Video: Animal Defender Slams TUI Boss Over Cruel Dolphin Prisons

London – Today (10 September), a PETA supporter confronted TUI UK&I Managing Director, Neil Swanson, at Travel Weekly’s Future of Travel Conference, with a sign reading “TUI: Dolphins Don’t Belong in Tanks”, urging the company to cut ties with cruel dolphin prisons.

Footage is available here.

“Dolphins are trapped in a nightmare at marine abusement parks like SeaWorld, where they’re forcibly bred into a life of confinement and made to perform demeaning tricks for tourists,” says PETA Vice President of Programmes Elisa Allen. “PETA is calling on TUI to catch up with the rest of the travel industry and stop propping up these watery hellholes.”

TUI is the last major travel provider in the UK that sells tickets to marine parks like SeaWorld, where dolphins and whales are denied everything that’s natural to them, and dolphins are sexually abused and sometimes drugged so they can’t fight back in the park’s breeding programme.

In nature, dolphins maintain dynamic relationships with large social networks and can swim up to 60 miles a day. But at SeaWorld and other dolphin prisons like Loro Parque, they’re crammed into concrete tanks, where they have no stimulation, leading to stereotypic behaviours like swimming in endless tiny circles, floating listlessly and repeatedly hitting their head and grinding their teeth on the tank walls. More than 500 dolphins and whales have died at SeaWorld parks, many of them decades younger than their natural lifespan.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – points out that when it comes to the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a dolphin is a dog is a boy. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow PETA on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

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

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