Armed with a megaphone and wearing a shirt proclaiming, “SeaWorld Sucks,” Academy Award nominee James Cromwell has led a group of PETA supporters in a takeover of SeaWorld’s “Orca Encounter” show, telling visitors about the company’s history of premature orca deaths.
Live footage of the action was posted on PETA’s Facebook page and can be watched here.
“Orcas deserve a full life in the ocean, not a life sentence of swimming endless circles until they drop dead from disease,” says Cromwell. “My friends at PETA and I want SeaWorld to move these intelligent animals to seaside sanctuaries without delay.”
PETA — whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” — notes that while orcas in the wild work cooperatively with their family members to find food and traverse up to 100 miles of ocean every day, those at SeaWorld are housed in incompatible groups inside tiny tanks and have even been given the drug diazepam to manage stress-induced aggressive behavior.
