Dear colleagues:
As readers of MARMAM may recall, a two-volume special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Psychology (IJCP special issue) was produced last year, focused on the value of captive marine mammal research. The editor of the special issue, Stan Kuczaj, stated in his introduction that "[t]he idea for this special issue resulted from the publication of the Humane Society of America's [sic] recent edition of The Case Against Marine Mammals in Captivity" (CAMMIC) in 2009. CAMMIC was a white paper from The Humane Society of the United States and the World Society for the Protection of Animals in support of their policy position that marine mammals, particularly cetaceans, are inherently unsuited to public display. It was not peer-reviewed nor meant to be objective and did not even focus on captive research specifically. Yet as editor of the IJCP, Dr. Kuczaj responded to it by compiling a two-volume special issue on the value of captive marine mammal research. After reading several of the special issue's contributions, we found it overall to be a valuable exercise and, had it not contained (in Dr. Kuczaj's introduction and several of the papers) specific and pointed references to CAMMIC, would have accepted it as a timely means of summarizing the current state of play of captive marine mammal research. However, aside from Dr. Kuczaj's reference to the genesis of the special issue, in his introduction he also noted that "Although the authors of [CAMMIC] acknowledged the possibility that some research with captive animals might have been important in the past, they also suggested that research with captive marine mammals is no longer necessary" (p. 225). My co-authors and I felt strongly that this latter characterization of our position, as well as comments on CAMMIC in some of the other papers, were inaccurate and therefore we submitted a reply to the IJCP. Dr. Kuczaj, who is also the general editor of the IJCP, after sending our reply out for review, rejected it. In his email to us, he stated that "the two-volume special issue of IJCP was not an attack on the HSUS white paper. In fact, [CAMMIC] is only mentioned a handful of times throughout the two issues. So a 'rebuttal' of the special issues makes no sense." We note again Dr. Kuczaj's introduction to the special issue, in which he states "The idea for this special issue resulted from the publication of" CAMMIC and goes on to offer a paraphrase of CAMMIC's position on captive research. Also, despite one of the three reviewers agreeing that allowing a reply from us was "justified" (albeit with major revisions), Dr. Kuczaj nevertheless said in his email that "none of the reviews favor[ed] publication" of our reply. His refusal to allow a reply to what we perceived as a mischaracterization of our position - to avoid what he called a "he said-she said cycle of rebuttal and re-rebuttal" - is troubling to us, as these kinds of exchanges in the published literature, however lively they become, are an accepted and common element of the scientific process. We were open to edits of our reply, of course, and the same reviewer who acknowledged that a reply from us was justified offered a number of suggested revisions that we found useful. However, two of the reviews recommended outright rejection (one review was highly unprofessional and personal in tone, in our view), and Dr. Kuczaj chose to follow the latter recommendations. He suggested that instead we draft an entirely separate paper, a clarification of our position on captive research, and submit it anew for consideration to the IJCP, with a separate review. We acknowledge that a clarification of our position on captive research may be warranted (indeed, we even suggest it might have been appropriate for Dr. Kuczaj to have solicited such a clarification from us for the special issue itself - we note that we knew nothing about the compilation of the special issue until it was published) and we will keep this in mind in future editions of CAMMIC. However, our purpose in replying to the special issue was to address characterizations of CAMMIC that we felt were inaccurate, which Dr. Kuczaj's suggestion for a new submission expressly precluded. As we are unable to correct the record in the IJCP, we beg the indulgence of the MARMAM community and do so here, in the interest of open, collegial debate on a topic relevant to this community. (If you would like a copy of the original submission to the IJCP, which has additional text and references that were cut for space here, please let me know.) We believe the special issue's editor and some of its contributors fundamentally misread our position on captive research. We never suggested that "research with captive marine mammals is no longer necessary." Rather we stated that "There may be some research questions that the study of captive animals can answer most directly (such as questions regarding cognition or the impacts of human-caused noise on hearing)" (p. 14 in CAMMIC) and "Research on captive animals can only be justified in circumstances where it is necessary to resolve critical questions to benefit the animals themselves or animals in the wild" (p. 15). Clearly we recognized that some captive research could be justified by critical welfare or conservation needs - these statements we made are far from claiming that "research with captive marine mammals is no longer necessary." We did claim that "research programs that are not part of the entertainment industry could address those [critical] questions" and "Dolphinaria are not essential to continued research on marine mammals" (p. 15 in CAMMIC). We made a distinction between commercial entertainment facilities (which we referred to as dolphinaria) and dedicated research facilities. The editor and some of the contributors to the special issue failed to make a similar distinction when drawing comparisons between their work and our claims. The most notable example of this was in the paper by Hill & Lackups, in which the authors assessed the cetacean literature to see, inter alia, how many publications focused on free-ranging cetaceans and how many on