be an expert witness to talk about several aspects of my experience and expertise, but in particular about the welfare of dolphins and whales living in concrete tanks, as well as the claims made by marine parks that they have to keep these animals in tanks because it helps them with conservation, it helps them to educate the public. And I was able to show that there's really not much to those claims at all. When you really look at the kinds of studies that they put out, and where those studies go, and how those studies penetrate into the conservation literature. There’s no there there. So I was there to talk about that.
Elizabeth: [00:20:13] And it passed. How far away are we from a bill like that in the US?
Lori: [00:20:19] I think we're pretty far away. I don't think we're anywhere near where Canada is in terms of that bill. We still have facilities that are breeding these animals, and that kind of bill bans breeding. We have to stop full breeding. I think SeaWorld has stopped breeding orcas, but we still have bottle-nosed dolphins, and other kinds of dolphins, and beluga whales. Just today, the Shedd Aquarium announced that the newest beluga calf just died. She died, they say of pneumonia and sepsis, but you know we see this over and over again.
Elizabeth: [00:21:06] It’s not uncommon.
Lori: [00:21:07] Exactly. We bring these animals to thrive in these concrete tanks, and it just keeps happening. It keeps happening at the Georgia Aquarium all the time. They just can't keep them alive.
Elizabeth: [00:21:15] What confuses me is that you were in Blackfish, that doesn't confuse me, but after a movie like Blackfish came out, it felt like the whole country was up in arms that we still have this going on, right? And that was a while ago. That came out in like 2012 or 13. The laws haven't changed.
Lori: [00:21:33] I think that there have been some changes. I think, for instance, SeaWorld giving up breeding orcas, and I think that ticket sales are down, and people are definitely much more aware, and fewer people want to see the spectacle of watching dolphins and whales in tanks performing tricks. But obviously, as you say, not enough. Not enough to send a strong signal to these parks that we don't want to do this anymore, and that's really what it's going to take.
Elizabeth: [00:22:08] Well and the sad story of Lolita that has been in the papers a lot in the past year, who is stuck in this teeny tiny tank in Miami.
Lori: [00:22:18] Yes.
Elizabeth: [00:22:19] And she’s been there since the 70s?
Lori: [00:22:20] Yeah. She’s been there for decades.
Elizabeth: [00:22:24] And they won't let her go?
Lori: [00:22:25] Any attempts have been unsuccessful up to now. She doesn't have another orca with her, and that is a violation of animal welfare rules. She has two white-sided dolphins with her, and you know they’ve kind thrown them in to keep her company, but it is such a small tank, it’s only about four times the length of her body. There’s nowhere to go. I mean it's like walking across the room and then having to turn around again and go back, and that's your whole world. Luckily, I mean I don't know if it's lucky, but she's a very resilient whale. She's managed somehow to stay alive. She's not thriving because no whale can thrive in that kind of circumstance. She's managed to find some way to eek out an existence.
Elizabeth: [00:23:21] Which is so depressing. Would you talk a little about the difference in a whale's life, you know, a beluga or an orca who's been in captivity versus one in the wild, from their mental condition to their lifespan, just how drastic one life is versus the other?
Lori: [00:23:41] So the difference between living in a concrete tank and living free in the wild, particularly for an orca or a beluga whale, is like night and day, black and white. There's almost no overlap, so it's not like well, you get some of the things of a natural life. You almost get nothing of what you need to thrive in the tank. So, in a natural setting, these animals would be swimming maybe a hundred miles a day, diving deep, they have their social lives, their social networks, roles to play, are in very tightly-knit family groups, they raise their children, they have cultures, different ways of doing things in different populations, they can explore and play and come together. None of that is available in a concrete tank. None of it. They don't have any place to go, they don't have any place to dive. They’re in artificial collections of animals. Some of them are hybrids. They don’t observe, you know, even subspecies kinds of genetic distinctions. Whoever mates with who is fine. And they don't have a social network to live in. You can't have a culture in the concrete tanks. It just can't exist. What you see is a lot of mortality, a lot of sickness, a lot of behavioral abnormalities. Everything that makes life worth living for a dolphin or a whale is absent in marine parks, in concrete tanks. None of it is available.
