Former Marineland whale dies at Chicago aquarium

Buffalo, NY (WBEN) A former whale trainer at Marineland says one of the whales moved has died.

"We only learned this morning that Pikachu, one of the whales that was removed from Marine Land, has actually died," says Phil Demers. The whale died at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

Demers says this came as no surprise. "I've been forewarning of just how compromised these belugas have become on account of Marine Land's failed water system for over 15 years now. I've forewarned of this exact situation. So, you know, could all of this have been spared had the animals been moved a long time ago, I would suspect likely, but the best case scenario would would be that they had never been taken into captivity in the first place. So it's really just another example of the fact that captivity just kills. It just does," says Demers.

He says dehydration is found very often as one of the elements or one of the issues after a whale dies. "I would have to attribute that mostly to Pikachu having lived for far too long in very grossly compromised water," Demers contends. "That bad water is a death sentence to whales, and I might remind you that before the Ontario government actually stepped in and forced Marineland to clean that water, between the years 2019 up until about 2022, there was an excess of 30 whales that died. So this is this was a major issue at Marineland for a long time that they only just got a grip of in the last couple of years, even months." Demers says a lot of those animals will be forever compromised. "They will be forever on medication and forever be in need of treatment."

Demers says the whales can't be spared of their past, and the damage done to them simply can't be erased. "The blame squarely falls on on Marineland and their repeated failures over the past multiples of decades, but especially that in the last decade and a half to address these issues. They allowed those those animals to languish in those compromised conditions for too long, and now the net effects is that they're all vulnerable and susceptible to suffering and death, despite the fact that there's been the best foot forward made to to put them in in greater conditions and under you know under greater oversight, et cetera. But you know, this is the this is the reality. When you take an animal out of the wild, especially a long-ranging, socially complex animal like this, and you put them in these concrete these concrete tanks. This is what inevitably ends. This is how it inevitably ends," says Demers .