Phil Demers, former Marine Land trainer turned whistleblower, reveals how Canada’s equivalent to SeaWorld—worse than SeaWorld—used "slap lawsuits" to silence activists, delaying court for years despite $100K crowdfunded. Owner John Holder allegedly stalked him and his girlfriend, with police refusing to act, while Marineland’s valuation dropped from $2B to $1.7B due to activism. Demers’ own baseless lawsuit demands "$1M bones" (CAD), exposing systemic intimidation, including threats against journalists like Jesse Brown. SeaWorld’s rejected $100M pool expansion and China’s captive marine animal trade highlight global hypocrisy, with Demers arguing financial motives drive cruelty over cultural claims. Their debate underscores nature’s complexity—intelligent predators like orcas and octopuses—while exposing how activism faces legal and corporate suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
Honestly, if it wasn't for my having been on this podcast two years ago and returning now in a very timely manner, I think I'd be a fish dead out of water.
I ate pot candy and was in Hawaii once, like many years ago.
And I had an experience with dolphins where these dolphins were...
We were fishing and these dolphins were coming by the boat and they were jumping and playing with us.
And I remember thinking, they might as well be people.
They might as well be water people or something.
There's something weird about this.
They're enjoying playing with us.
As we yell to them, they do more stuff.
They came by and they were jumping and they were clearly looking at us when they jumped through the water.
I'd never been to SeaWorld before because I had seen some documentaries on dolphins and I knew they were really smart.
I'd seen some documentaries on orcas as well.
It just always seemed really fucked up to me that they make them stay in these swimming pools.
But when you came on the podcast Two years ago and illuminated what it's like behind the scenes, at least at Marine Land.
It was horrific, man.
And I got a lot of tweets from people and Facebook messages that said they would never go to SeaWorld or Marine Land again.
And then they realized really what it was.
Then the documentary Blackfish came out and the whole world...
I was sort of forced to take a look at this and understand that these animals are super intelligent.
Just because they can't manipulate things, just because they can't pick things up and they can't write their name, they can't send you an email.
In their environment, that's unnecessary.
In their environment, in the natural world, they're moving through 3D space in the water, they have free food and fish, they have a huge community of Fellow orcas and fellow dolphins, and they communicate with each other through a very complex language that we barely understand.
They have a fucking language.
Not like monkeys go, ooh, ooh, and the other monkey goes, ah, ah, like kind of a language.
Like, we have this kind of view of our position being the top, I mean, we're kind of the top predator, but we're only the top predator because of our minds, because we figured out how to manipulate things.
They have huge minds, they have incredible brains, and then they're also, they eat everything they want.
earth you know being like the smart things are supposed to be compassionate and we're supposed to like be the stewards of the land and take care of the little chipmunks and all the other animals but it's because we're so far ahead of all the other animals that we kind of that's how that's you know we kind of feel bad The way we treat each other, we want to kind of treat other animals that way.
Which is why, you know, animal rights organizations and all these people that really, really love and care about animals, that's where they sort of come under fire.
Because they want people to treat animals different than animals treat animals.
So animals are fucking mean as shit to each other.
You know, I'm an animal rights activist by, I suppose that's the label that I've been given, but I should mention that there are a lot of animal rights activists that owe you a great deal of credit for your sort of, I want to use your sort of advocacy,
despite the fact that there are There's a stark line between those who believe in not killing animals and everything else, but then there are also other people that can appreciate how nature operates, predator-prey relationship, and can also appreciate that, at least in what you've said before.
You yourself are opposed to the captivity of animals.
I mean, the last time we were on, you mentioned of going to a zoo and maybe eating a pot cookie and having a look at the monkeys and being like, you know, you're throwing bows through animals.
And I very much respect the fact that the way that you hunt and the way that you eat is the kill what you eat movement or whatever you want to call it.
And as an animal rights activist, I can say that that is a far more responsible way than, you know, I want to take a look at the factory farming things and whatnot.
But I forget shit, I forget the point I was making.
They come cuddle with me while I'm watching TV. On any given day, I've got five cats, three that I claim as my own, two that just sort of come and go at will.
We don't want to think about it that way, but animals today that are alive today in 2016 are alive because their ancestors, especially predators like cats, were fucking vicious.
