
Philip Demers was a senior animal trainer at Marineland for more than a decade. He did his job, and was paid well. The animals, he thought, were there for one reason, and that was to perform for the public.
But then something happened. A walrus that Marineland had captured from the wild oceans of Russia was doing something never before observed. She was bonding with Demers and accepting him as family.
Gradually, Demers started to see that the dolphins, the whales and the walruses were intelligent and complex and weren't supposed to be in concrete pools in a North American city. For the first time, he noticed their stress, the burns on their skin from the chemicals in the water. And he heard stories of a whale they named Junior that Marineland kept in a building nicknamed 'The Warehouse' --a building without sunlight or air--a building he lived in for years until he finally died.
And then one day, in 2012, instead of turning left to go to work, where the walrus was eagerly waiting for him, Philip Demers turned right, and drove to the offices of the largest newspaper in the country.
Listen to an interview with Mr. Demers and hear the story of thousands of sea animals forced to live on cement and behind bars, away from the currents and depths of the ocean, away from their ancestral homes, away from life itself.
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