Nova Scotia Whale Sanctuary Approval: What It Means for Captive Whales and Ocean Conservation

0:00 For the first time in Canada's history, we're one step closer to giving captive whales a real home in the ocean. Nova Scotia, the province of Nova Scotia has just approved the lease to the country's first whale sanctuary, A refuge that could finally let former captive whale live in the sea again, or if they were born in captivity for the first time ever. But is this the finish line or is it just the beginning of a long journey? We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you could speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action.

0:46 On today's episode, we're gonna be talking about how the Whale Seaside Sanctuary. the Whale Sanctuary Project finally got approval for a lease in Nova Scotia. This is huge. We never thought this was actually gonna happen. It's been a long time, and it's been over 10 years that the Whale Sanctuary project has been alive. I remember having Lori Marino from the Whale Sanctuary Project on the podcast to talk about it. Also link it to the show notes. this is something that's been a huge, huge news, and I, it's all sort of stemming from, I think, from Marineland. It just seems to be a big coincidence right now. There are 30 belugas in Marineland right now that need to go somewhere. The Marineland wants to sell them off to either theme parks in China, but the government stopped that from happening.

1:30 They needed a permit. The government said, no, you're not gonna be putting it into another park where they're allowed to be part of the entertainment as well as breeding. That's a law in Canada, you're not allowed to do, so why would we send it to another country? Perfectly understandable. That's what's happened, and now we have these 30 beluga. They're sitting there. It just reminds me of Marineland, me as a kid going to Marineland, you know, listening to the jingle. Everybody loves Marineland. It's a song that just kept happening over and over and over in the eighties and nineties. And when I was finally in university, I hadn't really learned about the problems of captivity yet. And I took my girlfriend, who's now my wife, I took my girlfriend to marine land. It's like, let's go see the whales. We're in Ontario. It's really the only time where we can go see whales.

2:11 And I remember being on a show, we are super excited to see these whales perform tricks and seeing what they do, how intelligent they are, how magnificent they are in person. And these dolphins came out of where they were stationed and they came outta this gate and one animal kind of came out a little too early. one of the dolphins. And looked like he got caught in the gate a little bit. He kept swimming into the pool where they were the main pool where they were doing all the tricks and you saw a trickle of blood coming from his blowhole. That trickle of blood increased and increasing, increased throughout the show. People in the show and the crowd were like, Hey, you need to stop this dolphin. It's bleeding, it's bleeding, it's bleeding. And people were saying, look, we know it's bleeding. We got people looking after. 'cause they were. Looking after it, but it kept doing the tricks anyway, even after being looked at including being bloody, all the thing, people were freaking out and they were trying to say that this dolphin wants to do the tricks so bad.

3:00 It doesn't care that it's bloody. That's the stuff that they were giving the audience, the information that was giving the audience. Long time after that, there was this guy who was a trainer who actually worked at Marine Land. He defected seeing all the stuff that was happening to the animals. He was the walrus trainer and he saw what was happening to the walrus. He saw what was happening to the orcas. He saw what was happening to the bottlenose dolphins and the belugas, and he was like, these people at Marineland are not paying enough to take care of these animals. Fast forward to today's day, and we're starting to see these belugas, which basically the marine land is shut down now. We're starting to see these belugas. 30 of them that are in really bad water quality, really bad shape. There used to be 52. 20 have died actually in the past since 2019.

3:41 all because of just they're failing to take care of these animals when they try to transfer the animals to Mystic Aquarium down in Connecticut. The animals died when they went down there. Obviously not a good situation for the whales, not a good sign for marine land. And so things just happen. In 2021, we saw a law go in to protect these marine mammals, make sure they're not doing shows, they're not part of the entertainment and they're not being used for bread. 'cause that's another big money moneymaker. Marineland tried to transfer these animals out and try to get paid for that transfer to go out to go to another marine theme park in China. Now, I'm gonna tell you, I've heard from scientists, from advocates and from both who are saying the worst thing that people could do at Marineland is transfer them out of North America and to Asia where the animal welfare protections are not very good.