They were vicious and ruthless and they made sure they killed everything they could because if you don't kill that little baby rabbit, there might not be anything left for you to eat that day and you might starve or you might be too weak to get away from something that wants to kill you.
I think in defense of anyone that likes to call out hypocrisy is that you have to take a look at the fact that there's hypocrisy in absolutely everything you do.
I mean, the fact alone that...
And I'm going to use vegans as an example.
If you're going to look at what...
What an abomination of nature is really the functions of society as a whole.
A city, a physical city is an abomination of nature.
There's a line in all advocacy where how far are you willing to go?
Really, it's a question of how willing are you to sacrifice?
I lived in South Korea for a while, and this is a country that was leveled back in the mid-50s.
They had to rebuild from essentially nothing.
I saw pig heads being served up on the side of roads, but I can appreciate that these people had suffered so much so that they had to eat everything that was available to them.
I don't want to sit here and defend that South Koreans are eating dogs and whatnot.
It's symbolic of their history and whatnot, but if you've got nothing left to eat, I'd like to see how quickly your ethics change, right?
I mean, they're physically cute on account of the fact that we selectively bred them through and through.
And they themselves learned that, hey, if I'm like really docile and cute and look with these big puppy dog's eyes, I get more food and I get a better place to live and get a warmer shelter.
And I'm not likely to wind up in the backyard in winter, you know?
But anyway, the radio lab about foxes, they selectively bred foxes based on their behavior, based on whether or not they were aggressive, and the ones that were aggressive they killed, and the ones that reacted a certain way.
I don't remember the actual parameters that they set, but...
Ultimately, what it was, and if you're into this, Google it, because I don't remember the name of the episode, but it was amazing.
Within a few generations, like within less than 10 years, they had completely changed what these foxes looked like.
Their ears had become droopy.
Their jaws had become less pronounced and smaller.
Their behavior was markedly different.
They literally were almost a different species, and it was within 10 years.
The reverse to that is, and I think I heard it on your podcast, is that if you were to release a pig, and then it eventually starts growing hair again and maybe protruding some tusks.
A fucking month of a pig living in the wild, and all of a sudden their hair starts growing thicker and longer, their nose extends, their tusks grow larger, they become a different thing.
They literally start to adapt to the physical shape of a wild pig.
Dogs are crossbred all the time to sort of pull out the...
The advantages that we're looking for when we're breeding them.
Yes.
I know they were breeding, and I don't know, I can't remember where now, but they were selectively breeding this hunter of a dog, and they just made this mammoth machine, but also a docile, docile and trusted creature.
My friend Laney, her boyfriend and her lived in this apartment, and they had down below, I went to high school with her, and down below their apartment, they found a cat that had given birth to a litter, a wild, and this is like Santa Monica.
So they're like, oh my God, what are we going to do?
So they decided to capture these cats and try to get them home.
So me, like the asshole that I am, I said, all right, I'll take it.
So I took one of them.
I brought him home and he was so...
I thought, ah, he's a kitten.
I'll bring him home and hang out with my cat.
Everything will be cool.
I had two cats at the time.
And he was so fucking different than them.
He was like, he'd look at you like...
Just hiss and fucking jump up five, six feet in the air.
So what I did was, uh, I would- I would pet him, and he'd purr like crazy, and then when I put him down, he would hiss at me and run away.
Like, he was so fucked up.
And I mean, he would jump- he would- he fucked up my curtains, jumped through the air and grabbed the curtains and like- I was like trying to climb them and shit.
It was like- out of control.
I was like, dude, I was just petting you a few seconds ago.
But the life or death struggle that these things were involved in, even whatever he got from his mom and his dad, like the genes that were passed down, those are genes of wild animals that were really scared of everything and trying to survive.
It was like, I'm a big fan of just the idea of wildlife.
You know, I think we live in cities, and living in cities and...
Driving cars and sleeping in nice houses and, you know, having a yard.
It's probably as close to a lot of people get to nature on a daily basis as they got a tree and some fucking grass in their yard.
When you're out in wild and you see wild nature...
One of the most fascinating things about hunting is not just the pursuit of an animal that you're going to eat, but it's also spending a lot of time out there in the real wild.
Like the real wild where a fucking elk lives, you know, where a thousand pound animal lives its life with fucking trees growing out of its head and wanders through the forest.
