PETA to Luton Town FC: Give TUI the Red Card for SeaWorld Ticket Sales!

London –After fans reported concerns over Luton Town Football Club’s sponsorship by TUI – which sells holiday packages to SeaWorld abusement parks, where far-ranging orcas are confined to cramped, barren tanks and forced to perform for tourists – during Dolphin Awareness Month, PETA rushed a letter to commercial director Chris Bell urging the club to reconsider its partnership with the travel company and place anti-captivity ads, paid for by PETA, at The Kenny.

“Unlike the players at Luton Town FC, orcas and other marine mammals trapped in SeaWorld’s watery prisons do not choose to entertain the public,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA urges the football club to reexamine its relationship with TUI and push the company to stop profiting from animals’ misery.”

In nature, orcas form complex relationships, work cooperatively to find food, and can traverse up to 150 miles of ocean every day, but those at SeaWorld are housed in incompatible groups in chemically treated water in cramped tanks and have even been given the drug diazepam to manage stress-induced aggressive behaviour. More than 40 orcas and over 500 other dolphins and whales have died on SeaWorld’s watch, many far short of their natural life span.

Around 66,000 PETA members and supporters – including Sharon Osbourne and Andy Murray – have contacted TUI to demand that it drop marine parks from its itineraries, as British Airways Holidays, Expedia, and Virgin Atlantic Holidays have already done.

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, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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