Animals are wild. They live in their own habitat with their own kind. The culture of the United States tells us that it is okay to cage animals because it is what we have seen since the time we were children. Caging animals can have an upside to it as well since we learn more from studying them up close. To be frank, I think that there are good ways and bad ways to exhibiting an orca in marine parks or aquariums. It just depends on how the place treats and cares for them.

Orcas that are caged should not be placed on display for entertainment purposes like SeaWorld does. I believe that if you want to see an animal like an orca up close and personal, it should be in a conservancy/rehabilitation center, an aquarium that does not train them and does real conservancy work, or the ocean. The Marine Mammal Center is an organization who rehabilitates and releases animals like whales, seals, and dolphins. A place like this will treat an animal right and most likely allow the public to go see the animals while being properly educated. The Marine Mammal Center stated that “toothed whales tend to be social and live in groups” (Marine Mammal Center, par. 4). Orcas “live in groups or pods and each pod has a dialect or accent, just like we have accents depending upon which part of the world we are from,” so it is very hard for one of them to communicate to each other if animal keepers put them in the same place (Marine Mammal Center, par. 4). As seen in Blackfish, the whales do not really interact with each other, and if they do they do not really understand each other because these whales are from different pods. I believe that if you are going to keep a whale to that degree of size, they should be in a big enough space with an orca or two from the same pod. According to the U.S. Government Publishing Office, two orcas can live in a pool with the diameter of up to forty-eight feet and a minimum of twelve feet deep. Though SeaWorld tanks are larger and by 2018 they plan to make their tanks fifty by three hundred fifty deep, it is still small for them today. These whales swim for hundreds of miles and being in a pool that size makes them seem like they are swimming in a bathtub. If people are going to keep an orcra, they need to make the space and the effort to care properly for them or else they will die early from either unhappiness or pain.

 Once people solve how to care for an animal that size, people need to learn that these animals can not just be used for our amusement. The problem with keeping animals in marine parks is that we use them for our enjoyment, our happiness. We have no idea what the animal is thinking and what the animal wants to do. According to SeaWorld, the animals do the shows because they have fun doing it, but according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, whales and dolphins that are trained to perform tricks are only doing the tricks to get food as an reward. You can take a pet dog for a close up example. When you train your dog, you give them treats to make them perform the trick. Training a whale is like that, but on a much massive scale, is more dangerous since you are the whale’s domain. Humans do not live in the water. When trainers enter that tank, they are entering their habitat, their home. You have to be cautions, but to actually eradicate future trainers from dying, we must eradicate forcing these creatures to perform for our enjoyment and let them be themselves.

With the culture of the United States being that seeing an animal in an enclosed facility while performing tricks being the normal thing to see, it is a hard, fine line for people to decide what is right and what is wrong. This beautiful creatures should not be slaves and forced into doing tricks. As long as we have a big enough tank for them to be in, the orcas not being forced into doing tricks, and people actually seeing them for an educational purpose, it should be fine.