Elizabeth: [00:25:28] When you first came up with the Whale Sanctuary Project, it was all driven by this yeah it was driven this?
Lori: [00:25:34] Yeah. It was driven by the realization that, you know, we know enough now, we know enough to know that these animals don’t belong in concrete tanks, and that there are sanctuaries all over the world, for elephants and chimpanzees, and all kinds of animals. And why not for dolphins and whales? And I wasn't the only one that thought that. I mean obviously a lot of people were thinking that, and I think, you know, the thing that I did was just one day I got tired of hearing myself talk about sanctuaries, and just said let's just do one.
Elizabeth: [00:26:10] Will you tell people what it is?
Lori: [00:26:13] Sure. The Whale Sanctuary Project has existed since 2016. It’s a non-profit, US based organization and our mission is to create a permanent seaside sanctuary for orcas and beluga whales who are retired from concrete tanks in marine parks. And we have a site that we are looking to get permitted, and that site is in Nova Scotia on the Eastern Shore in a place called Port Hilford. It's a beautiful expansive bay, and we would like to create a sanctuary there for beluga whales and possibly orcas. The space would be at least 100 acres, which is about 300 times the size of the largest performance tank anywhere in the world. They would be in a natural environment, they would have all kinds of critters to play with, they could spend their days the way they want. It would house about eight beluga whales, maybe a few orcas in a separate area, but it’s the best of both worlds because we will feed them, and we will have a full-staffed veterinary clinic. They should not even be in this circumstance to begin with. We should not be confining large mammals to tanks or cages, but given that they are, the best alternative right now for them is to get out of the concrete tanks and into a natural sanctuary. We know it works for elephants and chimps and bears and big cats, that when they’re put in a more natural environment, their whole body, their brain responds, because they’re getting what they evolved to get. The more you can do that for an animal, the better it is for them, their welfare, and the chance that they have to actually flourish in life.
(Cetacean noises)
Elizabeth: [00:28:22] And most of these guys couldn’t go back to the wild because they don’t have the skills, correct?
Lori: [00:28:27] We would not release them because most of them will have been born in captivity or would have been born in the wild, but have been in captivity for decades, and they just missed the opportunity to learn how to hunt. They don't even know that live fish are prey. They don't have a social group to go back to or a culture. So unfortunately, it's not a question of just dumping them back in the ocean, but what we can do is provide as much of a natural environment as we possibly can for them. And that's a heck of a lot better than what they have now on display or performing in concrete tanks, which has essentially none of the elements of a natural life.
Elizabeth: [00:29:12] There's not really a retirement, now, either, right? Because they stay.
Lori: [00:29:15] No they just stay up there, and they perform until they die.
Elizabeth: [00:29:19] The Whale Sanctuary Project: are there others like it already in the world?
Lori: [00:29:24] Well I'm glad to say that there are a couple of others. One is in Iceland run by Sea Life Trust, and they had some beluga whales in their marine parks that they wanted to retire, and two of the beluga whales, one of them passed away, but two of them are now in a sanctuary in Iceland. And they're getting ready, they're in a smaller area, but they're acclimating them with that, they're getting ready to have them going to the larger area that they've set up for them there. And then the National Aquarium in Baltimore is planning on creating a sanctuary for the seven Bottlenose Dolphins that they have. The CEO of the national aquarium, John Racanelli, just at some point said, you know what this doesn’t feel very good, to keep these animals like this.
Elizabeth: [00:30:15] That’s awesome.
Lori: [00:30:16] And he’s a leader. He’s decided that, you know, I don't want to do this anymore, and I want to create a better environment for them, and he's doing it. We're hoping that if all of these early versions, these initial versions, are successful, then it becomes something that other people start to do.
Elizabeth: [00:30:37] What goes into this? Live even finding a location, how did that go?
