Stop dolphin captivity in tanks for entertainment

Each year, Japan kills more than 20,000 dolphins in the village of Taiji, where pods of dolphins are driven into shallow coves and, amid total panic and chaos, are killedfor the meat industry by having their throats slit with knives or being stabbed with spears. But the real business remains not in the dolphin meat but in their exportation to resorts and hotels for entertainment and also for dolphintherapy.

Just to explain you what it means, The "lucky ones" are selected from drive fisheries to be sold to aquariums around the world.

• Captures of dolphins are traumatic and stressful and can result in injury and death of dolphins. The number of dolphins that die during capture operations or shortly thereafter are never revealed in dolphinariums or swim-with-dolphins programs. Some facilities even claim their dolphins were "rescued" from the ocean and cannot be released. This claim is almost invariably false.
• Training of dolphins is often deliberately misrepresented by the captive dolphin industry to make it look as if dolphins perform because they like it. This isn't the case. They are performing because they have been deprived of food. Basicaly they are doomed to be exploited as attractions at theme parks and resort hotels, forced to perform silly tricks for food, swim with tourists, and endure being hand-fed and petted by curiosity seekers. The majority of their time will be spent swimming around in circles in tiny, barren concrete tanks.
• Most captive dolphins are confined in minuscule tanks containing chemically treated artificial seawater. Dolphins in concrete tanks are severely restricted in using their highly developed sonar, which is one of the most damaging aspects of captivity. It is much like forcing a person to live in a hall of mirrors for the rest of their life - their image always bouncing back with no clear direction in sight.

After the killing in Taiji the selected dolphins sold for thousands of dollars, are awaiting export to Ocean World Adventure Park, a tourist resort in the Dominican Republic, where visitors pay big bucks to swim with captive dolphins. More recently we have found also wild dolphins jailed in swimming pools not only in Dominican Republic but also in Indonesia and Australia, like Peto (picture) and Joyce showing signs of sickness and depression.

What You Can Do

Please sign this petition to urge those countries to deny import of the Taiji 12 dolphins, and other wild dolphins and insist that they be returned to their ocean home