100 orca and beluga whales are being illegally held in a bay near Nakhodka in Russia and are being sold to the Chinese for their booming ocean theme park industry in China. There are already over 60 marine parks in China, according to Alec Luhn of Moscow for The Telegraph (British paper). The Chinese plan for at least a dozen more ocean parks.
Supposedly Russia is investigating this, but Russia is also believed to be the only country that exports orcas captured in the wild, according to Luhn.
Since the "jail" is quite small, this suggests that many of the captured orcas are babies. For every orca captured, however, at least another is killed in the process. Jailers don't seem to care since an orca can fetch up to $6 million dollars.
This activity flies in the face of the 1982 moratorium against whaling: the only whaling allowed is for scientific purposes (that sounds quite lame) or for those with aboriginal "cultural" needs (another fairly lame sounding excuse taken advantage of by the Japanese who have killed over 1,000,000 whales and dolphins).
"Catching them at this tempo, we risk losing our entire orca population," according to Oganes Targulyan, a Greenpeace Russia research coordinator.
Enough of this inhumane horrible activity. Perhaps if President Trump stood up for orcas like he has for his recent signing of the Save our Seas Act, he might gain a slew of caring supporters. As for me, I will write the president about this, and since I already boycott Chinese products, I'll pass the information along to those who care enough to come up with their own plan to help right this incredible wrong.
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