Update (February 25, 2026): After enduring nearly 40 years of imprisonment, Martha, the beluga whale, died in a concrete cell at SeaWorld San Antonio. After being ripped from her family in the Hudson Bay, Martha spent the rest of her life used as a breeding machine in a tiny, bare tank in the sweltering Texas heat.
PETA is calling on the public to boycott SeaWorld and for SeaWorld to end its cruel forced breeding program, which sentences whales and dolphins to lives of deprivation and misery, and to send the survivors to seaside sanctuaries before it’s too late.
Speak up for Whales Like Martha!
Originally posted on September 6, 2016:
Early on Saturday morning, June 20, 2015, SeaWorld San Antonio excitedly announced the birth of a new beluga calf. Though the calf was born a month premature, SeaWorld touted her health, and—about 12 hours later—both mother and baby were placed on public display.
Three weeks later, the calf was dead.
Meet that calf’s mother, Martha.
Martha was taken from her ocean home in 1988 near Manitoba, Canada, where free belugas travel into Hudson Bay and river estuaries to give birth. She was shipped to SeaWorld’s San Antonio abusement park, where she arrived on July 17, 1988. Martha has been repeatedly impregnated at SeaWorld as part of the company’s sordid captive beluga–breeding program.
Of the five calves Martha has given birth to at SeaWorld, four are dead and the fifth was taken from her and shipped to multiple locations around the country.
In June 2007, Martha gave birth to a male calf named Grayson, who was shipped to another facility in 2010 and moved cross-country again in 2016. Grayson’s father was a beluga named Nanuq, who, like his son, was also moved around for breeding purposes. After sustaining a jaw injury from another animal, possibly as the result of being placed with an incompatible tankmate, Nanuq died of an infection while at SeaWorld Orlando in Florida.
Help us put an end to this cruelty.
They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. SeaWorld has repeatedly bred animals, with disastrous results. As the many deaths and injuries demonstrate, breeding belugas in tiny tanks is clearly not humane. It’s time that SeaWorld and all other marine parks accepted that intelligent, social animals like Martha don’t belong in barren, chemically treated swimming pools.
Join the thousands of people calling on SeaWorld to release the long-suffering orcas, belugas, and dolphins it holds captive to coastal sanctuaries, where the animals could experience some semblance of the natural lives that they’ve been denied for so long.
Speak up for Animals at SeaWorld!