Couple weeks a month out of the year gets to fuck and the rest of the time is just running from danger and eating.
It's like there's some animals that are so far gone and need so much help that it actually benefits them to have some of them in captivity just so they can keep a breeding population alive.
I mean, I'm not slighting in any way people who care about wild animals.
I absolutely care about wild animals.
I think it's amazing.
I mean, people think you don't if you hunt or you eat.
And I get it.
I understand.
I understand where they're coming from.
But...
This is how I try to look at it.
Those animals are going to die no matter what.
They're all going to die.
They're not going to live forever.
I'm not talking about wiping out populations with hunting.
I'm not doing that, and I don't think any hunters are trying to do that.
What hunters are trying to do, and what they have done, there's more deer in North America today than there were when Columbus landed.
And the reason is a bunch of things.
But a big part of it is wildlife management.
The wildlife agencies, like the Department of Fish and Wildlife in America, Department of Fish and Game, they're very careful about how many deer they allow people to take.
And there's consequences for poaching, like stiff consequences.
They put you in jail.
And because of these rules and enforcing these ethics, they've allowed these animals to grow in massive numbers.
And then, of course, there's also agriculture.
Agriculture contributes to them a lot.
Like the most deer population or the biggest deer population in America is usually around people.
It's usually on people and farms.
Some of the biggest deer in the world, like Iowa and Kansas, they're known for the biggest deer in at least North America.
Canada is actually known for the biggest ones.
But that has to do with cold temperatures creating larger-bodied animals because they have to generate more heat to stay alive.
But my point is, I'm not a hater of animals just because I kill them and eat them.
In fact, I love them.
I really do.
It sounds...
I get it.
I know it sounds contradictory.
But what you're doing when you're eating an animal is almost like a sacred thing.
When you hunt an animal and you kill and you eat it, it sounds like such hippie horseshit or some pseudo-spiritual horseshit.
But it is kind of sacred.
There's something that happens.
When I cook a steak of an elk...
That I ate, and I grill that thing, and I eat it.
There's a connection that I have to that meat that's crazy.
I know that that animal ate from the grass, you know, in the forest, and then I killed it, and now I'm eating it, and this is like this weird, crazy cycle.
Yeah, at my weakest moments, and I'm admittedly a weak man.
I tried not to, and last time I was on the show, I'd stress that, you know, I tried to get away from pork, and still I tried to make as ethical a decision as possible, but not at three in the morning, you know?
It just happens.
It was just like last night, we were driving around, we were cruising around, we needed to eat, and we found our food, and we gave them that paper money, and I slept better.
Again, I'm not a scientist, but I did read this article and it said that the more processed that a food is, it creates some type of fat that your brain itself becomes addicted to.
And they actually referenced an addiction to crack and that it was similar.
To process it, the thing about saltwater is it does corrode things really badly.
If you're near the ocean...
I have a friend who has a beach house.
Every time we go to hang out with him at his beach house, everything's all fucked up and corroded.
They're constantly dealing with corrosion because of the salt in the air.
It's just a constant moisture and salt together.
They just corrode the shit out of things.
That's why where I used to live in Boston, the cars are always fucked up.
Old cars, it's hard to find.
If you want to find a 1970 Plymouth or something like that, it's hard to find one that's in good shape because they're all rusted out from the salt that they throw on the ground when it snows out to melt the snow.
It's funny because one of the cruelest things I'd ever watched, and maybe it's because I have a vivid imagination, is if you've ever seen a Venus flytrap slowly dissolve its prey.
When these things open up, they open up and the rats are attracted to the smell and they climb in that tube and when they climb in that tube, they wind up dying.
I think it's the hours that poor animal's going to be just laying there incapacitated until ultimately, well, if it's suffocated, then it is what it is.
They haven't seen me kill the whole animal, but they've seen me chop up a giant elk backstrap and turn it into steaks in the middle of the kitchen, just sitting there with a cutting board, slicing it up, and they ask questions.
Well, they've seen me on television kill animals on a TV show, so they know that I do it.
They know that...
I have targets in the yard.
I'm always practicing arrows and archery.
But what I want to do is not even the hunting aspect of it.
I want to take them so they can see the elk.
When elk are rutting and they're screaming, it is amazing.
It's like you're in Jurassic Park.
It's like you're in some Hobbit movie or something.
When you're in the hills, what I want to do is I want to plan a week of hunting, and then I want to pay a guide just to call in the elk so we can just watch them.
I just want the kids to see what it's like when you make this noise.
And then you see this fucking thing.
Looks like a giant forest horse that comes up and wants to fuck.
And they're screaming.
They have this crazy wail.
It's amazing to watch.
Outside of hunting.
Separate that.
That's all great and everything.
But just being a part of...
The environment, like stepping on the ground where these things live wild.
And all they're worried about is like mountain lions and bears.
And that's what they're doing.
They're trying to stay alive.
They're trying to get laid.
And they're existing in this very bizarre world that we rarely get to see.
They have these tourism things they do in Africa, but a good percentage of them are in these high-fence operations where they've sort of fenced in these animals in these giant contained wildlife sanctuaries.
And the animals thrive in there, but how do you see...
I mean, the way you see them is you get in a jeep and you drive around, and even if the...
There's something fucked up about knowing that they can't leave.
Even if it's like 10 miles in every direction and there's a fence, and they would never roam 10 miles in the wild.
The fact that there's a fence at all, the fact that we've gotten our greasy little hands in their world, it kind of changes it in a way.
Well, it's funny because I actually witnessed a rutting deer, a male, of course, Trying to enter the premises of Marineland, and there's a large fence around it.
And this thing was so...
I mean, a rutting deer is actually a pretty dangerous animal.
I mean, their sexual urges are far beyond any type of, like, it just trumps any behavior that they would have.
So this thing was smashing.
It must have been smelling the females inside the park, but it was repeatedly smashing itself against the fence, trying to get in to the point where it ripped half its face off.
Its antlers were getting fucked up.
So we actually called a hunter who had been in the back.
Who had had the permission by the owner of Marineland to hunt inside some wild deer.
And we went and got him.
And he came, put the first bow, went directly through the animal, didn't kill it, got a second bow, and then put the animal down and killed it.
And then we ate the sausage sometime later, of course.
So what has changed since the two years that you've been here other than there's a lot of public acknowledgement and understanding now that it wasn't available or wasn't it sort of wasn't at the level that it is now.
I think people are much more outraged now about SeaWorld and about marine land and just the idea of captive orcas and dolphins and in your case walruses.
Well, so the first thing we did was we managed to ban orca captivity in Ontario.
That's done now.
So Marineland will never, and mark my word, they will never acquire another killer whale, whether it be wild caught or not.
So that was a big win for animal activists, if you will, or anyone for that matter who has any invested interest in the well-being of animals.
Just as of January 1st, we're 2016 now, there are standards of care, which is what I actually petitioned the government for back in 2012, because when I came out and sort of revealed Marineland for what it actually is behind the scenes, during that time, there were no standards of care.
You could literally have dug a hole in your backyard, filled it with whatever you want, and then, you know, plunked yourself some dolphins in there, and that was fine.
There were no standards of care.
There was no oversight in any capacity.
That's changed, albeit the letter of the regulations that we have now, I would say that few people are really satisfied.
There's still lots of work to do with them, but the fact alone that they are now legislated, we'll be able to change some of the parameters.
One of the biggest things is that there's in fact water quality parameters.
In the last eight months of my tenure at Marine Land, I was witness to...
Some of the more horrific things that caustic water can do to animals.
I witnessed dolphins lose their skin.
I mean, the skin was flaking off.
Literally flaking off their skin.
And we're not talking about just a regular slough.
There was some permanent eye damage that was done.
What happened was there was a breakdown in a disinfection unit.
A water disinfection unit.
We used to use ozone in conjunction with chlorine.
Ozone mitigated the use of chlorine, so you didn't have to use so much of it.
And when that machine broke down, the resolve was just keep pumping more chlorine, keep pumping more chlorine.
And because we were in the off-season, the public wasn't seeing this.
And this is 2012. I had an old shitty Blackberry, but I was conscious enough of how bad things were that I started snapping photos.
Taking videos.
And, you know, there was a major complacency for management because, hey, shit, we're not opening again for another eight months or six months, whatever it be.
I think the issue started in October and they opened in November.
And so there were no parameters.
There was no oversight.
