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Letter to TUI Staff

Dear Tui staff

RE: Tui's involvement in the cruel dolphinarium industry


As you will be aware this is our third collective weekend of action being carried out to try to raise awareness about Tui's involvement in the cruel dolphinarium trade. We have handed in a letter to Tui, we have also emailed, tweeted and had articles in the press. Tui is aware of our petition with over 11.5k signatures. Yet still, Tui has not replied to us.


This is why we address our letter to you, the staff at Tui, and ask that you ask your seniors why Tui is ignoring us and why they continue to make money from animal practices that were outlawed in the UK in 1992?


Of course, we know Tui's position at the moment as when they were approached by the Daily Mirror about their involvement in a brutal Chinese marine park which stocks its dolphins and whales from Russia and Japan, Tui was forced to answer them. They said they are working within the industry to improve conditions for marine animals. How do they think they can improve the life of a dolphin which has been captured in Cuba, Japan or Russia and ripped away from their pod, friends, family, and children and sent overseas to live the rest of its life confined in a small concrete tank? How does Tui propose that they make the trauma, loss, and sadness of losing their freedom better for those animals it's endorsing the capture of to entertain their tourists? Please ask them for us. Does Tui plan on stopping working with parks that buy captures, as Virgin did before it stopped selling tickets completely?


Does Tui propose forcing marine parks to make the tanks sizes bigger? Dolphins swim around one hundred and fifty kilometers a day in the ocean and roam great expanses, hunting, corralling and catching their prey. How does Tui think marine parks can expand the size of tanks so that they can sufficiently replicate the wild? Please ask them, because we know, honestly, they can't, it's impossible that they can build tanks sizes big enough to replicate nature. Let us look at this logically, even if Tui was suggesting marine parks make tank sizes bigger (which they're not) what marine parks are realistically going to spend millions of pounds on expanding the size of their tanks? To do that would be costly and timely. They've already invested in the construction of the tanks, why would they change them now? Dear Tui staff, did you know that the UK already has a law on the minimum sizes dolphinarium tanks should be? Yet Tui and ABTA’s standards are deliberately smaller than that?


So how else does Tui plan to work within the industry to keep promoting dolphinariums whilst also improving standards for animal welfare? Will they stop the practice of keeping dolphins and whales hungry so that they are desperate enough to perform the circus tricks they perform for Tui customers? Of course not, because we all know that if a dolphin isn't hungry it won't perform. So even if Tui were to insist that dolphins are fed large amounts in one go so they're not perpetually hungry, (which they're not of course) Tui would not have a dolphin show. How could Tui make money off the dolphins if the dolphins weren’t performing? They couldn't, so Tui isn't going to do that are they?


Perhaps Tui will only insist on captive breeding in parks instead of capture? Although that won't stop dolphins being bred intensively and then separated unnaturally and prematurely from their mothers - causing great trauma and grief to both the mother and the calf will it? Dolphins are dying prematurely in captivity. Captive born dolphins die earlier than their captured mothers. Dolphinariums HAVE to keep breeding intensively to keep replenishing dying stock. Will Tui stop customers riding on dolphins? Is Tui concerned about the repeated lesions on the dolphins' chins and around their pectoral and dorsal fins after they carry out the same tricks day in and day out around 300 times a day? We know that Tui is not concerned about this archaic abuse because, in the ABTA animal welfare standards that they follow, those standards refuse to accept that these tricks could be degrading and damaging to dolphins. So how is Tui going to improve welfare standards for animals who are languishing in tiny tanks day after day, year after year, filled with diseases and infections because they are suffering chronic stress and trauma and have compromised immune systems, exposed to bacteria in the tanks' water, fed frozen fish consistently which is so cold it's causing lesions on their tongues, documented to be fighting and killing each other, throwing themselves against tank walls, killing their offspring and even committing suicide? How is Tui going to improve the lives of these animals who are enslaved for the pleasure of Tui customers?


We ask you Tui staff members to speak to your managers and superiors because what is going on here, we suspect is Tui is trying to fob us off. They are trying to fob you off. Tui has no serious animal welfare policy to protect dolphins. ABTA has no serious animal welfare policy to protect dolphins. They don't want anything to change really because they are making millions in commission by exploiting wildlife.


So we pass the baton to you Tui staff to speak up for animals confined in prisons all over the world as we hope you may have more success in getting an answer.

Join us in calling for Tui to #DropTheDolphins.


Dolphin Freedom UK

info@dolphinfreedom.net





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