Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
The thing about Blackfish, and basically any film that ends up being that affecting, is that that is the deliberate point of the movie. It's a highly activist film. Now, obviously, a lot of the content is correct and from where I sit, the filmmakers' hearts are in the right place. But as a documentary - a film whose purposes is to inform viewers, rather than to propagandize to them - it has a whole slough of flaws. A quick google search reveals this.
Basically, whenever you watch a documentary that's obviously partisan, you should take it with a grain of salt... except for Going Clear. That sh##'s all true.
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I've read up on the flaws in the film, and to me they all seem to be beside the point. Most of them centre around how the film was cut for dramatic affect (splicing in 911 calls, fabricating certain aspects about whether or not people went into tanks with the animals willingly and if it's safe to do so, misleading about what Sea World today does vs Sea World of 30-40 years ago, etc..)
To me, these things are not really the point. IMO, any idiot should know that it's dangerous to enter a body of water with a predator like an Orca. Trainers are absolutely putting themselves at risk, and the few deaths that happened, while largely accidental, are to be expected when working with animals like this. I never really focused on that part of it.
The act of keeping these social and intelligent animals in secluded cages and pools barely big enough to fit them, 1000's of times smaller than what their natural territory size is supposed to be, is what I focused on. It's just straight up not OK, and there are going to predictably be psychological effects. These things have their own languages, they solve problems, they play, they have an intelligence that we just don't understand.
The fact that Sea World stopped taking from the wild some 35+ years ago, IMO, does not absolve them of the fact that they did, and now they and their young can't be placed back. "Well we took them, but now they can't survive out there so... are we good?" Is not cool. Plus there are still places all over the world that do this.
To me, it's less about damning Sea World itself (although there is plenty of that for sure), and more about the question of should we be taking and keeping ANY animals this way? There are research purposes absolutely, but only a small fraction need to be retained for those reasons.
As far as doing it for our entertainment, I don't agree with it. And doing so with conditions far outside of what is natural, It just gives me a really uneasy feeling.