Moral Status In The Film Blackfish

To ascribe an entity with moral status is to declare that its treatment by moral agents is morally important (DeGrazia 2008: 183). Moral status depends upon an entity being, at a basic level, sentient. This means that it must have the ability to experience sensation or feeling, which will see it having interests in avoiding sensations like pain, and desiring others, such as pleasure. Without this basic capacity, and therefore the ability to be harmed, moral status is meaningless and cannot be awarded to an entity (Jaworska & Tannenbaum 2013). Some may attempt to argue against this restriction, but as having interests is essential for moral status, non-animal objects lack or have an insufficient biological basis from where interests arise, so

The film Blackfish (****), for instance, clearly shows how problematic it is to keep orcas in captivity. Orcas, as well as other cetaceans, are incredibly intelligent animals, with complex social relationships, and a need for immense space. Being confined in tanks means that they are almost guaranteed to suffer boredom and listlessness, and, given the complex nature of orca social structures, keeping them in confinement severely restricts their ability to properly organise themselves in social groups and maintain their family relations. Not to mention that it frustrates their predisposition to swim great distances (DeGrazia 2011: 761). The confinement of such intelligent and social animals may be so negative for the animal in question that they develop abnormal and pathological behaviours. Indeed, an underlying thought in Blackfish was that for animals such as Tilikum, the orca that killed two of the aquarium's trainers, the negative psychological impacts and complications that came with confinement played a role in his behaviour which saw two members of Sea World staff being killed by the captive

Moreover, when those in favour of zoos accept that there may be a particular shortcoming with keeping animals, or a particular species of animal in the zoo setting, it is also deemed to be morally unacceptable based on negative consequences. An example of this can be seen in the announcement made by the Detroit zoo, who declared that they would stop keeping elephants due to the fact that even their best attempt at constructing a decent elephant habitat is lacking, and only leads to elephant suffering (Jamieson 2006: 141). Furthermore, we judge the conditions of individual animals within zoos to be good or bad as a matter of degree, where the overall situation for a particular animal could be brought to be worse and made better, if modifications were made, to their enclosure for instance, that resulted in changes in the animals welfare. As such, there are clear reasons to utilise a utilitarian framework for evaluating zoos and aquariums. In fact, it may be said that utilitarianism is already the default moral theory that is, by and large, already adopted by those involved in both the institutions