Marineland, Planète Sauvage: the same fight for France's cetaceans!
One month after the closure of Marineland, the fate of the dolphins hangs in the balance. After fears that the dolphins would be sent to China, the French Minister of Ecology has finally announced that she will veto this destination. We demand that their well-being and the end of their exploitation come before any other consideration. Why this persistent refusal to sit around the table?… Especially when at Planète Sauvage reproduction continues. We’ll be outside the Nantes park on Saturday February 8, the day it reopens.
Western parks are overflowing
At the end of January 2025, the French Minister for Ecological Transition announced that she would refuse to allow Marineland’s dolphins to be sent to China… A good thing too… even if, clearly, this announcement comes very late!
The captivity market is saturated. And in France – we’ve been experiencing this bitterly since the vote on the 2021 law, which the French government itself initiated – our government seems to be discovering every day that there’s no more room in European parks for the survivors of endless breeding and training.
Sleights of hands, euthanasia… and breeding in full swing
As proof of this, the Greek park Attica – where Naska and Ekinox, both born at Parc Astérix a few years before its closure, are still sequestered – is sending five dolphins to Clearwater in Florida.
Will some of Marineland’s dolphins be killed? The question must be asked. We’ve reached this point because when the captivity industry no longer wants animals, when they are no longer profitable, either for breeding or for circus acts, it kills them. We remember the tragic fate of Ekinox’s mother, Femke.
At the same time, Planète Sauvage continues to make money off cetaceans, with the birth of dolphin calves in overcrowded tanks. We’re choking.
What are our leaders doing, apart from burying their heads in the sand?
Where is the ministerial decree awaited for over three years after the law was passed? Where are the sit-down discussions needed to find truly acceptable solutions?
One month after the closure of Marineland, the future of captive dolphins in France remains bleak. We’re looking for ways out for those on the Côte d’Azur, while on the Atlantic coast dolphins are giving birth again and again… Where will these babies end up?
We’ll be there next Saturday, February 8, in front of Planète Sauvage, which continues to train and breed under the guise of a “scientific and protection mission”, as the legal newspeak so aptly puts it.