There was nowhere for me to run to find help.
Now there is that.
So now Marineland has to adhere to new legislation that will require some capital investment from them, which, of course, is something that we like to hear.
But there's at least some stuff in place.
And most importantly is most recently, there's a senator, federal Canadian senator, liberal senator by the name of Willie Moore is what we're actually the hashtag.
We're saying free Willie Moore.
It's sort of in the hopes of sort of getting Justin Trudeau's attention.
And he's introduced a bill.
It's called the Ending of Captivity of Whales and Dolphins Act.
It's Bill 203, I believe.
And this bill, once it passes the Senate and ultimately passes into law, is going to ban both the import, the breeding of all whales, porpoises, captivity, or rather, and whales in captivity in Canada.
Basically putting a shelf life on marine land in the capacity that they do business now.
This is a bill that I'm urging people, look, if you give a shit about animals in captivity, you know, tweet Justin Trudeau, our recently elected Prime Minister, and yeah, we're really trying to, we're looking forward to moving this thing forward.
Beyond that, it's always a thing about what I call the paradigm shift.
People don't want to visit zoos no more.
Attendance at Marine Land is annihilated.
Now, this doesn't stop him from exacting a gross revenge on me, but nonetheless, we're still afloat.
We're still here three years later amidst all these bullshit lawsuits, as I stressed before, these slap lawsuits, strategic lawsuits against public participation.
When I got sued, Well, I had hoped one day we'd be in court.
Here we are, well over a thousand days later, and I've spent, well, I say I've spent, but we've publicly raised a lot of money.
We've spent collectively, over the three former animal trainers that are turned whistleblowers, we've collectively spent over $100,000 and not had a single day in court.
Look, Joe, the fact alone that I'm speaking into this microphone is exactly what Marineland doesn't want.
I'm dangerous to the anti-captivity, or rather the captivity industry, because I know a lot of things.
Of course, SeaWorld was, if you want to use the term, in bed with Marineland.
SeaWorld likes to acquire, because in the States you can't acquire wild-caught animals, what SeaWorld would do is they would get the animals that Marineland would import, so Marineland would import wild-caught belugas from Russia, Breed them.
And because the calves were bred in captivity, they could now be moved to the States.
So this is how SeaWorld in the States was trying to continue to acquire these animals.
And this is exactly what this bill is sort of trying to stop.
There's a number of examples of that being bullshit.
One being a wild-caught orca, or what they deemed rescued orca named Morgan, that was captured off the coast of the Netherlands.
It was by itself.
It had left its pod or it had lost contact with its pod.
And so it's a dolphinarium called Dolphinarium hardevike.
They acquired this animal.
And then what they did, or they took it and they called it rehabbing.
And then they, of course, deem it non-releasable.
They sent it to a place, and it's outlined in Blackfish, in fact, because there's a large documentary Blackfish.
There's a relationship between SeaWorld and a facility called in Tenerife.
It's called Laurel Parque.
So what SeaWorld did was they had that animal, Morgan the wild orca, transferred to Laurel Park.
And now it's actually part and listed as part of its collection.
That's a wild-caught animal.
So SeaWorld will sit there and tout this idea, we haven't done this in years, and yet they're...
They're importing wild-caught animals that have just recently bred one, the babies from Canada, and then they're basically adding to their stock of animals this other wild-caught animal.
But we could talk about the bullshit that SeaWorld spews all day, but the nice thing is most people are now conscious of it.
Most people look at it and say, I mean, every time SeaWorld tweets anything, they get a lot of fucking hate because people know now, right?
Why can't they make it so that they can go back and forth?
Why can't they make it so that they can have, like, set up a facility?
This is the way you can make it so these animals can transition back to the wild, and that if they do decide to come and participate in shows, they could do it on their own free will.
Have like an open area where it's connected to like a dock, where the pools and the areas where the animals swim, they should be examined by some marine biologists that deem it ethical.
This is an enormous place.
As long as you don't keep them in here, but they can do their stuff in here and everything will be fine.
And have it be actual ocean water.
And then have An open portal, so you don't have to worry about them starving to death in the wild.
They can always come in and get food anytime they want, and that way you can kind of keep both things happening.
Like, they develop a relationship with these animals where it's an actual, real relationship.
It's not captivity.
