This picture alone has once again brought up the incredibly controversial issue of removing these animals from the wild. This picture proves what many conservationists, including myself have thought for a wild now and that is that these animals have emotional attachments to each other and will grieve when loved one dies. This, to me anyway, is more than enough justification to at the very least give these animals immunity from being removed from the wild. The amount of pain that we as people must cause the entire family of a single orca that we take out of the wild has got to be nothing short of the grief and horrible feelings we get when a loved one dies or is kidnapped. They fear for their lost loved ones and they certainly grieve for them as well.
Very similar to humans, when an orca is born, they are completely reliant on their mothers. Without them, they would naturally not be able to survive. Just like (most) human mothers, orca mothers are instantly attached to their babies with a deep bond that can be defined as love. To rip that away from them just to make money is nothing short of disgusting and inexcusable. When I see things like this, I can't help but think of all the pain we as humans have caused families of orcas. To think that there have been no recorded situations where an orca has actually attacked a person in the wild is amazing considering what we do to them. Regardless of your position on orcas in captivity, if you honestly care about these animals, you can see that removing a member of a family that cares about each other as much as a family of orcas do is simply wrong. Still not convinced these animals work and love each other as a family, check this out. This video is taken in Antarctica of a family of orcas literally training the younger members of the pod to hunt seals. It's simply incredible!
Again, you can see the importance of family for these animals. It's really not all that different from us if you think about it. Try to imagine your child being ripped away from you in the name of money and see how you feel. Unlike the orcas, we know about the greed of the world and we all should know just how wrong taking these animals away from their loved ones is.
Elsewhere, OpKillingBay continues to reap havoc over the internet. Anonymous has sent an open letter to Sea Shepherd and the Cove Guardians in reference to an alliance between the two organizations whose methods differ, but have the same goal that they are working to achieve. No public communication has been heard of between the two groups as of yet, but time will tell what happens with that. Some of Anonymous's targets over the past several days include Nintendo.com which survived the attack, but ifkgroup.com (owners of Ocean Port Resort Hong Kong and Sea World) were not so lucky and experienced massive issues with their websites. Yesterday, Anonymous announced another Twitter Storm to take place this Friday at 8:00pm Tokyo Time (6:00am EST). Once again the voices of the people will be heard as we all try to stop the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji. Taiji supporters and enablers continue to feel the wrath of Anonymous and one can only think that there will be many more attacks to come in the coming days. My question though is will Anonymous weigh themselves in against the Japanese whaling program in the Antarctic as they have in the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji. Time will tell, but I am hopeful that they will. The killing of all of these animals needs to stop now.
To close out this blog I leave you all with. An orca family reunion of sorts!
