Beluga whales swim in a tank at Marineland amusement park in Niagara Falls, Ont., in 2023.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
With hindsight, and a lot of good reporting, the public can now see Marineland for what it was: a hideous exercise in alleged animal cruelty and exploitation.
For more than 60 years, visitors would come to the tourist attraction in Niagara Falls, Ont., to watch aquatic mammals, plucked from their natural environment or bred in captivity, give high fives to their trainers and splash the audience on demand. According to various reports, water conditions in some of the tanks at the park were so bad that dolphins’ skin would fall off in chunks and sea lions were going blind. Kiska, Marineland’s last surviving orca, spent the last 10 years of her life totally alone in her tank, where she exhibited disturbing repetitive behaviours and was allegedly left bleeding for months (which Marineland denied). In 2024, the park was found guilty of animal cruelty charges for keeping three young black bears in cramped enclosures and was ordered to pay fines totalling $85,000.
And though Marineland is now closed to the public, dozens of animals are still allegedly suffering there. Thirty belugas are languishing at the park – their fate unknown following a federal decision to block their export to a marine park in China – and Marineland has warned it will have to euthanize them if the government doesn’t provide funds for their care.
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Deeply disturbing as it all seems now, there was a time when the most controversial thing about Marineland was its admission price. Indeed, if you peruse Toronto newspaper archives from, say, the 1970s, you’ll find letters to the editor complaining about the “rip-off” admission price ($4.25 for an adult in 1974). In the same edition, you might find a story about Marineland’s owner and founder, John Holder, flying to the Gulf of Mexico to pluck wild dolphins out of the water for his shows, or about a new killer whale named Kandy, who was captured off the coast of British Columbia, arriving at Toronto’s airport for her journey to Marineland (she died two weeks later).
The specific reports of poor conditions at Marineland, combined with the evolution of the public’s awareness of, and empathy toward, animals suffering in captivity, worked to turn Canadians’ opinions against Marineland. But other zoos and aquariums around the world and in Canada are still thriving.
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Part of the reason why the public still generally supports zoos is that few come with a Marineland-type laundry list of horror stories. The Toronto Zoo, for example, has put conservation and animal welfare at the forefront of its operations, pledging to actually reduce the number of species in its care (from 440 about six years ago to around 300 last year) and taking action to preserve embryos of animals facing extinction. Indeed, most quasi-informed visitors can tell the difference between a “good” zoo and a bad one: one where provided habitats appear suitable for the animals’ sizes, where social animals are housed in packs, where there are efforts to replicate conditions that exist in the wild.
The last zoo I visited was on a family trip to Florida in 2023, when my daughter was just learning to make animal sounds. We saw the lions, housed in a desolate enclosure of probably just a couple thousand square feet, with the only shade provided conveniently right next to the viewing window. And then we left. I haven’t been back to a zoo since.
The argument for the good zoos is that they engage the public in such a way as to raise awareness about species preservation, about climate change, about harmful poaching practices and so on. Indeed, it’s a different experience seeing an elephant in real life when learning about the ivory trade than it is reading about them in a book. But it is undeniable that captive animals endure certain hardships that wild animals do not. There is vast documentation of stereotypical behaviours such as pacing and rocking among animals in North American zoos, as well as physical ailments and illnesses not seen in wild populations. Gorillas kept in captivity are experiencing an epidemic of heart disease, for instance, even though cardiovascular disease is rarely seen among apes in the wild. Elephants in zoos also tend to experience foot problems as a result of captivity, likely because of enclosure conditions and repetitive behaviours. Captive animals cannot breed, forage for food or engage with the environment as they would in the wild. That’s not Marineland-level cruel, but it is arguably cruel all the same.
Decades ago, Marineland’s animals were treated as a tourist delight: something to entertain the family on the weekend. With hindsight, we can see how wrong that was. Perhaps decades on, we’ll think the same of other animals kept in captivity, too.