Travel companies are a soft target for the animal rights industry. They obviously want to give the impression to their clients that they are caring organisation but this can lead to an erroneous view as to the actual reality particularly when it involves science and animal welfare. A case in point is the ban defunct Thomas Cook travel company and Richard Branson's Virgin holidays which decided on the information from the animal rights industry to stop promoting zoos and marine parks that display marine mammals such as dolphins.
Now, TripAdvisor seems to be the latest organisation to adopt this position.
Below I reproduce a comment from the marine mammal scientist Dr Jason Bruck regarding this matter.
"...I am probably not supposed to post this but soon TripAdvisor will announce that they will no longer sell tickets to facilities that "breed or import cetaceans". They were told by "experts" that no amount of husbandry can replicate the "living environment" whales and dolphins need to thrive. I do not presume to know who these experts are. I can tell you that they are not well-read. Because if they were really experts, they would know that Jaakkola and Willis (2019) clearly demonstrated that dolphins in human care live as long or longer than their wild counterparts. Furthermore, a meta-analysis by Proie (2013) showed that cortisol (stress) levels in animals under human care are not significantly different from animals in the wild under handling and, when appropriate training is involved, managed care animals actually show a decreased stress profile relative to their wild counterparts.
I want to talk to TripAdvisor and specifically their CEO Steve Kaufer. Let me make this abundantly clear. Depriving animals of natural breeding and calf rearing is anti-animal welfare. This was the consensus reached by a panel of expert marine mammal scientists at the 2017 Society of Marine Mammalogy Conference in Halifax Nova Scotia. I have plenty of well-published and well-respected scientists and experts ready to explain what this policy would do to the animals already in managed care. As a dolphin researcher for over 20 years, I assure you that this is an anti-science decision that will have negative effects on animal well-being and conservation work.
Any policy that moves to push facilities to ban animal breeding, forcing cetaceans to live in sex-segregated groups or rely on spotty birth-control is anti-dolphin. Furthermore, activists are willing to endanger the welfare of dolphins in human care for some perceived benefit to animals never born. This makes no sense. Breeding bans exist to cause the extinction of animals under managed care. Animals that have their own unique whistles that researchers like me and others study as a means to understand the closest mammal communication system to our own. Furthermore, the extinction of animals under human care will lead to the end of conservation technology development. As my lab moves forward with the design and fabrication of non-invasive drone technologies, we have been asked by regulatory bodies to ensure that all new aspects of our platform be tested before use in wild animals. This means that we have had to simulate aspects of dolphin behavior and physiology with measurements taken from animals under managed care. This will not be possible if activists get their way and companies continue to listen to these extremists. Serious people are trying to do serious work and again we are taking time out of our day to deal with the Blackfish Effect. It is exhausting and it decreases our ability to be productive conservationists..."
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