Misha's Blog

The excellent Amy Waldman (her book The Submission is great) wrote an article in a recent New Yorker magazine about the architect Jeanne Gang. Gang has been hired by aquariums to change their mission in order to reflect humanity’s recent realization that keeping whales and dolphins locked up is barbaric. It seems that everyone has seen Blackfish, a documentary about the evil of keeping hyper intelligent animals in slavery. The aquariums want to respond to this but as the article states they don’t want to just release their valuable animals into the wild or some kind of sanctuary: they will loose a lot of money. So what do they do?

The article describes an arrangement where the cetaceans are free to swim around in a protected sanctuary in exchange for pervasive video surveillance to let aquarium patrons gaze at them. The idea that aquariums have trained humans to expect animals to perform is a solid one, and the aquariums have to retrain humans to respect these animals while they are still sharing the earth with us. But to make them subject to our surveillance is desperate. These mammals need their privacy just like we do. I can imagine an underwater monitor for the dolphins that tracks the geolocation of their trainers by scraping social media activity so that the dolphins can prepare themselves for any possible incursions on their lives.

I do hope the aquariums start to retrain people to not expect these guys to always perform. This expectation is causing people to do stupid things like poke at wild sharks with go pro cameras on sticks. The sharks are just chilling so please lets not provoke them.