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Because orcas are highly social and complex animals with vast home ranges—swimming up to 140 miles a day and maintaining lifelong relationships—they're particularly vulnerable to suffering in captivity. A case in point: Lolita, who has languished for nearly a half-century at the Miami Seaquarium in Florida.
Despite her highly endangered status, Lolita is confined to a small, shallow, barren concrete tank without adequate protection from the sun. She's been without the companionship of another orca since 1980, when her tankmate, Hugo, died after repeatedly ramming his head into a wall. She can't engage in any behavior that is natural to an orca, like diving, swimming any meaningful distance, feeling ocean currents, and forming social relationships with members of her own species.
Marine-mammal experts can attest that the complete deprivation of all that is natural and important to Lolita causes her extreme and unnecessary stress, torment, injury, and suffering, an apparent violation of Florida's cruelty-to-animals law and a form of speciesism—a human-supremacist worldview.
Please join PETA in asking the Miami-Dade state attorney to investigate the Miami Seaquarium for cruelty to animals.