San Diego City Beat columnist Edwin Decker is calling on SeaWorld San Diego to stop terrorizing animals with fireworks. As Decker points out in a hard-hitting piece titled “Please Do Not Explode Fireworks Over the Animals,” the marine theme park bombards the captives (as well as local wildlife and domesticated animals, of course) with noisy fireworks displays every single night, all summer long, and to the animals, they sound like a war is raging.
“[SeaWorld] brags that it has ‘a commitment to animal welfare,’ which seems like a bunch of seahorse s*** to me, considering SeaWorld’s insistence on reenacting the Battle of Fort McHenry over Mission Bay all summer long,” writes Decker. “Just because there aren’t dead fish washing up on the shore doesn’t mean some seriously bad mojo isn’t happening.”
Imagine how awful it would be to be blasted with booming vibrations night after night and having no way to figure out the cause. Marine mammals, as Decker points out, navigate by echolocation—bouncing sonar waves off other objects to determine shape, density, distance, and location. So the reverberation from fireworks must be confusing and maddening.
“Hard to believe there aren’t some creatures that aren’t adversely affected by the orgy of light and thunder pounding over their heads every summer night,” Decker writes.
The orcas, dolphins, fish, and other animals confined to cramped tanks at SeaWorld already have it bad enough without this kind of gratuitous stress.
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But SeaWorld management has proved time and again that creating a spectacle trumps animal welfare. People who care about animals should never buy a ticket to SeaWorld.
