Blackfish

                Over the past couple weeks, in my Language Arts class, we have been talking about animals rights and just rights in general and comparing the two and that got me thinking about all the different rights that we have compared to the different rights that animals have.

                Before we had a discussion, we watched a film called Blackfish which showed all the SeaWorld orcas and how the behaved and cooperated with the other whales and the trainers. At the beginning of the film, I had the idea that orcas are very harmless animals as long as you don’t upset with them. Then after they showed the first death that was caused by one of the whales, my perspective change. It didn’t change however to say that it was the orcas fault, I thought it was more of the owners at SeaWorld for putting these large animals in captivity for so long. It would be like us living in a bath tub the rest of our lives and, I don’t know about you guys but I would think that would be the worst thing ever. These large animals should not be put in this relatively speaking, small tank for show. They should be put back out in the wild so they can grow up in the environment they are supposed to be in.

                Later, after watching and discussing the film, we read an article that outlined whether animals should have rights or if they were just things that we have to live with on Earth. In this article, there was one sentence that stood out above all others, which made me actually really mad because it just was very unthoughtful and, quite frankly, stupid, in my opinion. This sentence said something about the comparison between mentally disabled people and “normal” people was the same as animals and humans. This just upset me so much, because earlier in the article, this same person had said that animals deserve no rights because they aren’t able to think the same way as us. Now looking at the first sentence again, you can see how upsetting (I hope) this actually is. It’s pretty much saying at mentally disabled people aren’t allowed to have the same rights as “normal” person because they aren’t able to think about things as others are. That just isn’t fair at all because, it’s not like they can help it, just like animals aren’t able to help be what they are. And just because they are different doesn’t mean that we have full right to do whatever we want with them just because they can’t tell us to stop.

                What I’m trying to get at is that animals don’t have the same expectations, but they should have the same rights because we are all trying to live our lives on this Earth together and the second one starts taking advantage of another group, the second they become the superior power and then that just leads to them thinking they can get away with anything because they got away with the first thing. So in my opinion, if we could all just live equally and in our own environments without taking some and putting them into captivity, we would have a better outcome in the balanced ecosystem.