Floating underwater and wearing little more than black-and-white bodypaint, Marjorie de Sousa stars in a new PETA Latino campaign that proclaims, “Teach Compassion, Not Captivity. Please Don’t Take Your Kids to SeaWorld.”
In an accompanying video, the Al Otro Lado del Muro star — the mother of a 1-year-old son — puts herself in a grieving orca mother’s place. “Orca mothers are just like us. They love their babies and would protect them with their lives,” she explains. “But SeaWorld has torn baby orcas away from their mothers. Some were kidnapped from their ocean homes. Others were shipped from park to park. And some died just months after birth, never knowing life outside a tank.”
PETA Latino — whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment” — notes that in the wild, orcas form complex relationships, work cooperatively to find food, and traverse up to 140 miles of the ocean every day. But those at SeaWorld are housed in incompatible groups inside tiny tanks, and some are even given the drug diazepam to manage their stress-induced aggressive behavior. So far, 41 orcas have died on SeaWorld’s watch, and seven marine mammals died at its parks last year alone.
“This isn’t family entertainment,” de Sousa concludes. “Tell SeaWorld that it’s time to stop destroying families and start releasing orcas to coastal sanctuaries.”
