You must have seen it: that powerful and beautiful photograph that advertises the Vancouver Aquarium.
It features a little kid and a beluga whale, encountering each other through the glass at the Aquarium. It’s awe-inspiring.
The only problem is that every time I look at it, I imagine the whale going: “Kid! I’m being held captive here against my will! You have to tell somebody!”
Then, after the photo is taken, the kid goes for the promised ice cream, and the whale goes back to his fellow prisoners: “Sorry, guys, but the kid wasn’t listening. We’re stuck here, I guess.”
I could be wrong, but these are whales, not goldfish. (For all I know, goldfish don’t like living in bowls either.) Beluga whales, the kind held captive at the Aquarium, live in big happy pods in Hudson’s Bay or the Arctic Ocean, which have a bit more room than the Aquarium, and can dive as deep as 800 metres.
They haven’t evolved to live in solitary confinement in a cement pond.
Every now and then, the issue of keeping whales in captivity crops up at the Aquarium. Now is one of those times. One of Vancouver’s top tourist attractions, the Aquarium is undergoing a $100 million expansion, and when it’s finished in 2016, the plan is for belugas to be the centrepiece of the brave new facility.
The Aquarium has plans to add another male to the mother-daughter combo now at the Aquarium – their assigned cute names are Aurora and Quila – with the objective of baking a baby half-brother or sister for Qila. Qila was born at the Aquarium; she has the distinction of being the only home-grown whale left. The rest, uh, died.
You have to wonder if the Aquarium’s scheme will hatch. The Vancouver Park Board has a commitment to review the practice of keeping whales at the Aquarium in 2015 and the chorus of critics is starting to warm up. It’s all very nice to see these magnificent beings close up, but they have a disconcerting tendency to die while we’re doing it.
You may remember Bjossa, the Aquarium’s last orca, who kept trying to give birth but her babies kept dying in front of everyone. Then there was Kavna, the original Baby Beluga, an inspiration for Raffi’s song, who died of cancer in 2012, in front of an appalled crowd. She was 46. The Aquarium says she lived a long and healthy life, but how would you feel if you had spent your entire life confined to the patio, even if someone brought you snacks?
There are an estimated 150,000 belugas in the wild, so there’s no actual need to keep them in captivity to prevent them from going extinct. The only reason for keeping them has to be entertainment, er, education.
And now that we’ve watched them die or go bat crazy for 50 years, aren’t we educated enough?