It’s not just an animal or killer whale. They are not entertainers. It’s our relative that rightfully belongs to the Salish Sea, and we’re coming to liberate Lolita.
ANDREW BUNCOMBE: ‘Lyla Scover still broods over the screams she could hear as the boatmen herded the whales into the most shallow part of the bay. It was the sound of creatures in trauma and agony, she says, and it echoed over the town… More than 50 years after seven young southern resident killer whales were captured here using nets and explosives, then sold to aquariums, only one is still alive. Now, Scover’s memories of what happened in August 1970 are central to a campaign to free the last whale, known variously as Lolita or Tokitae, and return her to the waters of the Puget Sound. Local experts, who study family groupings through matrilineal lines, say many of her relatives, and possibly her mother, aged in her 80s and named Ocean Sun, are still alive.
This month, the campaign took on new momentum, when Indigenous Americans, members of the Lummi Nation who have claimed the whale as one of their own, carved a totem of her, and made a 7,000-mile round trip to the Miami Seaquarium, where twice a day she is made to perform tricks for visitors. Freddie Lane, a member of the Lummi Nation council, says it is a sacred duty to fight for the return of Lolita, who he says was “abducted”. He also fears time is running out; campaigners believe that after decades of effective solitary confinement in chlorinated water, the whale’s health is declining and she may be going blind. Reports say her tank, measuring 80 feet by 60 feet, and 20 feet deep, is the smallest killer whale aquarium in the country.
“It’s not just an animal or a killer whale. It’s our relative that rightfully belongs to the Salish Sea,” he says, claiming the Seaquarium offered to sell the killer whale back to them, something he considers an insult. “So we’re coming after her…They are not entertainers, they’re enslavers of our relative. And we’re coming to liberate Lolita”… The campaign to release Lolita has taken on a dual-pronged approach. In December 2018, a lawsuit brought by activists on the grounds the Seaquarium was violating the Endangered Species Act of 1973 by confining Lolita, was turned down by a federal appeals court. Lane believes a fresh legal challenge can be made on the basis that tribal laws have been broken. Meanwhile, others are trying to pressure the aquarium by turning public opinion against keeping whales and dolphins in captivity’. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: