The Dangers of Anthropomorphism

Image Credit: Docurama

By Mike Madsen

SeaWorld has weathered a lot of storms lately, all due to a vocal minority who insist on attacking them over their captive marine cetaceans. Having seen all the captive marine cetaceans SeaWorld has at all their parks and the facilities they are kept in, it is hard for me to recognize the veracity of these attacks as anything other than outright propaganda.

Seeing is believing, so they say, and from what I’ve seen the orca in SeaWorld’s care are happy and healthy, the facilities clean and well maintained. I keep hearing folks talking about “bathtubs”, which implies, like any regular bathtub, some tiny enclosure where the head and/or tail of the whales stick out of the water because there is insufficient room for them to move within them.

This is so far from being true in the deep tanks I’ve seen that it really puzzles me when I hear the term. It tells me mostly that those using the terms haven’t actually seen or experienced the tanks for themselves.

There is an enormous amount of anthropomorphism about these animals, as people try to draw analogies like, “How would you like someone to take your daughter from you and make her live in a bathtub her whole life?” Well, of course I wouldn’t. It would be completely inappropriate. But then again, I’m a human and I have different feelings, values and abilities to recognize the world around me.

I am not an orca, nor do I pretend to think like one, nor am I a cetacean, or even a marine mammal. Nor are the people making these judgments. They simply take a leap of perception based upon what they personally would or wouldn’t like for themselves or others.

When talking about animal captivity, this empathy, while it can be admired within them for their human dealings, has to be put aside. We have to consider all the facts and factors in captivity for it to be dealt with fairly; emotion has only a secondary place within the subject in that we must always bring our empathy to any problem we discuss, but only when it is tempered with facts and empirical data.