Posted on 12/28/2003 4:50:29 PM PST by Pikamax
Activist pulls no punches in battling animal-performance theme parks
By ELINOR BRECHER
MIAMI -- Russ Rector, South Florida marine-mammal advocate, is chowing down on breakfast sausage - counterintuitive for an animal rights activist, but then again, Rector tends to be that way - and fulminating against the theme parks that use performing dolphins and killer whales.
"There is no redeeming social value in these stupid pet tricks," he growled, calling such attractions "little better than a roadside zoo."
In 1992 he founded the Dolphin Freedom Foundation, which promotes the notion that marine mammals belong in the ocean, not in captivity forced to "live in their own toilet" and beg for food.
At the moment, Miami Seaquarium is the target of Rector's near-obsessive loathing. He's trying to cost the attraction so much money and trouble that it will either "shape up" or bail out. Seldom at a loss for the incendiary phrase, he said: "When I come after you, it's not for fun or exercise, it's to get you gone."
And "gone" is where he wants the Seaquarium.
"If you can't abide by the Animal Welfare Act and common sense, you shouldn't be in the business," he said. "It is very abusive to keep these animals in these small containers."
It was Rector who alerted Miami building and safety inspectors to scores of infrastructure defects at the 48-year-old park, offering videotape shot by a foundation volunteer and a report by the safety expert he hired.
The city hit the attraction's operators with 137 violations, mostly electrical, in October.
Then the feds moved in, thanks to a letter from Rector alleging hazardous working conditions for Seaquarium employees to the Fort Lauderdale office of OSHA - the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
While Seaquarium general manager Andrew Hertz acknowledged numerous "life-safety violations," he disagreed that captive displays exploit animals and called those who believe otherwise "elitist. Not everyone can jump on a boat and go see a killer whale in the wild. ... Flipper is where a lot of these people learned to love these animals."
Hertz said most violations have "nothing to do with the guest's primary experience."
Repairs are estimated to cost at least $500,000. Hertz won't discuss costs or Russ Rector. "I've never spoken to him or have any desire to do so," he said.
Rector, 55, hails from Fort Mills, S.C. He and his wife of 32 years, interior designer Linda Rector, share a duplex with her mother in Fort Lauderdale.
After his parents moved to Dania Beach in 1969, Rector answered an ad for an assistant at a porpoise show: Ocean World, on the 17th Street Causeway in Fort Lauderdale.
That appealed to a lifelong animal lover who grew up with a bear cub, pet snakes and squirrels. He graduated to performer, putting dolphins through their jumping routines for fish rewards before applauding crowds.
But he grew as bored as his co-stars did, he says.
He also grew disenchanted with the animals' conditions. They were kept hungry so they would perform for food. They lived in chemically treated water that made them sick.
He quit after seven years and worked various jobs in Florida and Haiti before establishing the foundation in 1992.
With Rector, the rhetoric is often grandiose; the tactics sometimes shameless. While battling Ocean World, he suggested to his barber's 11-year-old daughter that the dolphins were unhappy.
Mandi Chase wrote the management a scathing letter, the apoplectic response to which Rector delights in sharing. "Our dolphins get the best of care and we would never do anything to hurt them," the attraction's veterinarian replied in April 1992. "Mr. Rector has not worked in the dolphin business for 25 years yet he thinks he is an expert. So please don't believe all the bad things Mr. Rector says, because he isn't telling the truth."
Chase, now a Fort Lauderdale cosmetologist, recalls that after visiting the attraction as management's guest, she still wasn't satisfied. "So I started working with Russ to sign petitions and collect money. ... He made me feel like I helped." Ocean World closed in 1994.
Rector's favorite threat is the tourist boycott. He aimed it at Panama City in 1998 unless the city canceled its dolphin-feeding program, and Virginia Beach, Va., two years ago after the Virginia Marine Sciences Museum sought city financing for a dolphin aquarium.
"You build this facility, I will destroy your tourist industry," he recalled warning the City Council.
The city decided to finance convention-center renovations instead, but the aquarium project remains on the table, said Alice Scanlan, museum marketing-public relations director.
"I don't believe he had much impact," she said.
Scanlan called him an in-your-face type of guy. "My personal impression is that those are the tactics he uses because what he has to say isn't valid ... It's an award-winning performance of, 'Let's act psychotic.' Others questioned the validity of the project, but he was more grandstanding."
It's an accusation that has followed Rector since the Ocean World campaign - the attraction's owner called him a media bimbo.
But fellow Florida marine-mammal activist Rick Trout said Rector used the Animal Welfare Act against Ocean World and Trout learned a lesson from that: "There are laws that need to be enforced. He's a great civics lesson on how to make the system work for animals."
Yet Trout acknowledges that Rector can be volatile. He said he had never been so scared as he was in Rector's company during a parking-lot showdown with a Venezuelan consular official in Miami. The issue was a bloody videotape showing Venezuelan fishermen hacking dolphins into shark bait.
Rector released it to the U.S. media in 1993 and followed with an Internet call for a tourist boycott. He's fond of saying that he brought Venezuela to its knees.
For several years, Rector went after one feature at the Seaquarium: the size of Lolita's tank. But he was unable to convince federal officials that it failed to give her the 48-foot range mandated by law.
While Rector might have been satisfied with her freedom at some point, it's no longer enough. "You can't just go in after one animal," he said. "You have to go in with the premise that all the animals get to go free."
Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from this list.
I don't get offended if you want to be removed.
I just wish he was on our side.
Seconded.
Hardly apoplectic. Someone with only 7 years experience and out of the business for 25 years does NOT count as an expert. Rector should stop corrupting minors.
Free the whales and dolphins, and all the other animals that this whacko doesn't like to eat!
Sounds to me like he just got tired of working a real job and went after the easy money to live off of.
They are wonderful creatures, and I agree they do not deserve to be imprisoned in these nasty little marine parks.
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