They come because they want to get food, sort of like squirrels at the park or something.
Well, it means they think that they're going to become susceptible and be sick, or that the transition itself from captivity into this new environment is going to be too much to stomach.
Well, where was that logic when they were plucking them out of the ocean and putting them in these concrete tanks, right?
But to be fair, the mimicry itself was pretty impressive.
And I've worked with dolphins, and I never actually tried to have the dolphin mimic my own sound, but with what I was watching, I watched the documentary recently as well, it was pretty impressive.
But the idea that that was teaching or trying to bridge the communication was pretty...
It just sent me on a voyage through my mind and got me in this very positive groove.
It was a good trip because it was a New Year's Eve trip.
It was like New Year's Eve's bullshit, really, at the end of the day.
Who cares?
You know, it's just another day, man.
But rituals, as I'm getting older and more experienced, I used to reject anything that was established, because my life wasn't so good when I was growing up, and I thought that everything that everybody wanted and everything that everybody's working for was all bullshit.
Degrees are bullshit, and rituals are bullshit, and fuck you, I'm a rebel.
But as I get older I recognize the benefit in like a new beginning in your mind like this year I am going to do this this year I'm going to like how many people It's hard for people to I actually retweeted something today from Neil Strauss who's a really brilliant guy and It's an article that he wrote about strategies and systems that you can set up and To make sure you don't fall into the same traps and sabotage yourself.
Why you need a Ulysses strategy for 2016. People have this thing in their mind that this new day and this new time is going to be the start of their new diet.
They're going to quit smoking.
They're going to start exercising.
They're going to get their life in order.
And they go at it with these earnest intentions, but very few continue that process.
And the problem being We're creatures of habit and we have these comfort zones that we've sort of set up.
And when you set up those comfort zones, you set up these established patterns, it's very easy to fall right back into them.
The language that your mind beats the shit out of you with changes, and suddenly you start getting resolves and answers to your problems versus dwelling on them.
Myself, personally, I have gone for runs, and I don't run that much, and I ride my bike amidst the darker depths of hell, and every time I come back saying, thank God you went and did something, right?
So shortly after I was on the podcast, and I don't know if you recall, you probably don't, you see a lot of tweets, but I tweeted you a video of the owner of Marineland, who's the man that's suing myself and a number of other people to try to stifle our advocacy and essentially punish us.
And the video was of him driving past our home.
And...
You know, I uploaded it to YouTube and whatnot.
And then shortly thereafter, there were more videos.
And then neighbors started taking photos when I wasn't home.
In fact, we got him in his new vehicle as well, license plate, the whole works.
The police, in fact, set up a surveillance camera, two of them.
They caught him independently, and don't quote me, but I'm going to call it 12 times.
The police refused to lay any charges because they said, A, driving past someone's home isn't technically a criminal harassment, despite the fact that we were like, look, the man's suing us.
He's dangerous.
I mean, I knew the man, at least historically, to have had a shotgun in his vehicle.
He's got a lot of reason to not like myself and my girlfriend, who's on any given time alone in my home.
So nonetheless, the police wouldn't do anything.
We took that information and went to a Justice of the Peace to try to lay what's called a private charge.
Not a charge, but we just want him, a summons, to come into the court and explain this behavior.
This is normally a 30-day process.
Marineland's lawyers managed to get in an appeal to the summons, which is largely unprecedented.
I mean, I guess people with money can skirt the law, but nonetheless, it took a year and a half The judge ultimately decided that this issue shouldn't be decided in the criminal court.
In fact, it should be dealt with in the civil matters.
So he quashed the summons.
So the owner didn't have to come and explain himself.
And now, I'm waiting any given day now, because the lawyers already informed my other lawyers, they're seeking a cost motion where I'm to pay the legal fees, which they're claiming upwards of $100,000, To try to get this summons against him.
His stalking leads to my trying to lay a private charge, if you will, or whatever.
Private summons.
He gets it quashed, and now he wants to put me on the hook for his legal fees.
Two of my lawyers have left, and these were ultimately the ones that were working really cost-effectively.
They're gone.
So I had to retain a new lawyer.
I don't ask for a lot of money from people, but I do ask for a lot of people.
As long as we've got money and our lawyers can work, this lawsuit has to run its course, and at some point, and the judge has already said, has already criticized Mariland for taking as long as they have.
