Dolphin Captivity in Mexico - A Dark & Violent History
Everyone loves dolphin’s… but as history reveals there are always evil individuals who will exploit It all began in the 1990´s when Dolphin Discovery a relatively small company at the time began paying local fishermen to capture wild dolphins.
The capture process was barbaric involving the detonation of dynamite under water to scare families of wild dolphin into shallow water bays where the fishermen would separate young female dolphins from their families and drag them on-board their fishing boats using nets and hooks.
Once wild dolphins were successfully captured, those that didn't die during the brutal and traumatic ordeal were then transported to dolphinariums. A dolphinarium is basically a shallow and confined body of water (often generic swimming pools) where dolphins are forced to perform jumps and tricks for food. People pay large sums of money to enter the water with dolphins in the hope of a life defining experience of interacting with a majestic and intelligent animal.
The capture process was so brutal that 53% of dolphins that survived the initial capture would later die from wounds sustained during the ordeal or from the resulting post traumatic stress of having been violently separated from their family, torn out of their natural habitat and plunged into an artificial prison.
Now remember that the early 90´s was a time before the internet when people were uneducated about the horrors of dolphin captivity and blindly believed whatever any uniformed authority figure would tell them.
Dolphin trainers sporting logos of smiling dolphins told tourists that these dolphins had been rescued, were happy to be alive, and enjoyed performing and playing in an environment free of predators.
It was a good pitch... So as you could imagine Dolphin Discovery were making a killing (literally) off of capturing and exploiting dolphins.
The problem was that wild dolphins removed from the vast limitless wonder of the oceans were quickly dying from illness, stress, injuries, and even depression. This meant Dolphin Discovery and other dolphin captivity businesses in Mexico had to capture more and more dolphins to replenish their depleting stocks of dolphins.
It was mayhem as fleets of local fishermen were laying waste to reefs whilst attempting to heard dolphins into shore with explosives, dead dolphins were washing up on beaches every week.
News of these barbaric methods quickly spread throughout the community, and the outrage from the Mexican people was so severe that the Mexican government was forced to illegalize capturing wild dolphins from Mexican waters.
This didn’t stop dolphinariums as they soon began importing dolphins from The Solomon Islands, Japan, and neighboring Cuba. The Solomon Islands, and Japan used drive hunt methods to herd hundreds of dolphins into coves where the show dolphins were sold to the highest bidder and the remaining dolphins were massacred and sold as cheap and often mislabelled meat.
The word was out that the captive dolphin entertainment industry was big business and soon Dolphin Discovery was competing with other companies such as Delphinus, and Dolphinarus.
Dolphinariums in Mexico had found a way around the ban on capturing wild dolphins but it didn’t last long… In 2003, Mexican dolphinarium`s imported 28 bottlenose dolphins from the Solomon Islands. Over 11 of these dolphins died within five years of their transport to Mexico and half of them within a few weeks. More and more imported dolphins were dying and public outcry once again forced the Mexican government to intervene and they promptly banned importation of dolphins into Mexico.Dolphinariums quickly hired veterinarians with loose moral stature to administer medical concoctions designed to keep dolphins healthy enough to sustain profits whilst they tried to find another way around the bans.
The answer was aggressive artificial insemination or as the dolphin industry like to refer to it as “Natural breeding”.
What is “Natural breeding”? Well it all starts with inter-specie interaction of a sexual nature. Dolphin trainers need to sexual arouse male dolphins so that their semen may be extracted and artificially inseminated into female dolphins.
So what a dolphinarium would label as “Natural breeding” could easily be defined as bestiality.
A successful insemination means that a baby dolphins will be born into slavery and endure a life of servitude where they are denied all the basic desires to hunt, explore, and play that wild dolphins enjoy on a daily basis.
This is only a short term solution, because dolphinariums lack the necessary amount of dolphins to ensure genetic diversity which has led to inbreeding between family members. Often mothers will be impregnated by their own son, or sisters by their brothers. Inbred baby dolphins are often rejected by their mothers, and often born with mutations associated with inbreeding.
Nowadays there are over 300 captive dolphins in Mexico, with the highest concentration in the Riviera Maya. Dolphinariums invest millions of dollars into marketing campaigns portraying dolphins as willing educational tools for children. The truth is much darker, more and more stories are beginning to surface of dolphins attacking tourists and trainers alike.
The threat of disease transmission between dolphins and humans is completely ignored by dolphinariums, and dolphins are continually starved into obedience and forced to work without adequate shade from the searing Mexican sun.
Even all inclusive resorts in Mexico such as Barceló, Dreams Resorts, Bahia Principe, and El CID have built swimming pools inside their resorts where dolphins are kept in confined environments and forced to perform 12 hours a day 7 days a week.
Dolphinariums and the all-inclusive resorts that house them all share common characteristics and practices such as:
- Zero or inadequate shade for dolphins
- Starving dolphins into submission and obedience
- Lacing food with anti-depressants and antibiotic cocktails
- Punishing dolphins that refuse to perform
- Failing to warn guests about disease transmission
- Miseducation e.g. labeling displays of aggression as playfulness
- Aggressive and highly frequent artificial insemination
- Inbreeding
- Providing a vastly inadequate environment for dolphins
- Subjecting dolphins to constant noise pollution
- Transporting dead dolphins out of dolphinariums under the cover of darkness
The list goes on and on, but unfortunately the average tourist on vacation in Mexico knows nothing of the dark history of violence that forged modern day dolphin prisons. The captive dolphin industry in Mexico was built upon a foundation of barbaric events, unethical actions, and gross exploitation of people's love for intelligent and majestic mammals.
The profit margin is huge, and unfortunately in Mexico the more money you have the less laws you have to obey. Interestingly enough despite the ban on capturing wild dolphins in Mexican waters the number of dolphins off the coast of Mexico is plummeting seemingly without cause.
There have been recent reports from fishermen that a group of wild dolphins were captured from the nearby bio reserve of Sian Ka'an and transported to an unknown dolphinarium.
Any business with a vested interest in dolphin captivity is on-board the captivity train even companies such as Expedia owned TripAdvisor will delete forum comments or reviews detailing the inhumane treatment and conditions that captive dolphins in Mexico endure on a daily basis.
There's just too much revenue generated from the enslavement of dolphins for the industry to stop on its own accord. The only people who can stop it are people like you and I by not supporting captivity, educating friends and even strangers, joining protests such as those regularly organized in Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, Cancun, and Cabo San Lucas by organizations such as Delphines en Libertad.
The dark and violent of history of dolphin captivity in Mexico does not need to become an equally bleak future.
Don't swim with dolphins in captivity…
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