Animal Activist Disrupts Travel Awards, Shaming TUI Execs Over Marine Park Cruelty
Animal Activist Disrupts Travel Awards, Shaming TUI Execs Over Marine Park Cruelty
London – Tonight, at the British Travel Awards ceremony, a PETA supporter stormed the stage of TUI executives and unfurled a sign reading, “TUI: Stop Supporting Orca Abuse. Drop Marine Parks!” Protestors were also outside the venue holding illuminated signs saying, “TUI: See the Light! Drop Marine Parks”. These are the latest actions in PETA’s campaign calling on the travel provider to sever its ties with parks that hold orcas and other dolphins captive in the name of entertainment.
Video footage of the awards show disruption is available here, and more photos are available here.
“Orcas and other dolphins endure a lifetime of suffering when confined for entertainment,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “It’s time for TUI to understand that compassion shines brighter in business. PETA is calling on the company to step out of the shadows, join the rest of the travel industry and stop profiting from marine mammals’ misery.”
PETA notes that while orcas in nature form complex relationships, work cooperatively to find food and traverse up to 150 miles of the ocean every day, those at marine parks are housed in incompatible groups in cramped tanks. Held in these concrete prisons for decades and forced to perform tricks for tourists, the majority die far short of their natural life expectancy.
Most leading travel companies, including rival Jet2holidays, have ended their promotion of dolphin prisons. TUI’s propping up of the notorious SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, and promotion of other marine parks, like Loro Parque in Tenerife, Spain, is an embarrassment to the entire travel industry. Over 202,000 PETA entity supporters have urged TUI to drop marine parks from its itineraries.
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, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
#