Wildlife
The plight of 30 captive belugas at Ontario’s now-shuttered Marineland theme park captures how decades of entertainment, science and activism has reshaped Canadians’ relationship with whales
The catchy jingle that Marineland of Canada used to fade out its splashy 2004 television advertisement still lives in the minds of countless Canadians. The ad shows children clamouring for a better view of the white shapes splashing in the park’s shimmering blue pools, one visitor even lucky enough to touch one of the belugas, seemingly smiling back as it performs. It delivered a simple message: we love our belugas, and so will you.
Yet 30 of those once-beloved beluga whales, including Jellybean, Frankie, Bertie Botts, Cleo, Tofino, Yukon and Lillooet, now face the prospect of death, threatened by the same park that once promoted them. As the last whales held in concrete tanks nationally, their plight — from tourist attraction to activist focus — highlights the tangled legacy of whale captivity in Canada and reflects shifting public views on animal welfare.
Before the slick television ads, gift shop toys, and trainers planting kisses on whale noses, North America had a far different relationship with toothed cetaceans. They were, quite simply, menaces and pests to be actively hunted in coastal waters.
From the 1920s to the 1980s, tens of thousands of whales, both belugas and orcas, were slaughtered to protect fisheries. Nearly a century ago in Quebec, planes loaded with homemade bombs targeted “white devils” in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Hunters earned $15 per tail. The whales, wrongly believed to have a “voracious appetite,” stood accused of decimating the cod stocks. The beluga hunt ended in 1979.
Jason Colby, an environmental historian at the University of Victoria, says captivity was once seen as “progressive.”
“People tend to look back on captivity and … they tend to think from our optics of today, that the debate was always about whale catching or whale watching,” says Colby. “But it was really about whale catching or whale killing.”
Early success in capturing and displaying killer whales and belugas sparked a continent-wide frenzy for these hulking mammals, which became major aquarium attractions. Orcas arrived first, followed by belugas. By the late 1990s, aquarium pools had transformed into theatrical stage productions, marking the zenith of whale captivity in Canada. By 2003, Marineland, a 400-hectare marine and theme park near Niagara Falls, had opened a second pool, called “Arctic Cove,” to display a growing collection of Russian belugas that eventually reached nearly 60 whales.
Capturing cetaceans for glass-enclosed tanks had a dual function: giving the public a chance to see large whales, while giving researchers the opportunity to study them up close.
“Activists look back and say ‘They were so awful then. I can’t believe they did this,” says Colby. “We know that these are amazing animals. Well, the reason we know that is actually because of the research that was generated.”
Colby’s family also saw the dark side of an industry built on keeping mammals in enclosures far smaller than their natural habitats. His father, who helped capture orcas, assisted with transporting a young whale across the country from Sealand in Victoria to Marineland in Niagara Falls in 1973. Colby says the seller, Bob Wright, cut corners on transportation costs, and as a result, the whale developed pneumonia.
“My dad tried to nurse this animal back to health for months and watched him essentially die in front of him. That was the thing that got him out of it.”
Colby’s father’s traumatic experience, along with growing concerns among trainers and researchers about captivity’s harms, highlighted how holding whales, despite its promise of entertainment and research, became its own undoing. Many of the most prominent critics of captivity were the same people who had worked closely with captive whales. Alongside their criticisms and depictions in media, new generations of activists were emerging as a result of shifting public perceptions. The 1993 movie Free Willy also played a pivotal role in this new era.
“There’s a case to be made that captive marine mammals and especially orcas were transformational in the way we think about the environment and our environmental politics and our priorities,” says Colby. “Without marine mammal captivity, our environmental politics and values [would] look different in 2025.”
Those values reflect a society increasingly critical of cetacean captivity, and for good reason, says Lori Marino, who has studied dolphin and whale neuroanatomy for more than 30 years.
Anyone who has seen belugas in captivity quickly recognizes their intelligence and playful personalities. But a new study by Marino and her colleagues exposes how harmful concrete tanks are for mammals adapted to complex social networks and long-distance swims. Captive whales die younger than wild ones, prompting researchers to speculate the stress of living in a concrete tank produces “very disturbed social interactions.”
“Those born in the tanks are born into a completely impoverished, artificial situation, and so they don’t get any of the benefits that free-ranging whales get,” says Marino. “There’s nothing for them to do. What it tells me is that there’s really a fundamental mismatch between who these animals are and what’s on offer in marine parks.”
Years of activism culminated in a 2015 legislative effort to ban cetacean captivity. Bill S-203, dubbed the Free Willy bill, sought to end both aquarium performances and breeding programs that supplied whales for entertainment.
“This is not a political issue for a partisan faction to own,” Wilfred Moore, the former Canadian senator who sponsored the initial private members bill, said during a 2015 Senate debate on the bill. “It is an ethical issue that should engage the conscience of every Canadian.”
