The abusement park

The abusement park is a place where you go see marine life trained to do tricks for a paying public.

In the abusement park intelligent marine mammals are separated from a life-long pod, put into small holding ponds under unnatural conditions, and re-trained through a steady diet of fish to do clever tricks for a viewing public.

This viewing public, that fiction of suburban advertising and petroleum fueled fantasy, wants that world to be before it as if everything conformed to a television fiction. Shows like "Flipper," which emerged, perhaps, from World War II and Cold War training of marine cetaceans to conduct military operation, would become a model for the entertainment industry situated in marine theme parks like Sea World. Sea World, situated near another World, created by Walt Disney follows Walt's template for always-consistent, always-fun, always-white-washed entertainment involving people and animals and people-as-animals. It's a combination of circus, acrobatics, and that eye-popping spectacle of marine cetaceans measured by the ton.

Killer whales, orcas, those wonders of the ocean, those pack animals with large brains and sophisticated sonar, those creatures who live in pods comprising multiple generations have their cetacean sociologies cross-sectioned when they're forcibly removed from their environment and environs to be placed in a man-made pool in places like Florida where a paying public watches them jump out of the water, slide out into the open air in stylized poses, and launch their white trainers into the air to the astonishment of the audience.

This abusement park, a place where fictions are spun at the expense of the creatures caught in its narrative. This abusement park, a place where science is distorted to support a narrative that explains away the obvious signs of containment shown by the whales: the collapsed dorsal, the rake marks of aggression spawned from mixing whales of different sexes and different pods into the same small enclosure. This abusement park, an aquarium, a curio containing some of the world's largest, most intelligent, and socially sophisticated marine mammals in spaces much, much smaller than the many miles of open sea that the creature would normally inhabit, safely, and without mental distress. This abusement park, a place that inspires countless generations of white kids from suburbia to join its ranks only to realize the cruel underside to the whole enterprise. The abusement park, a marine themed zoo with a profit motive, pimping animals in its captivity for the sake of a paying public.

The abusement park is the theater of the spectacle where animals (human and otherwise) were harmed in its making.