Tonight's guest on The Daily Show is John Hargrove. The panelists on The Nightly Show are J.B. Smoove
Robert Reich
Rory Albanese
Egypt Sherrod
John Hargrove is a former Senior killer-whale trainer for SeaWorld and supervisor of Killer Whale Training for Marineland in the South of France, who appeared in the 2013 documentary Blackfish and has since gone on to support legislation in California and New York to end the practice of keeping killer whales in captivity. He is on tonight to discuss his book
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish
Over the course of two decades, John Hargrove worked with 20 different whales on two continents and at two of SeaWorld's U.S. facilities. For Hargrove, becoming an orca trainer fulfilled a childhood dream. However, as his experience with the whales deepened, Hargrove came to doubt that their needs could ever be met in captivity. When two fellow trainers were killed by orcas in marine parks, Hargrove decided that SeaWorld's wildly popular programs were both detrimental to the whales and ultimately unsafe for trainers.
After leaving SeaWorld, Hargrove became one of the stars of the controversial documentary Blackfish. The outcry over the treatment of SeaWorld's orca has now expanded beyond the outlines sketched by the award-winning documentary, with Hargrove contributing his expertise to an advocacy movement that is convincing both federal and state governments to act.
In Beneath the Surface, Hargrove paints a compelling portrait of these highly intelligent and social creatures, including his favorite whales Takara and her mother Kasatka, two of the most dominant orcas in SeaWorld. And he includes vibrant descriptions of the lives of orcas in the wild, contrasting their freedom in the ocean with their lives in SeaWorld.
Hargrove's journey is one that humanity has just begun to take--toward the realization that the relationship between the human and animal worlds must be radically rethought.
Beneath the Surface: SeaWorld Insider Goes Beyond Blackfish
Nearly every page in Hargrove's book made me stop and think about how we humans have had enormous and wide-ranging negative impacts on the lives of numerous individuals of many diverse species who we keep in captivity for our--not their--benefit. Orcas are the main topic of Hargrove's book, and in this book we meet many orcas up close and personal and see how just how we make huge and irreversible messes of their lives "in the name of entertainment." Hargrove's book is deeply personal and he bears his heart as he writes about orcas he came to know well and how "SeaWorld's wildly popular programs were both detrimental to the whales and increasingly dangerous for trainers."
I really enjoyed the entire book, and I found a lot of food for thought in Chapter 12 called "A vision for the future." Hargrove begins, "The prospect of a SeaWorld in financial decline does not fill me with glee. The company may be motivated by greed and it may have exploited both orcas and trainers, but SeaWorld is, paradoxically, the best hope for the 30 killer whales that it owns." Clearly, the whales can't be released into the wild. And, of course, clearly they shouldn't breed. SeaWorld has tampered with and changed their fertility cycles, the animals are clearly socially dysfunctional, and they are imprinted on humans. It would be a recipe for disaster if any were released into the wild.
This sounds like a good book and hopefully will be a good interview.
Next week will be repeats after being pre-empted Monday. New episodes begin again Mo 4/6.
Guests in 2 Weeks
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Mo 4/6: Gene Baur
Tu 4/7: Peter Dinklage
We 4/8: Tavis Smiley
Th 4/9: Sen. Elizabeth Warren