4:26 That's essentially what I'm gonna say, right? And so now we have these animals that are kind of stuck there. The marine land asked for a permit to send them to China. The government said, no, you can't do that. Okay? Now what they're saying, we can't feed them. We're gonna have to euthanize 'em. And government said, absolutely not. You're wrong for even saying that. You need to take care of them because you are the ones who have them housed. And that's been going back and forth ever since. There's been a little bit of fundraising. I've done this all another episode, another couple of episodes. But during this entire thing. During this entire fiasco, the name of the Whale Sanctuary project came up a number of times 'cause people are wondering where can we put these animals? If we can't keep 'em in captivity, if we can't ship 'em off to another marine theme park, where could they go?

5:08 Two places were suggested. There was up in the Arctic where there are beluga whales in the wild. They would put them there. That hasn't really manifested into anything. The indigenous people who are up there, who are part of the commission haven't come back with an answer as far as I know. And so there's no real will at this point to do that. Somebody suggested, and rumors, kind of flew around, but it just still hasn't happened. The other place was the Whale Sanctuary Project, which is supposed to be in Nova Scotia. Now this whale Sanctuary project is and has been around for about a decade. Now nothing has really come of it other than they have found a location in Nova Scotia where the organizers and the funders and the donors and everything feel that there could be a spot in Nova Scotia where they actually found the location would be perfect to house orcas or maybe a couple of dolphins, or maybe a couple of belugas depending on the situation.

5:58 So a lot of people are like, oh, great. Let's put the 30 belugas over there. That's not happening. This sanctuary would be a pen. So essentially it would be a net, but it'd be in natural ocean waters in the ocean in the North Atlantic. There's a lot of problems with it in terms of the location, because these belugas do not come from Nova Scotia. They don't belong in Nova Scotia. A lot of them have Russian ancestry of where their ancestors were located. A lot of these animals were fed and bred in and born in captivity, so would they be able to survive on their own? There's a lot of misinformation around the sanctuary. When I did the interview. Lori would say, and I've also interviewed other scientists about that, and they have said that, look, there's no expectation that these animals are gonna survive on their own.

6:42 There's no expectation these animals will survive. For a long time, there hasn't been a precedent that's really been set. There've been some beluga whales that have been released into a sanctuary, but they stay inside. But they have a choice of going outside. There was Keiko, the orca that was put in Iceland in a pen. He survived for about five or six years, and he finally went out of his pen. He was allowed to leave every once in a while. He finally left, he went on his own, and he eventually passed away peacefully, but he was almost 30 years old. and also traumatized. A lot of these animals are traumatized, so there hasn't been a lot of precedent, but people are saying that these animals can't be put out because of these two things. They're also saying that the whale sanctuary, where it's located in Nova Scotia along the Atlantic Coast, is not good water quality wise.

7:24 Well, there used to be a gold mine back in the early 1920s, and so people were like, well, there's gonna be gold, and there's gonna be all these different types of metals that come around with mining. They've done tests, they've done the environmental assessments. Everything seems to be written off and checked out. Everything seems to be fine. Signed, delivered, sealed, delivered. We've been fine with that. They just didn't have the permits. The sanctuary did not have the permits. They did not have the provincial permits. They now have the federal permits, which is like navigable waters because they're gonna be putting in a pen, like a net, a massive net. and they didn't have the landowners around there. Their agreement, they have to have unanimous agreement. There's rumors that two or three of them have said okay, but the other two haven't. There's a lot of traffic that's gonna come in. A lot of people are gonna visit this bay, and it's a small area, like small town area where They don't want a lot of visitors.

