02/06/2025
For those interested here is my response to Lori Marino’s latest piece for Aeon on personhood for Happy the Elephant.
**As is often the case with Animal Rights issues, both the law and science have again been contorted in order to align with a preconceived sense of justice. However, scientists should always be concerned about the misrepresentation of facts, even if the misrepresentations serve the most noblest of aims.
I am not an expert on elephants, so I will not speak to their welfare in this setting. I do work with cetaceans and have frequently found issue with Dr. Marino's characterization of 'facts' around their managed care (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7401611/). What Dr. Marino starts with is something she has very little data to support: the idea that a different form of captivity called a ' whale sanctuary' is going to result in improvement for animal wellbeing (i.e. her work with the Whale Sanctuary Project). The idea that cetaceans, would benefit from a sea pen-like environment remains untested. This is concerning given some of the setbacks associated with recent attempts to put animals from pools into these environments. The belugas little white and little grey (from Sea Life) remain in a pool instead of the promised 'sanctuary' as the whales did not both readily adjust to that environment. The Baltimore Aquarium who plans to move animals from a pool to a sea pen (admitting to pressure from Blackfish), is still years away from putting their pool-born animals in such a sanctuary. Ric O'Barry's Dolphin Project has just released their animals to the wild with little transparent monitoring, raising questions about the success of that effort especially given one of the animals received an experimental dental replacement.
Personhood is a red herring- a debate for linguists and philosophers. Those of us who consider the animals' welfare are less concerned about semantics and more concerned with evidence-based efficacy for these interventions. Dr. Marino frequently says the debate is over reguarding how to best care for animals under managed care. With all due respect, the field of objective welfare science is too young for her to make such a claim. These animals do not think as we do nor process the world as we do. Thinking that we can empathize our way to good welfare without applying objective welfare science is a disservice to these animals and can only lead to more negitive outcomes (https://www.animallaw.info/case/matter-richard-obarry).
I encourage everyone reading this to skeptically consider the word 'sanctuary'. Consider it another form of captivity. Possibly with benefits, but also potential downsides. In the case of cetaceans we do not know what disease corridors could result from such actions (mostly for pool born animals), how the swallowing of plastics in the sea may affect these animals' health, or how funding will be made perpetually available for these endeavors. We owe these animals a critical look at all these well-meaning efforts. This is because when one feels like the hero of the story it can often be hard to self-reflect.
Many bad ideas come from nobel places.
