According to Demers, employees were tasked with drugging anxious animals with valium and human antidepressants, and left to languish in cages and shallow pool.
KATE BRIQUELET: In happier times, Phil Demers and Smooshi the walrus snuggled in the summer sun or frolicked together down a snow-covered slide. The 800-pound flippered orphan would bark and lumber into the room when Demers sing-songed her name. Smooshi took a shine to Demers, who believes she viewed him as her mother.
But this interspecies love story ground to a halt in 2012, when Demers left his 12-year post at Marineland, the Canadian amusement park that keeps whales, dolphins, sea lions—and now apparently one remaining walrus, Smooshi—for aquatic performances. Demers says he quit in protest of the Niagara Falls attraction’s treatment of animals.
The 42-year-old former animal trainer has been at war with the tourist empire ever since. Marineland filed a $1.5-million lawsuit accusing him of a plot to kidnap Smooshi, a case that resulted in Demers countersuing the park’s rock-ribbed Slovenian proprietor, the late John Holer.
That legal battle continues, and is just one part of Demers’ story told in the new documentary The Walrus and the Whistleblower… The documentary was an official selection of Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and is currently seeking a home for U.S. and worldwide distribution…
At the outset of the film, Demers says, “Whistleblower? I blew whistles for years at Marineland but it was to tell the dolphins to come back to the stage and get their fish.” Initially he figured the animal-rights protesters he encountered simply didn’t understand his special bond with Smooshi and the other walruses, which included Zeus, Buttercup, Apollo and Sonja. (All but Smooshi have died in the past few years, and Demers told The Daily Beast this week her whereabouts aren’t known to him.)
Demers would join the ranks of anti-captivity activists years later. “There’s a walrus back there. Her name is Smooshi… and I gotta get her out of there,” he declares at one demonstration outside the 1,000-acre sea and land mammal menagerie… The protests at Marineland began to swell even before the groundbreaking 2013 documentary Blackfish, which depicted the troubling treatment of orcas living inside SeaWorld amusement parks in America…
The Walrus and the Whistleblower incorporates horror stories not dissimilar to those told in Blackfish, though it’s not the main focus of the character-driven feature. One former Marineland trainer even suggests in the film the Canadian park was worse than SeaWorld—likening it to the “Wild Wild West” when it came to animal protocols.
In the documentary, he speaks about baby walruses delivered to Marineland under cover of darkness, unannounced to staff before their arrival. (Some of them, he says in the film, were captured in Russia by operators who storm beaches, induce panic and corral the calves, sometimes slaughtering their mothers.)
According to Demers, employees were tasked with drugging anxious animals with valium and even slipping human antidepressants inside their food. He claims that when the walruses and other animals weren’t performing, they were left to languish in their cages, made up of 6- to 7-foot platforms and a shallow pool. “There comes a point where you used to make sense of things,” he says in the film. “You can’t no more. The excuses are gone”. SOURCE…
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