Photos: PETA “Trapped Orca” Ad Slams Travel Operator for Profiting from Animal Abuse
7th February 2025
Photos: PETA “Trapped Orca” Ad Slams Travel Operator for Profiting from Animal Abuse
Manchester – As holidaymakers book their summer getaways, PETA placed a striking billboard near TUI’s Manchester city centre branch, shunning the tour operator for continuing to sell tickets to cruel and exploitative marine parks and reminding Mancunians to never add animal exploitation to their itineraries. This is the latest action in PETA’s campaign urging TUI to stop selling tickets to abusement parks, where whales and dolphins are imprisoned in cramped concrete tanks and denied everything natural and important to them.
High-resolution images are available here. The billboard is located on Chancellor Lane, Manchester, M12 5FX. Credit: Vincent Cole Photography.
Earlier this month, PETA supporters in orca costumes disrupted the Globe Travel Awards with a massive trophy naming TUI the “Cruelest Travel Company of 2025,” and during summer, they also infiltrated TUI’s Bournemouth branch, brandishing a banner at the store’s entrance proclaiming, “Orca Suffering for Sale Here!”
“TUI seem not to care that dolphins and whales endure illness, physical and psychological stress in tiny tanks at SeaWorld as long as it lines its execs’ pockets,” says PETA Vice President of Programmes Elisa Allen. “PETA is calling on the travel giant to pull the plug on its ticket sales and promotion of marine parks or risk being forever known as a shameless profiteer of animal abuse.”
In nature, orcas live in complex matrilineal societies, work cooperatively to find food, and can travel up to 150 miles daily. But in marine parks, including SeaWorld in Florida, orcas and other dolphins and whales are confined for their entire lives to tiny concrete tanks where they can do nothing but swim in circles and fend off attacks from their stressed tank mates. Individuals are often forced to perform uncomfortable and demeaning circus-like tricks, time and time again, in order to receive food.
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 PETA UK on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Lucy Watson+44 (0) 20 7923 6244; [email protected]
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