Lori: [00:30:51] Well, that was a long process. Fortunately, that process was done with an amazing team of people. We have an executive director, Charles Vinick, who was the manager for the Keiko Project, the Free Willy Project. We got a lot of amazing scientists and on-the-ground people, and basically we ended up looking first on Google for areas along both coasts of North America that might have some characteristics that would work for belugas and orcas. We narrowed that down, and then we ended up going on the ground both in Nova Scotia, up and down that coast, Washington, and in British Columbia. To look for sites that looked like they might work. That they had some of the depths, and the protection from storms, and the water quality, and all that kind of thing that looks good for the whales. And then what we discovered is that probably one of the, or an equally important aspect of this, is the social aspect of finding a community who wanted to adopt a project like this. And not all did.
Elizabeth: [00:31:58] What was the resistance?
Lori: [00:32:00] Fishing communities where, you know, they felt like their livelihood would have been impacted. We didn't want to come in there and impose something and put people out of business and all of that stuff. We really needed to have a community of people who wanted this. It can't work any other way. We found that in Sherbrooke. And from the very beginning these people were so receptive, including the fisher people. The fisher people there, they take us out on their boats, they’re one of our biggest allies. What we found in Port Hilford was a site that met all the physical criteria, but also met the social criterion of being embraced by a nearby community, and those are two really important elements. It was a two and a half year search.
Elizabeth: [00:32:51] What’s the next step?
Lori: [00:32:53] Permitting, and collecting all of the data that we need to respond to all the permitting questions, creating relationships, not only, well we already have a working relationship with the Sherbrooke community, who are just over the top enthusiastic about this, they’re a fantastic community of people, but also connecting with the academic and the veterinary scientific community in the maritimes, to make sure that we due diligence on all of the potential risks that might come with this kind of a project, particularly to wildlife. So we are leaving no stone unturned, and we are making sure that what we do is safe, and that it's something that the scientific community is on board with, as well.
Elizabeth: [00:33:47] Sure. And then once you have all kinds of the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted…
Lori: [00:33:52] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:33:53] Then what do you do?
Lori: [00:33:55] When we can finally go back to Canada, because we can't right now, I mean, we are working on designs for the sanctuary, and we have to build it. And we have to employ contractors. To build it, it involves, you know, a big expansive net, it involves driving piles into the bottom of the bay, and involves buildings, all kinds of infrastructure. All of that still has to happen before we can get the first whales.
Elizabeth: [00:34:22] And will people be able to go there?
Lori: [00:34:24] They will, but they’ll be able to see the animals from a distance, not up close because we want the animals to have their privacy and their autonomy. The public can come and we will have probably something like a hiking trail set up above the bay where they can look through scopes and see the whales. But the reason we don’t want people coming in and sitting in bleachers…
Elizabeth: [00:34:57] Oh God, no!
Lori: [00:34:57] … and petting the whales, or feeding the whales is because that is not a sanctuary for the whales. That’s an amusement park. I’m looking forward to people learning and understanding why that is an important difference.
Elizabeth: [00:35:13] That’s how people really learn, once they actually have actually spent time at both, and they realize, oh, I get it. It happens all over the world. A lot of it because it’s not their thing to pay attention to this. They learn in steps. It’s just that they don’t know.
Lori: [00:35:26] They don’t know, and they’ve been told for so long that it’s ok to ride on top of dolphins and whales, feed them from your hands. They do therapy, dolphin assisted therapy, which is a sham, by the way. This is all normalized by the entertainment industry. People need to understand that that’s not the normal life of a dolphin or whale.
Elizabeth: [00:35:53] Once you’re able to get these whales into the sanctuary, how does that go? Because how many whales are in captivity right now? A lot.
Lori: [00:36:00] There are over 3,000 whales in captivity, and we really don't have a good count because in many places like China, and in some other places around the world, you know, we don't have the records. And they keep capturing them from the wild, and they die, and go back and get some more, and so it’s kind of a revolving door. We have really no idea except that it’s a lot. And it’s at least in the thousands.
