A former employee of SeaWorld in San Diego, Sarah Fischbeck, is speaking out against the constant abuse towards the animal attractions at SeaWorld. She worked as a quality diver for six years with the company after graduating high school in 2007. She also worked jobs for cleaning tanks and performing maintenance on the tanks.

She told TheDodo.com, “If people knew what I know, or saw what I have seen, they wouldn’t sell another ticket,”

Sarah Fishbeck told TheDodo.com about the constant abuse the animals at SeaWorld, the most abusive case being the Orcas. Due to captivity in these small tanks, their behavior is always becoming more and more aggressive, especially to other Orcas, stated Fishbeck

“You’d be diving at the bottom of the tanks and you’d find these long strips of what looked like black rubber,” she explained, “and it was skin they’d peeled off each other.” “We had divers take whale skin home to their families all the time as souvenirs,” Fishbeck added.

Although, it is not just the Orcas who are receiving constant abuse. “Those Magellanic penguins have been suffering for years because the visitors come and they throw pennies in the pool.” said Fishbeck “They don’t know any better — they see something shiny, they’re going to eat it,” she stated. “They have penguin surgeries all the time [to remove the objects from the birds] … it’s horrible.”

The dolphins at SeaWorld are as well suffering from captive aggression, Fishbeck claims that it can get quite severe. A dolphin named beaker was swimming with the whales when the whales started to push them around. They rammed her against the wall causing her jaw to break. She was then left to have a permanently upturned beak. Fischbeck said she believes the aggression problem is partially due to SeaWorld’s unnatural breeding program, which upsets the natural social order and leads male dolphins to act out.

Former trainers at Sea World, Dr.Jeffrey Ventre and John Hargrove both confirmed that Fishbeck’s claims were what they had both experienced as well. In disagreement to the statements, SeaWorld claims that these were “a complete distortion of the facts.”

SeaWorld also claims, “The fact is that SeaWorld is highly regulated by the U.S. federal government with frequent inspections by federal veterinarians and other government officials,” Aimée Jeansonne Becka, senior director for corporate communications at SeaWorld, said. “In addition, we are accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which has said that SeaWorld is ‘meeting or exceeding the highest standard of animal care and welfare of any zoological organization in the world.”