That’s Entertainment!

For my next trick, I will eat the trainer…

I am down in Miami this week.

For some strange reason, 6 birthdays in my family all all within the same four days in March:

My wife, my mother, my brother-in-law, two of my nieces and nephews, and my wife’s best friend (who is close to family).

As a result, we have gathered everyone here in Miami, where my mother lives, for a gala birthday week.

Yesterday, the twins, who live in England, really wanted to do the ‘swim with the dolphin’ thing, so we took them over to Dolphinworld at the Miami Seaquarium.

After much research, this seemed to be a pretty good location for this kind of thing, and the folks at Dolphinworld put on a very good show, with the possible exception of the endless hawking of the souvenir photos – pose with the dolphins for  photo, kiss the dolphins for a photo, get in a group and the dolphins will jump behind you (for a photo). Surprisingly, they sell the photos as you leave. (I bought the full set. What are you gonna do?). Personally, I would have preferred more science and fewer souvenir T-Shirts, but that’s just me. But lemme tell you, those dolphins sure are smart.

Maybe not so people.

The ride with the dolphins, (about $300 per person) also grants you admission to the rest of the Seaquarium, where, among other things, they have the Killer Whale Show.

Well, kids are kids and they wanted to see the highly advertised Killer Whale Show.

Fine.

You have no doubt seen these things in real life or on TV. A truly gigantic killer whale, (some 7,000 pounds) goes through a series of tricks in a small circular pool with a trainer who spends inordinate amounts of time smiling with her arms high in the air while Gloria Esteban music pumps through the system.  The crowd sits in a circle in concrete stadium-like seats and cheers and gets splashed by the funny antics of the killer whale.

OK.

Through the miracle of the Internet and my blackberry, I was able to access a lot of information about Lolita the star attraction at the Killer Whale show.

None of it good.

These magnificent animals normally swim 30-70 miles a day in the open sea, they dive to 500 ft, they are extremely social and live in groups and are deeply family based.

Lolita has been swimming around in circles in a small concrete pool for nearly 40 years now. You can read the whole story of her capture here.

Killer whales, kept in this kind of captivity apparently go crazy.  The endless echoing of their sonar on the concrete walls, the confinement, the solitude. Some commit suicide, some kill their trainers.

There is, apparently, a movement to ‘free Lolita’.

The more I read while watching the show, however, the more repulsive the whole spectacle became.

Terrible.

The night before, we had flipped on the hotel TV to Discovery Health. God knows who selects the 24 channels that the Mandarin Oriental carries on their internals system. In any event, at 3am Discovery Health was carrying an hour long show about a young girl born without a face.  You get the idea. This was followed by an hour about a man with a tumor the size of Connecticut that decided to grow on his ass – with predictable problems.

It is at moments like these that I take pause and reflect on just what kind of a culture we have created for ourselves.

In Medieval Europe they used to drag out the physically deformed for public amusement and torture animals before the crowds.

We like to think we have made some measure of progress.

Sometimes, I am not so sure.