Sanctuary proponents square off against captivity defenders, as both sides invoke the name & teachings of Ric O’Barry
CHICAGO, Illinois––Four of the 30 belugas evacuated from the defunct Marineland of Niagara in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, during July and August 2026 have died at their new homes, along with a fifth beluga who was already at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.
The deaths have reinvigorated 56 years of furious debate over whale and dolphin captivity, and in particular, over the ethics and options of captive marine mammal release.
(See Marineland of Niagara belugas evacuated, but move to the Shedd goes badly.)
(Ric O’Barry Facebook page)
Ric O’Barry
Ric O’Barry, now 86, at age 30 touched it all off on Earth Day 1970, leaving a lucrative career as a Miami Seaquarium and Hollywood dolphin trainer to try to free a dolphin named Charlie Brown from a laboratory in the Bahamas.
O’Barry, then known as Richard Barry O’Feldman, opened a gap in the sea pen that held Charlie Brown, but Charlie Brown refused to leave.
O’Barry went on to release many formerly captive dolphins successfully, while acknowledging that not every captive dolphin can, should, or wants to be released.
This position, though O’Barry still tends to be regarded as Public Enemy #1 by the marine mammal captivity industry, has also cost him many friends among marine mammal captivity opponents.
“Rushed transfer process”
O’Barry’s name is now invoked on either side of the discussion involving the former Marineland of Niagara belugas, three of whom died at the Shedd Aquarium, and one at the Oceanogràfic València aquarium in Spain.
“Advocates for animal well-being say a rushed transfer process may have contributed to their deaths,” observed Finnegan Belleau for the Chicago Tribune on September 23, 2026.
But the rushed transfer process was necessitated by the circumstances.
“Marineland’s owners threatened to euthanize the belugas if long-term solutions weren’t found,” Belleau mentioned.
The Shedd Aquarium took in 10 whales, Finnegan recounted. In addition to the Georgia Aquarium and Oceanogràfic València, former Marineland of Niagara belugas were sent to SeaWorld San Antonio and SeaWorld San Diego, which have not had deaths among the evacuated whales––at least not yet.
(Shedd Aquarium Facebook photo)
What killed the Shedd belugas?
Preliminary necropsy findings on the first three of the four belugas deceased at the Shedd Aquarium reportedly found that Peekachu, 23, a female former Marineland of Niagara resident who died on August 25, 2026, suffered from “significant chronic gastrointestinal inflammation,” and had “Bird feathers, sticks and large porous rocks in her stomach,” probably ingested at Marineland of Niagara, but not believed to be directly related to her death.
Rain, 20, a female beluga who died on September 2, 2026, also suffered from severe chronic gastrointestinal inflammation. She appeared to have ingested paint flecks at Marineland of Niagara, also not believed to be directly related to her death.
Beethoven, 34, likewise died on September 2, 2026. A male born on August 8, 1992 at SeaWorld San Antonio, Beethoven also lived at SeaWorld San Diego, the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, and the Georgia Aquarium, before arriving at the Shedd on October 19, 2014.
Beethoven was found to have died from “age-associated health changes, including changes affecting his cardiovascular system.
God of the dead
Osiris, another former Marineland of Niagara beluga, named for the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, died at the Shedd Aquarium on September 21, 2026, after a month of “ongoing clinical concerns,” a Shedd spokesperson told Belleau of the Chicago Tribune.
The Shedd also mentioned ongoing concern about the condition of two more former Marineland of Niagara belugas, Secord, 22, and Caspian, 27.
“Shedd’s eight female whales from Marineland were captured in Russian waters,” Finnegan reported, “while the two males were born at [Marineland of Niagara].”
The four recent deaths of belugas transferred from Marineland of Niagara were not unprecedented. Finnegan recalled that three of five belugas transferred from Marineland of Niagara to the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut died in 2021, soon after that move, also allegedly due to preexisting conditions.
(See Marineland of Canada & Mystic Aquarium in hot water over beluga deaths.)
Jason Bruck
Debate emerging from the most recent deaths of former Marineland of Niagara belugas, smoldering in online forums for weeks, erupted into public view with publication in the online magazine The Conversation of an essay headlined “Finding homes for whales and dolphins when parks like Marineland Canada close isn’t easy – a biologist explains why sea sanctuaries aren’t the answer.”
