Week 1:
A Whale of a Time

June 3, 2016

I greeted Sunday morning with a 6 am sunrise from Orlando Airport, anxiously awaiting my Uber driver. I knew Florida was going to be humid, but let me tell you, stepping out of that highly air conditioned airport into the sticky Florida morning was a very real taste of the mornings to come.

Monday morning I woke up extremely nervous to be thrown into a room with 40 other interns and meet those who I was going to be working with for the next 12 weeks. The first several hours were somewhat awkward, all of us making jokes and trying to seem comfortable as we read over company policy and signed a plethora of paperwork. We didn’t get the chance to go into the park on Monday, but arrived bright and early on Tuesday (6:30 am, to be exact) to make our debut into the park.

The first week has been filled with walking the entirety of SeaWorld and learning about everything SeaWorld does for its animals and conservation as a whole. If you’re not living under a rock, you know that there’s a lot of debate surrounding SeaWorld ever since Dawn Brancheau, a killer whale trainer, tragically died in 2010. The debate has been expanding ever since, and last year, it got legal attention from the San Diego Coastal Commission. The SDCC imposed a condition that SeaWorld end it’s orca breeding program, and SeaWorld complied.

However, “animal activists” are still demanding SeaWorld’s head say that no orca should be enclosed in a pool, and should be free to roam the ocean. Now this may come as a surprise to some, but to an extent, I agree. It sucks that the orca’s pools aren’t as big as the ocean. That would be awesome. 

But what it really comes down to is this: There’s only a couple of places in the world where you can look a 12,000 pound creature in the eye and have him look back. And that is what SeaWorld provides. The chance to get closer to these gorgeous animals than you would ever be able to in the wild.

And sure, people counter with the argument that seeing these whales in the wild is somehow better, and you can get close to them that way, too. But in fact, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 actually legally prevents people from approaching any marine mammal within 100 yards. I do still agree that seeing animals in their natural habitat provides an amazing and valuable experience. But there’s something about seeing a killer whale through 6 inches of glass that just doesn’t compare to seeing one several hundred yards away. There’s nothing else to describe it. It’s magical.

SeaWorld does so much to bring awareness to the dangers our oceans face every day. Our current way of life destroys so much of our world, and we need future generations to be conscious of that, and make different decisions. It’s hard to save what you don’t love, and it’s hard to love what you don’t know. That is the SeaWorld promise: to expose people of all ages to these gorgeous creatures in a completely unique way, and inspire a love for them that will last for generations.