TUI HQ Hit With ‘Orcas Suffer in Captivity’ Ad

For Immediate Release:

7 January 2020

Contact:

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

TUI HQ HIT WITH ‘ORCAS SUFFER IN CAPTIVITY’ AD

PETA Turns Up the Heat as Travel Provider Keeps Selling Tickets to SeaWorld and Other Marine Amusement Parks

Luton – Because TUI has refused to join British Airways and Virgin Holidays in cutting ties with SeaWorld, PETA has placed an ad near to TUI’s head office – which its employees will likely see every day – that shows an orca trapped in a glass bowl alongside a plea not to support cruel marine abusement parks.

Images are also available here, and here.

“While the majority of the travel industry is moving away from parks that confine far-ranging orcas to cramped concrete tanks, TUI is still propping them up,” says PETA Director Elisa Allen. “PETA is urging TUI to do right by orcas in 2020 and stop selling tickets to SeaWorld’s watery prisons.”

While orcas in nature 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 95,000 PETA members and supporters – including Sharon Osbourne and Andy Murray – have contacted the travel provider, demanding that it do the right thing and drop marine parks from its itineraries. PETA has organised protests with costumed “orcas” outside TUI’s main office, sent its CEO coal for Christmas, held days of action outside regional branches, and more.

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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