"Opinion: SeaWorld vs. the Whale That Killed Its Trainer"

Animal rights campaigns are an area close to my heart, having rescued my pet rabbit from an animal testing facility and nursing him back to health. Soon after I got Bunny I began to look seriously into animal rights, which had been an interest of mine for most of my life. I remember as a kid over summer break watching the show Animal Cops where in my impressionable mine god like figures busted into homes and like superman whisked down and saved poor voiceless animals. I wondered how anyone could do that to poor creatures, their only wrong doing was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a young naive child I thought the argument was as one sided as dog+good person= happy and dog+bad person= sad, this was before I learned about greed and neglect and most importantly before I learned about value.

Most people see life as a tipping point, what is the absolute closes I can go to the edge before I fall off, or how much money will it take for me to do this. For example in the movie The breakfast Club the question is posed 'what is the farthest you would go to get a million bucks' which was answered with something along the lines of 'going to school naked'.  I think this is very similar to the pet industry because most people on a singular level want all animals to be happy and healthy, but as you add money and the desire for more to that equation you learn that each animal is just a price tag and each life is easily snuffed. I think that this is one of the problems at sea world, the amount of money that is generated from the whales makes up for the risk to human health and the exploitation of the animals is just a price that gets shoved under the rug.  This outlook may seem harsh but as I said before this is an area that holds a spot in my heart. I have done a lot of research into the world of animal rights and when I gave a presentation with some of my findings I was told that I had to re-do the paper because I was too passionate about the subject.  

Animal rights is a very polarizing subject, a subject that is often misleading, and not entirely factual.  Its very hard to find real unbiased articles or studies for institutions like Sea World, because many times the institutions are the ones that hire for the studies; or the studies are done by an environmental protection agency that already passed judgement on the action and are just backing it up however they can. I looked into Kenneth Brower the author of this article and he is an environmental non fiction writer who has an obvious stake in this issue, which comes across while reading the article.  He does not do a great job of covering the issue from both sides and though I side with him it still would have been nice to learn about this from an equally represented front.

Overall I think that as we dig deeper into this subject we will learn a lot about bias and about the value that humans place on animals lives. As I stated before this is a polarizing subject but I feel that we can all learn from the other sides argument.