Drawing on work from experts like Marino, the proposal aimed to align Canada with nations like Costa Rica, Norway and the U.K., which had effectively barred whale captivity in 1993 by making nearly impossible to keep whales while meeting strict legal requirements. The Canadian bill, hailed by advocates as “landmark,” allowed facilities to keep their existing whales but was opposed by the Vancouver Aquarium and Marineland, with the latter warning the bill would rob “the average people of Ontario from a fair opportunity” to see marine mammals.”
“We have heard from many marine biologists, veterinarians, conservationists and oceanographers that it was their childhood experience at Marineland that inspired them to learn more about the wonders of the ocean and its amazing aquatic life,” the park said, citing a study that found the “behavioural indices of stress are very low.” As the bill neared passage, then-senator Murray Sinclair championed it as legislation reflecting empathy extended to non-human life.
“We are here to take care of our nation, to take care of our land, to take care of the people and to take care of all that is part of this Creation,” he said in front of the Senate at the bill’s third reading in 2019. “So n’gwamazin: Be strong and steadfast in your beliefs. Nii-konasiitook: Take care of all of our relations.”
The effects of the bill, which became law later that year, are clear now: there are no longer any captive killer whales in Canada, and the only mammals that remain at the Vancouver Aquarium are sea otters, harbour seals and sea lions, all of which are either orphaned and being cared for or candidates for future release back into the wild.
The 30 belugas trapped at Marineland are the last captive whale population in Canada — and are suffering through what whistleblowers say are abysmal conditions. Even Ontario premier Doug Ford called their habitat “just terrible.” Twenty whales — 19 belugas and one orca — have died at the park since 2019.
Marineland did not respond to Canadian Geographic’s request for comment, but told The Guardian earlier this year the whales “receive far better healthcare and around-the-clock attention than any human in the U.K., or anywhere else.” Marineland also said that for decades, “animal rights activists worked to link any animal death with alleged ‘abuse’ by the facility caring for the animals” which was “effective as propaganda” for those groups to fundraise.
Public pressure has profoundly affected the park: it remained closed this summer for one of the first times and is actively in talks with possible buyers. Earlier this year, a failed attempt to sell its belugas to an aquarium in China led Marineland to issue a threat: it would kill all 30, citing the immense cost of keeping them alive.
“There’s no way, logistically, they can go and euthanize 30 animals all at once,” says Kristy Burgess, a former trainer who worked with the belugas for three years, calling it an “impossible” task to euthanize, en masse, animals that grow to be more than four metres and weigh as much as 1,500 kilograms. Marineland’s threats to kill Canada’s last captive whales have made their future urgent and divisive.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Empty the tanks,’ but I’m hoping the situation with Marineland shows people it’s not that simple. You can’t just empty the tanks because there’s nowhere for the tanks to empty to,” says Burgess. Experts agree most belugas, born in captivity, cannot be released back into the wild, because they lack the skills to hunt and will need human care for decades, says Marino.
For many, the Whale Sanctuary Project offers hope. A proposed 40-hectare netted enclosure in the ocean bay by Port Hilford, N.S., could home some whales, with CEO Charles Vinick aiming for “dignity in their retirement” and an end to living in small concrete tanks “where the science has proven that they suffer.
First proposed in 2020, the sanctuary faces approvals and environmental tests. Aimed to mimic the natural world but with human caretakers and close monitoring of the whales, the sanctuary has a “doable” construction timeline of eight or nine months, allowing up to 10 healthy whales to potentially be re-homed by early summer. Whales that are too sick for transport would likely either remain at Marineland or be euthanized.
Andrew Fenton, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University, points to chimpanzee sanctuaries as evidence that animals bred for captivity can thrive in enriched environments. But with a growing acknowledgement that the Nova Scotia sanctuary wouldn’t be able to house all the whales and that facilities in the U.S. might be the best fit, Fenton worries the prospect of shipping the whales to other aquariums undercuts the spirit of a law passed to bar captivity on ethical grounds.
Fenton says the solution must remain Canadian: “We can’t export our duties to these animals. We can’t rely on other customers, other patrons of aquariums around the world, to do what we should be doing here.
The debate over Canada’s last captive whales often overlooks the belugas’ reality: bred for public display and trained to perform. But as society moved away from marine parks, the whales stayed put.
Burgess, the trainer, also wants people to remember the whales matter — that they have both value and distinct personalities. Sierra leaves a “big imprint” in people’s hearts, Calypso is the life of the party with her “cheeky smirk,” Tofino is the “poster child of a perfect whale,” Meeka is instantly recognizable with her “milk moustache,” and Gemini is “absolutely squishy” with an “adorable ‘meep’ vocalization.
Captivity ethics frames this as a “duty of repair” ⎯ the idea that a person or society is obliged to make whole those who are wronged. In the case of the whales, for the province and the country, says Fenton, there is a clear debt incurred by a society that permitted aquariums to keep whales captive. Everyone loved Marineland.
“We owe [the whales], and that debt can arguably only be repaid by making sure that they have the best lives possible,” he said. “We’ve denied them a life we shouldn’t have denied them.”
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