captive animals. Making specific reference to CAMMIC, they claimed to have refuted our findings that only about 5% of marine mammal studies use captive animals. They found that roughly 30% of the more than 1,600 published articles they examined presented results from captive cetacean research. However, while our sample included all cetaceans and also pinnipeds, sirenians, polar bears, and sea otters, they restricted their sample to literature focused only on cetacean species routinely held in captivity. This of course would lead to a greater percentage of captive studies being represented in their sample. In CAMMIC, we were trying to determine the extent to which marine mammal work from captive settings was being presented in scientific media and forums. Hill & Lackups sought to determine the extent to which research on cetacean species that could be studied in captivity was in fact being done in a captive setting. These are separate goals using different sample sets; therefore, since the results from Hill & Lackups can't be directly compared to ours, they can't be used to refute them. Indeed, Hill & Lackups actually noted that there was a relative paucity of publications using captive cetaceans, calculating that "captive research with Tursiops represented 18.1% of all articles and captive research with Orcinus, only 1.2% of all articles" (p. 431). This seems generally in line with our calculations looking at marine mammal publications overall (keeping in mind that we did not restrict our evaluation to cetacean species routinely held in captivity), yet Hill & Lackups stated that "Although research with captive populations is not published, or perhaps not conducted, as frequently as research with wild populations, it is nowhere [near] as sparse as suggested by [CAMMIC]" (p. 432-433). They also suggested that there is a "large need to conduct research with captive populations" (p. 431, emphasis added), despite the fact that the entire premise of the special issue was to support the argument that research on captive marine mammal populations is already significant and is essential to our understanding of these species. Marine mammals have been held in captivity for many decades. For at least the past 30 years their public display has largely been justified with the claim that these exhibits contribute significantly to research and conservation. It is therefore telling that a literature review conducted expressly to support this claim determined that in fact there is room for a great deal more research to be conducted on captive animals. It is hardly a rebuttal of the arguments in CAMMIC to state that "Research in captivity involves overcoming many competing demands (e.g., availability of animals, training time, and monetary support) and working within the goals of the facility (e.g., education, animal interaction, and entertainment)...[which] pose major obstacles for researchers interested in captive populations and make experimental paradigms very challenging" (p. 434 in Hill & Lackups, emphasis added). This conclusion is virtually identical to ours; CAMMIC stated that "The requirements of providing the public with a satisfying recreational experience are often incompatible with those of operating a research or breeding facility" (p. 4). Here the special issue goes beyond being a rebuttal in search of an argument - these authors are actually making our arguments for us, while claiming to refute them. A critical discussion in CAMMIC addressed the ethical considerations raised by continuing to maintain species for public display that science has shown to be highly intelligent, socially complex, and wide-ranging. Ironically much of this science has come from studying these species in captivity, yet many of the researchers looking at these questions too often choose, as Perelberg et al. stated in their special issue paper, "not [to] address the ethical aspects of holding a wild intelligent animal such as the bottlenose dolphin in captivity" (p. 636). There is a growing debate as to whether the research and education benefits of displaying captive cetaceans outweigh the ethical concerns (see, for example, the April 2011 article in Science by David Grimm) or indeed human safety concerns[1]. So the special issue ignored a central argument of CAMMIC and focused instead on a (non-existent) claim that "research with captive marine mammals is no longer necessary." Nevertheless, in several of the special issue papers, arguments were presented that in fact did not differ all that greatly from ours regarding the deficiencies in captive research. The special issue as a whole not only failed to address the distinction CAMMIC made between dolphinaria and research facilities, but we believe its editor mischaracterized our position on captive research overall. We urge researchers utilizing captive marine mammals to react less defensively and more thoughtfully in future when confronted with opinions that may differ, especially when only in degree rather than kind, from their own. Naomi A. Rose, Ph.D. Senior Scientist, HSI-Wildlife nr...@hsi.org <mailto:nr...@hsi.org> t +1 301.258.3048 f +1 301.258.3082 Humane Society International 700 Professional Drive Gaithersburg, MD 20879 USA hsi.org <http://www.hsi.org/> Join Our Email List <http://www.hsi.org/join> Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/hsiglobal> Twitter <http://twitter.com/hsiglobal> <http://www.hsi.org/> ________________________________ ________________________________ [1] Trainer Dawn Brancheau was killed by Tilikum, SeaWorld of Florida's oldest and largest male killer whale, on February 24, 2010; this incident led to the U.S. House of Representatives holding an oversight hearing on April 27, 2010 to address the issues of the educational value of public display, worker and public safety, and captive cetacean welfare (see http://naturalresources.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=1813 62 <http://naturalresources.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=181 362> and http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293204-1).
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