Elizabeth: [00:36:29] Not only does the Whale Sanctuary need to open, but a lot more of them do.
Lori: [00:36:32] Exactly. So the Whale Sanctuary Project, you know, we look at as the gold standard. We want to create a successful permanent sanctuary for belugas and orcas, but we are going to promote others creating similar sanctuaries as an alternative to the concrete tanks. And in fact, you know, we said time and time again, and we stand by this, that we hope that folks in the marine parks industry work with us. Or if they don’t wanna work with us, create their own sanctuaries. But move in that direction so that these animals can have better welfare. That’s what we’re hoping [for]. I think that a lot of people wanna see that this is an equation that works, just like it has for elephants and primates. Once we show that, then I am hoping that it becomes a viable alternative to the concrete tanks.
Elizabeth: [00:37:30] Have you been to the one in Iceland?
Lori: [00:37:32] I’ve not been to Iceland. Well I actually was in Iceland many years ago, but not to the one in Iceland. Apparently they’re doing very well. The two little belugas, Little White and Little Gray, are healthy and happy and adapting to their environment. They’ve done this in a very thoughtful way. It’s taken a long time and it’s because they want to make sure that these animals are ready every time they move to the next step.
Elizabeth: [00:37:57] Are these the first two whales that they’ve had then?
Lori: [00:38:00] Yes. Well, yes.
Elizabeth: [00:38:02] I knew about the whales, but I didn’t know that this was the first.
Lori: [00:38:04] Yes, this is the first two belugas.
Elizabeth: [00:38:06] Oh so this kind of the pilot of the pilots right now that’s happening right now.
Lori: [00:38:12] It is a pilot, yes. Exactly.
Elizabeth: [00:38:13] How helpful.
Lori: [00:38:13] And of course, the thing that’s different about the Whale Sanctuary Project is unlike the National Aquarium and unlike Sea Life Trust, we don’t have animals that we can put into the sanctuary. We are depending upon working with marine parks to retire some of their animals into a sanctuary. That’s an even harder proposition, but it’s something that, you know, I think, you know, Sea Life Trust and the National Aquarium, they’re showing the way because they’re showing that, these are members of the marine park or aquarium industry, if you will, and they’re saying guess what, it’s ok, and we’re doing it. And I hope that that becomes a model.
Elizabeth: [00:38:59] The public needs to get behind this as well.
Lori: [00:39:00] Yes exactly.
Elizabeth: [00:39:01] And fight for this. And let’s hope that you have to pick and choose because there are so many you can end up with.
Lori: [00:39:09] I would love to have that problem. To have everyone saying, take my beluga, take my beluga. But the truth is, you know, we have just a limited carrying capacity for that space. We probably can take many, but you know, what we don’t wanna do is take them from one crowded situation and put them into another crowded situation.
Elizabeth: [00:39:32] How can people learn more and get behind this too?
Lori: [00:39:35] The best thing to do is first obviously go to our website, whalesanctuary.org, because there you’ll be able to keep up on all the progress we’re making, sign up and subscribe for our newsletter, as well as our webinars, and just tell everybody about what we’re doing. The more people that know, the better and easier it is for us to accomplish this goal.
Elizabeth: [00:40:07] Lori, thank you, so much.
Lori: [00:40:08] Oh, you’re so welcome.
Elizabeth: [00:40:10] I’m so excited about this. I can’t wait until it’s ready.
Lori: [00:40:13] Well you’ll have to come up and see it!
Elizabeth: [00:40:15] No, I will. I’m definitely coming.
Lori: [00:40:16] You’re in New York City right?
Elizabeth: [00:40:17] Yeah. I’m absolutely coming. Alright. Thank you very much.
Lori: [00:40:22] Thank you so much. Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:40:31] To learn more about Lori, her work, and the Whale Sanctuary Project, go to our website. It’s speciesunite.com. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute, and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Please go to our website, and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knutson, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones, and Anna Callner, who wrote and performed today’s music. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day!