A documentary on the treatment of beluga whales in a Russian capture operation — purportedly the same type of operation used to capture whales for the Georgia Aquarium — presents the viewer with disturbing images and raises difficult questions.
We see the graceful, one-ton white whales being yanked out of the surf with ropes tied around their tails. We see the creatures being confined to small tanker trucks filled with brackish-looking water as they travel across Russia for days at a time.
None of those images involves the actual animals that the Georgia Aquarium contracted to buy six years ago. But the movie, “Born to Be Free,” by Russian filmmaker Gayane Petrosyan, includes a visit to the marine facility on the Black Sea where Georgia’s belugas have been held in limbo for six years.
And it suggests that Georgia’s whales were subjected to the same treatment.
The circular tanks of the seaside facility, built through the support of the Georgia Aquarium, seem like a rather circumscribed holding cell for animals that can travel hundreds of miles at sea.
“It is a very small place, very small tanks,” said producer-director-writer Petrosyan. “Seven or eight whales live in every tank. For years, they lived like this.”
Petrosyan’s movie premiered earlier this year in England at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, but hasn’t been shown in the U.S. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was given the opportunity to view the film online.
Petrosyan and her colleagues, Tatiana Beley and Yulia Petrik, hope their film will be another “Blackfish.” That documentary about Tillikum, an orca that killed three people, premiered in 2013 and led to intense debate. This year, SeaWorld announced it would end its killer whale program.
Prompted by concerns about the impact of the new film, the Georgia Aquarium announced earlier this summer that it was ending its practice of displaying any whales or dolphins caught in the wild.
The film urges the Georgia Aquarium to release the captured belugas into the open sea, though Petrosyan said that the costly operation will make that unlikely. “They spent so much money for this, they want their money back,” she said.
Untrue, said Mike Leven, chairman and CEO of the Georgia Aquarium. “There is no financial incentive for us at all; we’re not the owner.”
The Georgia Aquarium has paid $6.5 million in development costs to research beluga populations, to construct the holding tanks where the belugas are being kept, and to support the upkeep of the facility in Utrish.
“Those are unrecoverable costs,” Leven said. Four of the whales have died since they were captured and one was replaced. In the past few weeks, seven of the 15 whales at the Utrish facility have been transferred to a marine park in Japan, Leven said.
The Russian belugas were collected about six years ago from the Sea of Okhotsk by Russian fishermen, working with the assurance that their customer, the Georgia Aquarium, would receive a permit from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to import the animals. After the permit application was turned down, the aquarium filed suit, but was denied in U.S. District Court.
Ocean Park Hong Kong had agreed to keep the whales during the permitting process but backed out, according to Georgia Aquarium officials.
Leven said he still hasn’t seen “Born to Be Free,” despite multiple requests for a screening copy, though some associates in England attended the premiere.
He said he couldn’t comment on the capture operations showed in the film, except to say “sometimes things look traumatic but aren’t. The question is, how healthy are the animals?”
Earlier this summer, Greg Bossart, senior vice president and chief veterinary officer at the Georgia Aquarium, said reintroducing captive belugas to the wild is difficult after they’ve been in human care longer than a year, because of concerns about disease transmission and learned behaviors.
Petrosyan disagreed. Speaking by telephone from overseas, the 41-year-old Muscovite said, “We asked good independent experts, in Russia and the U.S.A, they all said the belugas will survive without a problem.”
She has worked on the film for three years, raising $30,000 through crowd-funding site Indiegogo and traveling widely across Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok, and to the U.S. and China.
Petrosyan also rejected the suggestion that keeping belugas in captivity helps research. “Can we catch people for research? I think, no. It sounds horrible, sounds like a Nazi state, like Dr. Mengele.”
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