The author, Jason Bruck, is an associate professor of biology at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, who also holds uncompensated positions as director of research and education for Marineland Florida (not affiliated with Marineland Canada), scientist member of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks & Aquariums’ animal welfare committee, and as a founding board member of the Marine Mammal Research Network.
Additionally, offered Bruck of his background, “I grew up in an animal hospital with a veterinarian father who was the wildlife rehabilitator for our county,” in upstate New York.
“‘Sanctuary’ is still a form of captivity”
Opened Bruck, “The word ‘sanctuary’ carries an emotional appeal, but a sanctuary is still a form of captivity. It is not release, which would be illegal for almost all animals currently under human care.
“In cetacean sanctuaries,” Bruck explained, “animals remain behind nets and depend on people for food and veterinary care. Managers must control the animals’ social groups, monitor their health and respond to environmental hazards.
‘Animal welfare,” Bruck defined, “depends on many factors: the animal’s health, social relationships, nutrition, the ability to make choices about how the animal spends time, cognitive stimulation, and if the animal has appropriate environmental predictability.
“The animals need enough change to keep them engaged, but not so much as to overwhelm them and cause harmful stress,” Bruck wrote. “Caregivers cannot assume that what is natural to animals born or housed under human care is the same as what is natural to a wild animal.
“A hypothesis to test”
“Whether a zoo-born cetacean benefits from a sanctuary is a hypothesis to test, not a fact to assume,” Bruck asserted.
Bruck further pointed out that there are no successful cetacean sanctuaries currently operating, though there are at least two start-ups in the Mediterranean that have yet to receive whales or dolphins.
(See Whale Sanctuary may finally get two whales; dolphin sanctuaries left waiting.)
“After 10 years,” Bruck mentioned, “The Whale Sanctuary Project in Nova Scotia, Canada, is still trying to raise funding and hasn’t built its [planned] 100-acre sea pen.
“Similar startup troubles have plagued the National Aquarium in Baltimore, which also pledged to place its animals in a sanctuary about 10 years ago but has not yet done so,” Bruck recalled.
Failed attempts
“Sea Life Trust Beluga Whale Sanctuary has made multiple attempts to place two belugas named Little White and Little Grey from a Chinese aquarium into a sanctuary they built in Iceland,” Bruck continued. “However, a 2025 review reported that both belugas spent 92.6% of their time in a conventional indoor pool rather than their sanctuary.
“While in the sanctuary they exhibited stress behaviors and had feeding difficulties, with one animal even developing ulcers. It remains unclear whether the whales will ever inhabit, much less thrive, in their sanctuary.
“These examples do not prove sanctuaries cannot work,” Bruck conceded. “They demonstrate that these types of enclosures are hard to develop, fund, and manage. They also show that animals don’t adapt to these environments readily.”
Lori Marino
Responded Whale Sanctuary Project president Lori Marino, “I am a neuroscientist who has studied cetaceans for over thirty years.
“Bruck’s essay does not include any new information or opinions,” Marino charged. “Despite his admonitions about sanctuaries, this piece serves to divert attention away from the real issue, which is that whales and dolphins from an entertainment park in Canada are dying at an alarming rate.
“They didn’t go to a sanctuary. They went into more concrete tanks after living a life confined to a barren environment where their health was neglected. Some of them, about half of the thirty beluga whales, were taken out of the wild to be kept at Marineland.”
Countered Bruck, “Your colleague and fellow Whale Sanctuary Project board member, Dr. Naomi Rose, suggested during an Animal Justice webinar that many of the Marineland Canada belugas might have [had] to be euthanized on site because their health could be so compromised.
“In the event, the American Zoo Association facilities [that actually evacuated the belguas] were able to move every animal out of Canada alive,” whereas, “Had these animals been transferred to the Whale Sanctuary Project, some might not have even left Marineland of Niagara.”
Hired gun?
Marino hinted that Bruck might be in effect a “hired gun” for the captivity industry.
Bruck responded that “My salary is publicly available as a professor at Stephen F. Austin University,” that he is not paid for any of his marine mammal work, and that “My pay is substantially less than the compensation reported for you and Charles [Vinick] through the years of the Whale Sanctuary Project.
“I also note,” Bruck added, “that although your reported salaries have decreased as the Whale Sanctuary Project has faced criticism regarding organizational expenses, compensation remains a significant component of the organization’s expenditures relative to the progress made toward developing a functioning sanctuary.