Now, Mariland wants to say, well, this is the behavior of the people, of the defendants.
The behavior being that we tried to seek some protection from this man that took a year and a half.
The lawyers are trying to allege that it's our behavior that's delaying this process.
And yet, here we are, two years after I was here, and not a single day later, of course, significant legal fees, but we recently...
We got a very generous contribution from some animal rights organizations that are running little fundraisers for us.
We used to have what you would call a benefactor, which was Sam Simon.
He's co-creator for The Simpsons.
He was giving us a lot of money.
Unfortunately, recently he passed away.
So that sort of ended.
But yeah, largely it's the public support.
This is really quite unprecedented to have a litigation funded by crowdfunding.
Just to stress, that's in Canadian currency, not to scare anyone, because a lot of people go over and are just like, well, what's this C next to the donation button?
If I can just touch on a story that I think it's important in the realm of public opinion or rather consciousness to know of, but this isn't the first time that the owner of Marineland has stalked and intimidated people.
In fact, some years ago, a woman named Paula Millard was living in a trailer park that the owner of Marineland actually owned.
That was across the street from the park, and he had promised them all that he was not going to move them or displace them, and this was going to be their home for a long time.
A lot of retirees there, people put some permanent investment in their properties.
Well, ultimately he did elect to kick everyone out.
He had the city's support, which is not, again, we're up against a lot of forces, if you will.
Well, one woman was having none of that.
She was refusing to move, and the owner would repeatedly drive by and intimidate her.
And ultimately what she did was she had written on the wall, she had written, John Holer, may you get exactly what you deserve tenfold.
I appreciate that, but I also appreciate what you're doing.
I think that guys like you are super important for this.
You, in particular, you're probably one of the most important because this whole thing that we're experiencing right now is essentially our civilization is awakening to the horrors of the past.
And we're doing something that's really fucked up and not right.
And we've been doing it for a long time, so we think it's okay because we've been doing it for a long time.
And this is sort of the same thing that they experienced with slavery.
I mean, slavery had existed for a long fucking time, and it took a bunch...
I mean, people think, like, you're exaggerating.
This is not slavery.
These are animals.
No, they're insanely intelligent animals.
They're so much different than a fucking puppy.
They're so much different than a squirrel.
They have a cerebral cortex that's 40% larger than human beings.
We don't know why.
We don't know what they're saying.
We know they have an insanely complex language, but we don't know what the meaning behind the sounds are.
We don't know.
We've recognized dialects.
They have different dialects in different areas.
We know that they speak differently in different parts of the world.
I can personally offer perspective of having had a really strong relationship with an animal.
Like my anomalous relationship with Smooshy the walrus, and I'll just do a quick summary of it, is that she at one point believed that I was her mother.
I mean, she still does.
It's innate now.
She thinks that I'm her mother.
I'm tattooed on her brain, right?
I've imprinted on her.
So I got to appreciate what it was like to raise this animal in that unique opportunity.
And in that, the language, and I wish John C. Lilly would still be around because I think that he himself would be calling a lot of bullshit on what's going on.
He'd say, this is a fucking catastrophe that you're, you know, what's being imposed on us, the separation, everything else.
But I got to learn what it was like to teach an animal to have a sense of humor, for instance.
I mean, this walrus has a sense of humor.
This walrus knows me intimately, whether I raise my voice or I lower it.
Actually, I can say that I've, and not just myself, and other former trainers, have actually rescued the owner of Marineland from walruses that were about to attack him.
There's a video on YouTube, which is actually hilarious, where he's out on stage, obviously...
Yelling at a trainer to bring out more animals, everything.
And the walrus breaks from him and starts going towards the owner.
And he turns around and starts booking.
And the walrus stops.
And he turns around and he grabs his water and he throws the water.
And then the walrus goes and he sort of tucks away behind this sort of safety door.
Actually, there's another video, if you don't mind.
Look up, if you Google John Holler again, you can get to a place where he's actually confronting an activist who's just there offering on public property, which has now since been leased to Marineland by the city.
He's handing leaflets with information.
Well, they have a conflict.
They have sort of a coming together.
And John Holder, in plain English, threatens to stab him and bury him.