8:07 A lot of people just want to be peaceful and a lot of them are retired or they're just growing up with Leon families there. They don't want the big traffic that's there. It's the bay that they live in. They may not want whales in there that are not supposed to be there on a natural basis. Who knows what that's gonna do to the ecosystem environment. There are still a lot of questions. I actually think the whale sanctuary is a great idea. It's something that we need to do as an experiment for these whales, and I know when I say experiment, I don't mean to play with whale's lives, but it's something that we need to do. We owe these whales some kind of sanctuary after being bottled up into these tanks for their entire lives. They need to do something and you can't fit 30 belugas in there.

8:48 These 30 belugas probably won't be able to be in there because they don't have the permits until today. They have announced, it has been announced that Nova Scotia has provided the permits for the lease for the area around the crown land that's around the bay. They will have access to it. So that's one of three major things that needs to happen. Of course, they still have to have federal, so DFO, fisheries and Oceans needs to sign off on and give them the permits to actually handle the whales and take care of those whales as well as transport Canada, which is like navigable waters. They need to make sure that boats can go in and out, that these nets are gonna be fine. We've had this net stuff happen before in other sanctuaries. So I'm sure we can come to an agreement, but the fact is they do have a permit from the province of Nova Scotia, which is one of the big hurdles that they had to get over.

9:33 And this is a huge thing. This is something that I feel as though we are getting closer and closer to having something that will work, to having something that is closer to a physical thing. And now I know there's a lot of people who are putting comments on my TikTok and social media and stuff like that, that do not agree with this and say, look, this has been planning for 10 years. This is not gonna happen. They don't have the funding, they don't have the people to care for it. They don't have this, they don't have that. I understand, I completely understand. This is something completely new. It's not gonna happen overnight. We need to be patient with these things. And of course, as we are patient, as we are waiting for other permits and for landowners to say, Hey, you know what, we're okay with it finally. Hopefully that will happen. 'cause I understand their predicament, there's gonna be dolphins and orcas and belugas that died that may have been able to go into the sanctuary if it was actually put in place.

10:20 But it isn't, and it's not gonna be done for a long time. Even if we get all the permits and landowner's permission tomorrow, it's still gonna take a while to put everything in place. But I guarantee you this Whale Sanctuary project organization knows what they're doing. Because they have the backs of scientists. They have the support of veterinarians, they have the support of advocates. They have the support of marine biologists, they have the support of local environmentalists. There are a lot of people who will support us just as much probably as people who won't support this. This is very new and is very experimental. We do not know if some of these orcas will last. They probably won't be able to feed on their own ever. or it'll take a long time. That we know these animals have been psychologically battered for a long time.

11:01 especially with orcas, we know of their emotional awareness. We know that they're sensitive. We know that they've gone through a huge traumatic event for their entire lives. Or some of them still were captured. Some of them were born in a tank and they have never seen the ocean. So we know that there's a lot of questions that need to be had, but we also owe it to these marine mammals, these poor marine mammals who have been the subject of entertainment, of breeding when they don't necessarily want to and artificial insemination and so forth. And it's just been horrible for them. We know this. And so it's up to us as human species to give them a chance. And I understand why a lot of people are against this. I completely get it. But we owe it. We need to help these animals out.

11:42 And it may not be perfect, but we owe them something. And there are some people who believe that these animals could even die in these pens at some point, maybe even directly. And that is something that we might see. If we can get this right, at some point, we can provide these animals with the sanctuary that they need. Now, not all the animals can fit in the sanctuary. There are a lot of questions. I get it. But this is something that we're getting close to and it's probably gonna happen at some point. We just don't know when, so I would love to hear your thoughts, whether you're for or against it. No judgment. Love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. If you're watching this on YouTube, if you're listening to your favorite podcast app or you're watching this on your favorite social media app, I'd love to hear your comments as well.

12:22 Or you can go to speak up for blue.com/contact and you can just fill out the form. You can email me. Or you can even go to Instagram, DM me at how to protect the ocean. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the true nor strong and free and home to eventual whale Sanctuary Project, seaside Sanctuary. I hope you have a great day and we'll talk to you soon and happy conservation.