PHASM drone
“For full disclosure,” Bruck continued, “I occasionally receive grant funding through our partners at Dolphin Quest. That funding, however, goes toward the cost and development of our PHASM drone, which is designed to collect health data from vulnerable wild cetacean populations,” specifically in Galveston Bay, Texas.
The PHASM drone, Bruck explained, is designed to capture whales’ breath when they blow, from which “we will be able to perform a lot of aspects of health assessment that once involved wild animal restraint, millions of dollars, and dozens of boats/people.”
“Every time animals from pools are put to expansive sea pen environments,” Bruck alleged, “there have been issues,” a point O’Barry among others may dispute, while conceding that there are frequent issues with many longtime captive whales and dolphins.
“Even when I see animals given the choice between open ocean/complete freedom and an outdoor pool environment, they choose the pool,” Bruck said. “It’s safe. It’s where their people are.
Training, says O’Barry, is the problem
“It takes years of training and vast amounts of fish to get them to trust trainers enough to follow them out into those open ocean environments,” Bruck claimed, “and even still they want to get back to their pools as fast as they can.”
Here is the crux of the longtime disagreement between O’Barry and practically all others who have attempted dolphin, beluga, or orca releases: O’Barry maintains that a successful release requires breaking the animal/human bond, that the animal to be released should never even see a trainer, if possible, during preparation for release, so that the animal no longer depends on a human for food, mental stimulation, and companionship, and instead learns (or re-learns) to think and act as a wild animal.
The O’Barry approach is exactly the approach used by most wildlife rehabilitators with most species. The notion that training with human contact is required to release captive wildlife seems to exist almost entirely with whales and dolphins––who are among the few wild-caught animals for whom there exists an entire training industry.
Bruck blames sanctuary schemes
Accused Bruck, replying further to Marino, “You might have saved yourself and a lot of animals in countries like Canada, Mexico, and France a lot of problems. Instead you convinced the world that sanctuaries were not only a viable alternative, but that they were the only alternative.
“And now when these places close because of laws you help get passed, your sanctuary model is a bust, leaving stranded animals in all of the places these laws are passed.”
Interjected Colorado College professor of neuroscience Bob Jacobs, “So, let’s say the cetaceans currently in captivity stay in captivity, and we take care of them the best we can for the rest of their lives. After they are gone, should we continue to hold cetaceans in captivity?”
Answered Bruck, “The devil, of course, will be in the details of how these things are measured and assessed, but as a theoretical answer, if we can meet two conditions then the answer is yes.”
Bruck argues for captivity
The two conditions Bruck said, are “That we are able to provide animals under human care with lives that are as good as or better than those they experience in the wild, though not necessarily the same. This includes not doing things to animals that are currently under human care that threaten their welfare,” for instance “sterilization, unhealthy sex segregation or denying animals calf rearing.”
This, Bruck did not acknowledge, amounted to an argument for breeding whales and dolphins in captivity.
The second condition, Bruck said, is “That the animals under human care are able to contribute meaningfully to research, conservation, and education,” which is the primary set of rationalizations for marine mammal captivity issued by the marine mammal entertainment industry ever since marine mammals first were captured for exhibit.
P.T. Barnum
Among the first exhibitors to use that pretext, and perhaps the first to exhibit beluga whales, was P.T. Barnum in 1861-1862, whose captive belugas all soon died, contributing little more to “research, conservation, and education” than their skeletons.
Bruck tried to separate his arguments from the dismal history of marine mammal exhibition.
“I think it’s important,” Bruck wrote, “to recognize how seriously welfare came to be taken in managed care as welfare science developed in the late 1990s and 2000s. The ulcers that used to kill captive dolphins in the 1980s are now exceedingly rare. Sterilization and cleaning practices improved, and standards around contamination are taken very seriously.”
But would this have happened without the pressure on the marine mammal exhibition industry developed by O’Barry, the 1993 film Free Willy!, the 2013 documentary Blackfish, et al?
“What is the effect of entertainment?”
“What is the effect of the entertainment?” asked Bruck. “If it offends our sensibilities but ultimately gets an East Texan to call his congressperson when the Marine Mammal Protection Act is under attack because he was impressed by a show he saw at SeaWorld, then I’m okay with that.”
Bruck further argued that many marine mammals seem to enjoy performing for crowds. The orcas Keiko and Lolita seemed to be among them, by most accounts, and were among the captive whales whom O’Barry deemed poor candidates for release because of their extent of habituation.
