Photos: Chained PETA ‘Dolphins’ Make a Splash at Jet2holidays’ Leeds Office
Photos: Chained PETA ‘Dolphins’ Make a Splash at Jet2holidays’ Leeds Office
Leeds – Today, a pair of shackled and chained “dolphin prisoners” with signs reading, “Jet2holidays: Stop Supporting Dolphin Prisons” and “Jet2holidays: Drop Marine Abusement Parks”, protested outside Holiday House, Jet2holidays’ Leeds office. The action follows the death of yet another orca, Kohana, at Loro Parque in Tenerife, one of the facilities promoted by Jet2holidays. PETA is urging the travel provider to drop marine parks that keep orcas and other dolphins in captivity from its holiday packages.
High resolution images are also available here.
This month, PETA also held a day of action, overwhelming Jet2holidays’ social media and phone lines and prompting over 26,000 people to write to the company urging it to join other travel providers – including British Airways Holidays and Virgin Atlantic Holidays – in refusing to sell tickets to marine parks. In addition, PETA US became a shareholder in order to attend the company’s annual meeting and tell it to take immediate action.
“Today’s holidaymakers object to seeing frustrated orcas and dolphins swim listlessly in tanks, and the travel industry has caught on,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA is calling on Jet2holidays to catch up with the rest of the industry and stop profiting from marine mammals’ misery.”
In the open ocean, bottlenose dolphins swim up to 60 miles a day alongside their families and can reach depths of over 450 metres. In marine parks, they’re confined to cramped concrete tanks filled with chemically treated water. Females are commonly sexually abused via artificial insemination, sometimes after being drugged, so their babies can be exploited for further profit in marine parks. Some are kept in water less than 2 metres deep and used as photo props for holiday “experiences”, handled by an unending stream of members of the public. Held in captivity for decades and forced to perform confusing tricks for tourists, the majority die far short of their natural life expectancy.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
#