Photos: Life-Size ‘Orca’ Protests TUI’s Ongoing Promotion of SeaWorld

For Immediate Release:

12 August 2019

Contact:

Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327, ext 222; [email protected]

LIFE-SIZE ‘ORCA’ PROTESTS TUI’S ONGOING PROMOTION OF SEAWORLD

PETA Calls On Travel Provider to Join Virgin Holidays and British Airways in Cutting Ties With Abusement Parks

Luton – Today, positioned above a banner proclaiming, “TUI: Drop SeaWorld,” a 6-metre-long, listless “orca” made a splash outside the travel group’s headquarters. Activists were also holding signs proclaiming, “TUI Profits From Orcas’ Misery,” to call on the UK’s largest travel provider to stop giving a financial lifeline to facilities which hold orcas and other dolphins captive. The protest follows recent announcements by British Airways and Virgin Holidays that they have cut ties with cruel marine abusement parks.

Images are also available here, here, and here.

“Animal-loving British holidaymakers want nothing to do with SeaWorld’s orca prisons, and forward-thinking travel providers are taking notice,” says PETA Director Elisa Allen. “PETA is calling on TUI to catch up with the rest of the industry and stop selling tickets to parks that confine orcas to tanks that are, to them, the size of bathtubs.”

While orcas in the wild form complex relationships, work cooperatively to find food, and traverse up to 140 miles of ocean every day, those at SeaWorld are housed in incompatible groups in cramped tanks and have even been given the drug diazepam to manage stress-induced aggressive behaviour. Forty-one orcas and numerous other animals have died on SeaWorld’s watch – far short of their natural life expectancies.

Nearly 90,000 PETA members and supporters – including Sharon Osbourne – have contacted the travel provider demanding that it do the right thing and drop marine parks from its itineraries.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

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