Blackfish Ethics

The documentary, Blackfish, examines SeaWorld and the ethical decisions they made and the consequences they caused. The film follows former trainers and asks them to speak about how they viewed their work experience. Most of the trainers had only positive associations with SeaWorld, besides the tragic incidents that were later documented within the film. Most of the trainers explained their work as a calling to work with these animals and took great pride in being able to perform their job to the best of their ability. At the heart of the documentary it highlights a key issue with SeaWorld and that the business of keeping orcas in captivity is inhumane. The film follows the journey of Tilikum, a bull orca whale that was first captured and

The so-called well kept living conditions are questioned and examined ultimately leading to the conclusion that these complex and emotional animals have no place in captivity. Blackfish ultimately raises an important social issue regarding captivity of animals vs. the business opportunities these ventures pose, calling for the audience to rethink our relationship with these animals and the parks that pose them. To understand what makes SeaWorld so valuable in the eyes of the customer I have performed a value chain analysis to see which activities the company uses to create additional value and how some of these activities are directly impacted by the ethical decisions the company faces. The first piece of the value chain I evaluated is the Human Resource component which includes managing the company's workforce. At SeaWorld, the workforce is critical to their success as their employees include trainers for operating the live shows as well as veterinarians who care and maintain the health of their animals. Throughout the film it was clear that the trainers were clearly motivated and positive even when faced with bad situations. This characteristic was important for the company to be able to retain talent and also create as much value for their guests by having someone passionate about training and performing with the

And customers only have a limited amount of time they can travel or spend visiting one of these theme parks in a given year. Theme parks face an uphill challenge competing among themselves to vie for that limited time there potential guests alot to visit a theme park in a given time period.

The biggest takeaway from the external analysis of the theme park industry is that it's hard to get started in the industry with so many barriers to entry, but once you have an established brand the industry even with albeit high rivalry among competitors is attractive in regards to low supplier and buyer power propagated by higher leverage thanks to a large brand image. When recommending suggestions for SeaWorld to implement there was one thing that needed to stay the same which included the ability to retain customers going into the park and creating revenue for the park. Therefore a suggestion of releasing the animals to the wild was not an option as it would be inconceivable for the park to eliminate the animals it uses to make its revenue. In a means to provide as much value to the park as possible the suggestions needed to be affordable, applicable and easy to implement. I wanted to suggest things the company could do