Jenna Deedy

Eli Smith is an Arizona-based college student and freelance artist with a focus on marine wildlife. He is also a big-time patron of well-managed, and scientifically accredited zoos and aquariums like SeaWorld, and the Dolphin Quest facilities. He hopes to one day be able to work with dolphins and other marine mammals full time when he is done with college. Recently, Smith read a memoir titled Killing Keiko.

On October 3, 2019, I posted an article that criticized the ethical practices of Dr. Ingrid Visser, a New Zealand-born whale researcher who is known for her work on wild orca populations in the Southern Hemisphere. The article primarily focused on certain PR moves, and ethical practices that have raised eyebrows within the marine mammal community, and why she at least, needed to be held accountable. Once it got published online, I received a lot of feedback on it, which most of it was pretty good. However, some people, many of whom, were all supporters of Visser and her work, were not so happy about the article’s criticism of Visser, and decided to go onto my Instagram to defend her. So, in response to remarks like “she’s talented,” “at least she works with wild orcas,” along with some brand new information I have since uncovered about her questionable ethics, I took it upon myself to write this follow up along with a little letter to Visser’s supporters.

Ingrid Visser is a New Zealand born whale researcher who is known for her work on wild killer whale populations, in both her native New Zealand, and in other parts of the southern hemisphere. She has an anti-zoo agenda as well—It is of one that involves her traveling to zoological facilities that house orcas, by taking photos of them in order to pass them off as “evidence” of “abuse.”

When it comes to how celebrities influence how the general public thinks, feels, and live out their lives, there is no arguing that they do manage to show it all off through social media platforms that focus on anything that has nothing to do with the glitz and glamor like it once was in the 50s and 60s. No, instead, it is a lot more focus on political, social, and even environmental-related causes or whatever may make them look more like international humanitarian workers and less like glamorous stars of film and television.

They say that the internet is full of crazy conspiracies that are just beyond indescribable, and sometimes, full of whimsical nonsense that does nothing more than to draw the emotional side of its audience that would be enough to be passed as “fact” without doing any research to validate the “claim”. Well, it does appear that animal rights extremists who target zoos and aquariums are now attempting to do the same thing on social media.

2019 has not been kind to the Amazon Rainforest with more than 40,000 fires across the region this year alone. Scientists from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research have determined that this year alone has seen the fastest rate of burning since the organization began a record-keeping survey on the health of the rainforest in 2013. In fact, the toxic smoke from the fires is so intense that many parts of Brazil now lay under darkness, and in some places, hours before the sun could even start setting.