The animal protection association One Voice, very active in this case, pointed out a natural sanctuary in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, despite it not being in operation.
Europe’s largest marine park, Marineland, closed its doors this Sunday and is looking for a way to relocate 4,000 animals, especially two orcas, which require a more complex facility and could end up in the Canary Islands.
The last show was held today, at the end of the Christmas holidays, putting an end to more than half a century of activity at the park, which was opened in 1970 and is located in the tourist resort town of Antibes, on the Côte d’Azur.
The 2021 law that prohibits, from 2026, shows with cetaceans, and the progressive reduction in the number of spectators (in the last 10 years it went from 1.2 million annually to 425 thousand) led management to consider closing.
The park recalled, in a December statement announcing the closure, that 90% of visitors attend shows with orcas and dolphins, which is why the new legislation “imposes the closure” of Marineland.
“The public has evolved in its view of this type of spectacle with animals… which are not natural”, said the Minister of Ecological Transition, Agnés Pannier-Runacher, speaking to the BFM channel.
“It’s a trend that is emerging internationally,” added the minister, highlighting that her office is studying, together with the park’s management, the possible options for the orcas: Wikie, 23 years old, and her son Keijo, 11.
The option of releasing the two animals into the sea was quickly discarded, as they could not survive on their own in the wild.
The park initially planned to send the orcas to another enclosure in Japan, but the ministry objected.
Pannier-Runacher justified the refusal with the “fragile” state of the orcas, for which a move of thousands of kilometers to Japan would represent an “important health risk”.
He also recalled that Japanese parks “are not subject to the same requirements as European parks” for the protection of cetaceans.
A spokesperson for the park told the daily Le Parisien that the ministry suggested the option of a marine park on the Spanish island of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands archipelago, despite emphasizing that it is “just a track, among others”.
The animal protection association One Voice, very active in this case, pointed out a natural sanctuary in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, despite it not being in operation.
When asked about these options, Pannier-Runacher avoided speaking clearly and said that Marineland should be the one to “present proposals” to the ministry, although she highlighted that there is currently no “sanctuary capable of hosting the two orcas” in the entire world. .
