This grim story of marine park whales could yet have a positive outcome – if it teaches us to value other species | Elle Hunt

There is no ‘saving’ these traumatised mammals from places like Marineland in Canada. Humans need to understand that our actions are not easily undone

Remember “Save the whales”? Now that was an environmental campaign everyone could get behind. Surely you don’t want whales to die!

It may have got the 1986 global ban on commercial whaling over the line, but in these sophisticated times that slogan seems woefully reductive, even naive. As Greenpeace warns on its website, 40 years later: “There is still more work to be done to save the whales.” Yes. You might say, surveying the state of our ocean ecosystems, there’s quite a bit.

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist