When questioned, the response is always the same: intent cannot be proven; breeding cannot be entirely prevented.
Harm
A system that allows reproduction while denying responsibility for it is not ending itself. It is sustaining itself while pretending otherwise.
At this point, it is necessary to name the structure at work. Orcas in captivity are legally owned. Their movement is controlled. Their social bonds are broken and rearranged. Their reproduction is managed. Their bodies are used for profit.
What marine parks call conservation, education, or rescue, is a system of domination: the total control of another species’ movement, reproduction, and social life for human gain.
When we look back on history, there are many examples of such systems of domination, systems that persisted long after their cruelty was understood. Slavery, for instance: its brutality was not a revelation that arrived at abolition. It was known. What delayed its end was not ignorance, but legality. Profit. Euphemism.
Orca captivity now occupies a similar moral position. Its harm is widely recognised. Its continuation depends not on doubt, but on loopholes, greenwashing, and the slow grind of habit.
Violation
The question is not how to make captivity better. It is how to stop it from continuing at all. This requires closing the loopholes.
Firstly, no new orca should be taken into captivity under any circumstances. Rescue must not mean transfer from ocean to tank. Where intervention is necessary, it should occur in ocean-based environments with an enforceable aim of release. Permanent confinement cannot be an acceptable outcome of stranding.
Second, conservation must be legally defined in a way that requires a conservation outcome. If an animal will never return to the wild, and will never strengthen a wild population, then its captivity is not conservation.
Third, breeding must be absolutely banned. Not discouraged. Not managed. Banned. With independent oversight, transparent reporting, and penalties for violation. Without this, every other reform is cosmetic.
Domination
Existing captive orca populations must be managed toward extinction. This is an uncomfortable truth, but an unavoidable one. Many, if not all, captive orcas are unreleasable. That is tragic. It does not justify creating more.
End the reproductive cycle. Let the remaining population decline naturally. Stop creating future captives.
The orcas already in tanks cannot be given back the lives that were stolen from them. But the legal and linguistic loopholes that put them there can absolutely be dismantled. Whether they are dismantled, or merely preserved under new euphemisms, will determine how this era is judged.
History is not gentle with systems of domination once their harm is understood. It only asks why they were allowed to continue for so long.
This Author
Dr Rebecca Gaston is a UK-based writer and animal-welfare advocate working with international NGOs on marine-freedom campaigns.