“Growing up,” Bruck said, “we had hundreds of different non-releasable animals on our property because my father was a wildlife rehabilitator. I learned early on that many animals, particularly mammals, genuinely enjoy training and human interaction. Raccoons, skunks, flying squirrels, you name it. These animals were not domesticated, but they willingly participated in training, sometimes even when there was no food reward. I’m not sure an audience clapping fundamentally changes that experience.
Dolphin exhibition & prison rodeo
“Obviously, I would not support behaviors that are coerced,” Bruck added. “That can include trying to force an animal into an environment the animal doesn’t want to be in, which can include a large sea pen.
“I think the key is understanding the individual animal,” Bruck continued. “If the ‘entertainment’ an animal participates in is something that animal prefers and voluntarily engages with, I have a very different view of it than I would have something coerced. Ultimately, it is in a facility’s best interest to understand and accommodate those preferences anyway. You can’t really make a 500-pound animal do something it genuinely does not want to do.”
Overlooked in Bruck’s argument, however, was the question of capturing an animal who does not want to be captured, whose options then are between either performing or not performing, not between captivity and freedom.
Under those circumstances, which are the circumstances of every captive marine mammal, the animal’s choices are comparable to the choice of a Louisiana State Penitentiary inmate to participate or not participate in the annual Angola Prison Rodeo.
There is no option for the prisoner to go free.
“The SeaWorld/Blackfish effect”
Bruck mentioned that, “The Japanese public, by going to dolphin shows and appreciating the animals as more than big fish, is now having more of an effect in pushing conservative politicians away from supporting and subsidizing the dolphin drives [at Taiji] more than anything Ric O’Barry ever did over there.
“It’s the SeaWorld/Blackfish effect, where people learn to love these animals because of marine parks and then become activists against them after watching Blackfish,” Bruck said, “without realizing that SeaWorld was often the reason they cared about the animals in the first place.”
This could also be said of O’Barry himself, who credits his years as a diver and trainer at the Miami Seaquarium with developing his concern for marine mammals and his opposition to captivity.
“Captivity industry is struggling”
Offered Bob Jacobs, “The concept of a sanctuary for cetaceans only really exists because the captivity industry, as historically defined, is struggling in much of the western hemisphere. Several countries,” including France and Mexico, “are banning using marine mammals for entertainment.”
Meanwhile, though, “Captive facilities for cetaceans have been growing rapidly in China,” Jacobs reminded, “with the majority of the animals being captured in the wild. Most of these facilities are not accredited; most of these facilities offer cetacean shows for entertainment, and estimates suggest that only a very small percentage offer any kind of enrichment,” other than training to perform.
Countered Bruck, “When I was a child growing up in upstate New York, we were not near the ocean. Marineland of Niagara was the probably the first time I ever got to see a whale or dolphin. There is no way I would have grown up appreciating these animals or become a cetacean biologist had it not been for facilities like this.
“Important for children” says Bruck
“As adults,” Bruck said, “we dismiss animal presentations because we may not need them to appreciate the animals. But do not underestimate how important it is for children to see these animals, even if they don’t live near the ocean. Seeing videos on the internet is not enough.”
Counter-argument: millions of children care about giant land-dwelling dinosaurs., extinct for more than 66 million years. No human children have ever seen one.
“As a professor, anecdotally,” Bruck finished, “I am seeing a massive drop off in interest in these animals and the ocean, as a possible function of the backlash against zoos and aquariums as a whole.”
More likely, this could be a function of a lack of job opportunities in marine mammalogy and oceanography as result of steep cuts in the U.S federal budget for environmental science of all sorts.
U.S. vs. China
“The question before us now,” Bruck opined, “is how to we utilize facilities to be the best possible in terms of animal welfare, public education, scientific discovery, and conservation stewardship.”
That argument, however, may at the present point in time be more applicable to captive wildlife facilities in China, including zoos and marine mammal parks, which are at a state of development in an atmosphere of public awareness to comparable to that of the U.S. before Free Willy!
Ocean-going whale-watching in China, as in the U.S. pre-Free Willy!, exists but is in relatively early development as an industry.
In the U.S., marine mammal park attendance, at about eight million visitors per year, is still two to three times as great as participation in paid ocean-going whale-watching, but the participation gap has steadily narrowed for more than 30 years.
Counting informal whale and dolphin observation from shoreline vantage points and recreational small craft, it is now likely that more Americans see whales and dolphins in the wild than see them in tanks.
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