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Closing day at Marineland

There’s a place we all know in Niagara Falls, Ontario: Marineland.

This past Sunday (Oct. 12) was the wildlife and amusement park’s season closer, a day the park’s detractors, Marineland Animal Defense, have traditionally called for a ban on wild capture and captive animal breeding programs.

This year felt like a family reunion, with approximately 200 participants. It was quieter, but so was Marineland. Below, meet the activists who are working to set all of the wildlife free on the premises: the deer, bears, sea lions, walruses, belugas, dolphins and Kiska, an orca who was captured as a calf 37 years ago, who swims alone in a captive wildlife amusement park.

The Mom: Ana Restovic

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“I don’t know how you could still have kids going into that park and parents of my generation allowing that to happen with all the information we have at our fingertips. I try to educate my children about the animals. I’m trying to teach them the right thing to do. They keep getting bigger and we keep coming back. I am hoping they have a future that doesn’t involve places like this because it’s unnecessary.”

The ocean advocate: Jeremy Larivee

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“All marine captive facilities state that they are educating the public about these animals, that they are the only way kids and people can see these animals, but they are empty shells of what they truly are in the wild. Kiska can lap her tank in 90 seconds. If you look in her tank she has a couple of fake rocks. They don’t feel the rhythms of the ocean, the magnetic tides. They don’t get to hunt, they don’t get to surf, they are living lives of destitution. The threats in the wild are habitat loss, overfishing. We are taking their food source, oil spills and pollution are a big threat – shipping lanes and the amount of traffic in the ocean is a huge threat.”

The dolphin child: Vijay

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“I think less people have been coming to the park just by looking at the parking lot. I have homeschool because my brother has allergies and I don’t really like school. I come here to learn to be compassionate. They’d probably say it’s not in the curriculum like they did on the climate changes and the floods, ‘cos it’s not in the curriculum. I think Marineland is going to fade away because people don’t want to come anymore because of all the people protesting.”

The Earth liberationist: Sakihitowin Awasis

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“The connection is the more violence we tolerate towards non-human beings and the earth, the more violence we tolerate ourselves, and it furthers this disconnection and vicious cycle of colonial and capitalist violence.”

The young women on the frontlines: Madison Walters, 16 (centre)

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“Being surrounded by passionate people empowered me and helped to take away the fear of speaking up for something I believe so strongly in. Any chanting that we did was to raise awareness to get people to turn around and go back home. It was an amazing feeling to convince the small amount of people we could to actually leave.”

The marine Utopian: Rachel Larivee

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“If this park were to shut down, we don’t have control over where the animals would go. They could end up liquidated out. We want people to know that we do have long term goals. I believe that Kiska the orca could be rehabilitated and released into the wild one day. Her case is similar to that of Keiko who played Willy in the Free Willy movies. He was a wild capture, lived in captivity for a number of years and then when Free Willy came out, there was this huge campaign to literally free the whale that played Willy. He ended up migrating up to Norway and was unable to integrate himself back to a pod life. Eventually he did get sick and passed away and it was a natural process.”

The cult leader: Dylan Powell, Marineland Animal Defense

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“We saw a huge change municipally at the start of this year and also a change within local news media. A lot of the business and political community sees that there would be a much more lucrative situation if a larger corporation came in and ran a strict theme park and got rid of the animal exhibits. Typically in the local media editorials focused on [saying] this is a cult-like group, called us a tamer version of the Black Bloc and wrote that people spit on children. Those papers are kinda the mouth piece of the business political community in Niagara, nothing has much changed on how they represent the demonstrations – we still have a very adversarial conflict ridden relationship, however they’ve shifted to this line of ‘we would like to see animal exhibits phased out.'”

Celebrities even participated – from Twitter and Tumblr:

goal: round up investors + crowdsourcing, buy marineland. deal with making it an animal free park, split profits w/ investors.

– deadmau5 (@deadmau5) October 14, 2014

Hey #Marineland what do you say – how many animals died today? #endcaptivity

– Pamela Anderson (@PamelaDAnderson) October 11, 2014

See our photos from this year’s opening day protest at Marineland here.

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