From Tank to Tombstone: PETA Sets Up Chilling Orca ‘Cemetery’ Outside ABTA Meeting

From Tank to Tombstone: PETA Sets Up Chilling Orca ‘Cemetery’ Outside ABTA Meeting

LondonToday, during Dolphin Awareness Month (March), a sombre “graveyard” of “headstones” – to highlight that majestic and intelligent cetaceans die when kept in captivity – haunted ABTA’s “Delivering Sustainable Travel” conference outside Deloitte’s head office. An activist stood behind each “gravestone” while the meeting attendees arrived to demand that the travel association amend its policy regarding captive cetaceans. PETA is calling on ABTA to add visits to facilities that exploit whales and dolphins for entertainment to its list of unacceptable practices.

Travel giants Tripadvisor, Virgin Holidays, and British Airways Holidays refuse to promote facilities that imprison orcas, yet ABTA lags behind. Its inaction allows ABTA members such as TUI to continue to profit from animals’ suffering by selling tickets to venues that confine these sensitive, intelligent animals to cramped concrete tanks.

More images can be found here.

“Profiting from orca abuse is indefensible,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “It’s high time for ABTA to stop dragging its heels and join the majority of the travel industry by taking a stand against cetacean captivity.”

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Contact:

Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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