Heartbreaking footage shows two orcas left trapped in enclosure in abandoned marine park months after closing
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: SWNS
Two orcas are among the animals still trapped in an enclosure at an abandoned marine park in France.
Heartbreaking footage has captured the killer whales swimming around aimlessly at Marineland Antibes, an aquatic zoo in southeastern France, months after the park closed.
French authorities are desperately trying to re-home the orcas, both born in captivity, while Canada's The Whale Sanctuary Project has offered to take them - despite a previous proposal having been rejected by the French government for ecology reasons earlier this year.
President of the group Lori Marino has claimed that their site in Nova Scotia - on the east coast of Canada - is 'the only option left' for 23-year-old Wikie and her 11-year-old son Keijo.
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However, French ecology minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher has stated that she hopes to re-home the mother-and-son duo in a sanctuary in Europe.
Still, zoos around the globe have told the French authority that they would be happy to take Wikie and Keijo on, but animal rights groups insist on the pair being re-homed in a whale sanctuary where they would be granted more space to swim - as well as not being forced to breed or perform.
"If you don't even have a site, you're years away from being a viable sanctuary," Marino said, per the BBC, adding that The Whale Sanctuary Project had carried out water surveys, environmental studies and has even been offered a lease by the Canadian government's department of natural resources to accompany the offer.
While Earth Island Institute's David Phillips, director of the International Marine Mammal Project at the non-profit California based institute, added on its website: "We have been strong advocates for the past year that these two orcas should be relocated to a seaside sanctuary, which would be larger, in natural sea water, and save them from repetitive performances in concrete tanks.
"While the French Ministry has stated a preference for a sanctuary in the EU, we believe that the whale sanctuary being developed in Nova Scotia is a very viable alternative that was previously chosen as the best option by the French Ministry’s Inspector General’s Report.
“Orcas don’t belong in concrete tanks; they belong in the ocean."
He went on to heap praise on the Spanish government for blocking a move to re-home Wikie and Keijo at a zoo in Tenerife.
“The Spanish government deserves credit for stopping the relocation into the dangerous, unsafe tanks of Loro Parque Zoo,” Phillips concluded.
As well as the two orcas, there are a dozen dolphins still at Marineland Antibes.