Kiska, an orca born free and dying without ever having seen the sea again
One Voice is reporting on the hell of dolphinariums and paying tribute to Kiska, the last orca at MarineLand Canada, who died on 9 March 2023.
Kiska, said to be ‘the most lonely orca in the world’ died on Thursday 9 March 2023 in the same pool that served as her solitary confinement cell for twelve years. The majestic orca, kept in captivity for forty interminable years, was captured in Icelandic waters. She was very young then.
Finally an end point after 40 years of hell
It was in 1979 that her interminable exploitation began. Kiska was ripped away from her family along with Keiko. They spent a few years in a Marineland pool together before being separated. She saw the five babies that she had carried and brought into the world die in the pools of the dolphinarium…
A tiny pool and solitude to the point of insanity
When we went to see her a year and half ago, she seemed mostly bored to death. Worse, she was doing what the whole world could only interpret as cries for help: thrashing the surface of the water with her tail, giving the impression she was banging on the sides of the glass pool… was this a demonstration of frustration, of pain? Marine biology specialist Ingrid Visser published a damning report.
With each trick she did to kill time, Kiska stumbled against the walls, obviously never being able to swim at full speed or in a straight line, or to dive down deep, so desperately alone. Living with their own kind is essential for orcas. And despite it being a strict legal minimum requirement in Canada for cetaceans being kept in dolphinariums to live with a companion of the same species, they do not care about the law.
Dolphinariums: hell on earth
Despite incessant campaigns by animal activists, in Ontario, or more widely in America and also in Europe, which we are of course part of, neither the old fashioned park nor the authorities ever had the mercy to grant her a semblance of life and freedom. Even in her old age.
There are still 34 belugas and five dolphins in the filthy pools of this dilapidated park. We must find an urgent solution for them.
Translated from the French by Joely Justice