Photos: ‘Free Me!’ – PETA ‘Orca’ Begs TUI to Stop Promoting Marine Animal Abuse

12 June 2024

Photos: ‘Free Me!’ – PETA ‘Orca’ Begs TUI to Stop Promoting Marine Animal Abuse

Birmingham – Today, a PETA “orca” pleading to be freed lay outside TUI’s Birmingham store – the city’s airport is among the company’s biggest UK bases – trapped in a cramped tank with a sign reading, “TUI: Orcas Don’t Belong in Tanks. Drop Marine Parks.” This is PETA’s latest action urging the travel provider to sever its ties with marine abusement parks.

Photos are also available here. Please credit @calvinjaytee

“If TUI hopes to maintain a shred of credibility with animal-loving British holidaymakers, it must stop promoting and profiting from orca abuse,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA is calling on TUI to join the rest of the UK travel industry by ending its support of 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 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 tourism companies, including Jet2holidays – which, after two years of relentless campaigning by PETA, announced its decision to stop selling tickets to marine parks in March – have ended the promotion of dolphin prisons. TUI’s support for the notorious SeaWorld Orlando in Florida and promotion of other abusemnent parks like Loro Parque in Tenerife, Spain, is an embarrassment to the entire travel industry.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.

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