Thomas Cook has announced it will cease ticket sales to any attraction featuring captive dolphins, whales and orcas – the first tour operator in the UK to do so.
The announcement is the extension of a ban on the sale of tickets to captive orca attractions – including Florida’s SeaWorld – introduced by the operator in 2018. Thomas Cook has said that it will, instead, promote experiences which allow tourists to watch whales and dolphins in their natural habitat in the wild.
The campaign to end trips to attractions featuring captive cetaceans began in 2016 with a Charge.org petition calling on Thomas Cook to stop promoting trips to swim with captive dolphins, which gathered more than 250,000 signatures.
In 2017, Thomas Cook began blacklisting operators that failed to meet acceptable animal welfare standards, and in 2018, working with the Whale and Dolphin Committee (WDC), stopped ticket sales to attractions featuring captive orcas.
‘Keeping whales and dolphins captive in these types of facilities leads to distressing behaviour,’ said a spokesperson for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) campaign group, ‘including cetaceans lying on tank floors, swimming in circles, and chewing on the sides of their pools.’
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Thomas Cook came under fire again in 2018 for promoting trips to the Atlantis Sanya hotel; a Chinese hotel based in Hainan province which featured on-site aquariums holding two beluga whales and ten dolphins, reportedly captured during the brutal Taiji dolphin hunt.
Speculation at the time suggested the hotel was promoted as its owner, Chinese tour operator Fosun International Limited, was a minor shareholder in the Thomas Cook Group. Fosun would go on to acquire Thomas Cook after the company went into administration in September, 2019, although the Atlantis Sanya hotel no longer features on the current Thomas Cook travel website.
In a statement about the extension of the ban, Alan French, chief executive of Thomas Cook, said: ‘We know that for our customers going to a zoo or an aqua park is an important part of their holiday and we only want to offer those experiences when we’re confident they abide by the highest welfare standards and are not built on animal suffering.
‘We have taken the decision to offer only wild-watching experiences for whales and dolphins to help our customers experience these intelligent and sociable animals in their natural habitat.
‘We have been seeing a strong return to bookings following the pandemic, but also a decline in the demand for activities that harm the environment or animals.
‘Our customers care about these issues, and we are proud to be matching those sentiments. It has been an easy decision to make.’
Katheryn Wise, Wildlife Campaign Manager for World Animal Protection, said: ‘We are thrilled that Thomas Cook will stop selling captive dolphin venues as part of their new animal welfare policy. It is great to see the travel company listening to their customers and recognising that captive dolphin entertainment is nothing more than animal cruelty presented as family fun.
‘This continues the trend towards viewing wild animals behaving naturally from a distance and in their normal habitat rather than performing circus tricks for tourists. A life spent in a concrete box is no life for a wild animal like a dolphin, it is a life sentence.’
‘We are thrilled that Thomas Cook will stop selling captive dolphin venues as part of their new animal welfare policy,’ said Wildlife Campaign Manager for World Animal Protection, Katheryn Wise.
‘It is great to see the travel company listening to their customers and recognising that captive dolphin entertainment is nothing more than animal cruelty presented as family fun,’ Wise continued.
