I am going to write a quick blog on the past few days with regard to SeaWorld, its Second Quarter Report, its stock collapse, and its announcement about the “Blue World Project.” I’ve seen many comments on this page about these recent developments (some of which are contradictory and possibly confusing to some), so I felt I should post my thoughts. Everyone should feel free to disagree with me and to think and post otherwise, but I wanted my views to be clearly stated. I think the reaction to SW’s 2Q report was exceptional, but I think overall it was strictly a business reaction. Investors and shareholders who had purchased stock based on SW’s and other financial advisors’ projections for 2014 were spooked not only by the company’s poor 2Q performance but by its admission that the rest of 2014 would also fall short of projections. I do think that SW’s additional (and first-time-ever) admission that public perception of its brand had been tarnished by the orca bill introduced in California and other bad publicity played a role in the extraordinary degree to which its stock price fell on Wednesday, but even without this admission, IMO the stock price still would have dropped significantly. I think SW anticipated this reaction as soon as it realized what it had to report for the second quarter (although I am convinced that the executives there never imagined the magnitude of it!) and therefore prepared a response – the proposal to expand the orca enclosures. This was something that was clearly planned beforehand – the artistic rendering of the Blue World Project (revealed in a large mural in San Diego) and the web page that was launched on Friday were obviously prepared well before Friday! I also think SW’s executives have once again demonstrated how tone deaf they are to the public’s changing attitudes. Releasing this proposal while claiming that it had nothing to do with public or “animal rights” pressure was simply foolish-looking – clearly he couldn’t have known how hard SW’s stock would fall, but given the admissions in the 2Q Report, Jim Atchison telling a reporter that planning the Blue World Project had “nothing to do with” activist pressure was utterly laughable. Atchison and his execs also seem completely unaware of (or deliberately blind to) the fact that the plan to build larger tanks is a de facto admission that the current enclosures are inadequate. Saying otherwise makes the entire gesture insulting to anyone’s intelligence – it turns what could have been perceived as a better-late-than-never acknowledgment that they need to do better for these animals into a cynical waste of money. If the current enclosures are enough to allow the whales to thrive (as SW insists), then how can the company possibly justify the millions of dollars this expansion will cost, when it just admitted that 2014 has so far seen, and will continue to see, poor financial returns? On Wednesday SW said it would start a cost-cutting program to increase dividends for its shareholders and then on Friday it announced an extraordinarily expensive expansion program that will be paid for…how? How can this proposal possibly be justified except by an open, honest admission that Shamu Stadium is not adequate to safeguard the orcas’ welfare? Please do not misunderstand me - in no way will larger concrete tanks change much of anything for the whales. (My point above is simply that SW could have spun it believably as such ONLY by admitting that the current enclosures aren’t adequate – by refusing to admit this, SW’s Blue World Project comes across as nothing more than an egomaniacal attempt to grab the trophy for the world’s biggest orca tank, when the company can least afford it!) The problem with concrete enclosures for orcas is that they are monotonic and artificial substrates, which in no way fool this highly intelligent creature into “feeling” like he or she is in natural habitat. That is the goal of most zoo design these days – to offer a captive animal a semblance of its natural home, allowing it to behave as normally as possible (and far too often falling well short of this, of course, but at least for terrestrial animals, some progress toward this goal can be made). This is impossible for cetaceans in a concrete tank, no matter how prettily it is landscaped for the human audience. The whales KNOW it is fake – they can see and hear the falseness of their surroundings. The only part of what SW has proposed that I think will make the slightest difference for the whales is the depth – 50 feet is 15 feet deeper than any tank anywhere and 50-60 feet is the typical depth to which most orcas dive on a daily basis (their deeper dives are usually for some specific purpose – their everyday dives are 30-60 feet). But for the rest? Three hundred and fifty feet compared to 150 feet for a 25 foot animal is a risible increase in enclosure length – the water treadmill is an even more ridiculous idea. My guess is the whales will rarely if ever use it voluntarily – it will simply be the oddest thing to them and not something that will be attractive in the least. They may use it under direction (when they are given a command to do so), but that’s hardly an improvement then – it’s just another trick they will learn. There is a small chance it will improve their overall health, but I actually doubt that either – each animal would have to use it for perhaps half of each day for any significant improvement in endurance or fitness and that is simply mathematically impossible with 10 whales, let alone unlikely because of show schedules and so on. The real worry, of course, is that SW will simply breed the animals more readily if the tanks are bigger, increasing its “collection” size and in the end providing each animal with about the same volume of water to call his or her own as now. I know that people here are concerned that this proposal will lull some part of the general public into believing that things are improving for the animals. It may well do so – so our job is to keep up the pressure, keep up our educational efforts (which I am doing this weekend at the Glasgow conference I am attending), and keep up our advocacy and activism. We cannot expect SW to give up fighting for its way of life (and making money). We need always to be prepared to push back against these efforts. Personally I think the ways in which SW is choosing to fight back are failing – I found it telling that for the most part the media’s reporting of the Blue World Project was either skeptical or neutral – there was very little (if any, even in San Diego) purely positive reporting on this announcement. It certainly had virtually no effect on SW’s stock price on Friday, even though it was in the news all day. In the end, the proposal came across as cynical and illogical and desperate. It was – and is – too little, too late and I think this will become clear in the next weeks and months to everyone. Onward.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 19:50:25 +0000
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