And of course, the activist, Mike Garrett, he's a fantastic guy, was...
I'm assuming he tried to keep some sense and keep things as light as possible, but John just has a conniption.
He's yelling his arms and up.
I mean, John's a little guy, right?
He's got what I call the little big man where he's just...
Well, we use the word protesting, but more than anything, he's handing information.
He's handing a history of Marine Land, but it happens to be at the end of the park on public property, but nonetheless, you know, the city obliged and...
Lease the land to them.
I mean, it is what it is.
Marineland's operated for 53 years above the law.
There was no laws.
There was nothing.
Now there are some, thankfully.
Things are turning slowly, but...
If you can find that video, if not, that's alright.
Joe, while I've got...
While we're just here, I'd like to show you this.
Oh yeah, let's take a look.
So here he's like, oh look, we're hugging, and then here...
He's actually having his wages garnished because Marineland, what they do is they use these lawsuits and then they propose all these different motions.
So it's like sort of a function inside the lawsuit.
Well, what happens during these motions is it can go either way, right?
A lawyer can win a motion against another lawyer, whether it be a bullshit lawsuit or not.
But what happens is in that process, there becomes a cost award.
So unfortunately for Mike, he got a cost award against him and he couldn't afford whatever the price was.
Of course, Marineland will say an inflated price to say, well, this cost us $25,000 to have to bring him in here.
And so the judge awarded $10,000 or so.
Mike's having his wages garnished now.
This is not a man who broke the law.
This is a man who opposed the policies and the practices of Marineland.
This is this t-shirt that I'm giving to you, so I'll hold it up.
Yeah, this is courtesy of Lofty Towers.
This is a place in Niagara Falls that generously printed it for us.
And then, of course, Ewok won.
You've got to see this guy's work.
It's fantastic.
And it's basically, if you look at it, You've got the walrus smooshy who's basically giving the finger to what appears to be an old man with a shirt that says, bury me with my money, who's got some shackles around it.
It sort of looks like it says, fuck Marieland on the bottom.
But I think if you guys really want to get a good perspective, there was a podcast that I was recently on called Canada Land.
And it's a big podcast.
It's hosted by an investigative journalist, Jesse Brown.
And he's very meticulous and very thorough in his work.
And he's detailed this exchange between he and Marineland's marketing.
No one put a name on it.
It's got to be Marineland's lawyers.
I don't know.
But nonetheless, if you want to see how they operate and how far they're willing to go to suppress what I say and the information that we provide, do go to the Candleland podcast and check it out.
They've threatened to sue him.
They've vowed to sue to what they call judgment, and that's a quote.
But that's just the way they operate.
If you, I mean, you yourself, Joe, and I hate to say it, but it would be a dream if they threatened to sue you.
I just think the whole thing, it's eventually, when you look at it historically, I think my friend Amber Lyon had a great quote when she was talking about when she used to work for CNN. I love this quote.
That's their avenue of getting back at you for talking.
He exists in a different world.
He is an old man, and he's born in a world where there was no internet, and he's experiencing the ramifications of this time that we're in, and also the new information that exists now, where we understand that these practices that they've been engaging in for decades are cruel and inhumane and disgusting.
He's going to give us the files, apparently, that is going to give context to the lawsuit.
It's nonsense, Joe.
It's just another means that I have to fight and spend a lot of money to try to get to the root of it all, which is the legitimacy of the lawsuit, which there is none.
My girlfriend's lawsuit is defamation in the sense that she expressed concern for the lone remaining killer whale Kiska, which was bleeding profusely from her tail and her talk with the Toronto Star, which is the newspaper that did the investigation of Marineland.
So she's being sued and they had a video and in the video you see the killer whale bleeding like crazy.
I don't know how you can call that defamation.
And then there's another lawsuit that's going against Jim Hammond.
He's a former land animal care supervisor, and he's the one that witnessed John Holder shoot the dogs on his property for no reason.
I mean, that can't be defended.
It's indefensible.
These were golden labs.
These are puppy dogs.
They're not coyotes.
And these were his neighbors.
And the neighbors were afraid to press charges because they...
Thought that John would sue them.
They probably thought, right?
I mean, the police themselves said to me, we can't lay this charge on him because he's going to lawyer us.
What they've done is essentially, or what I believe they've done, Allegedly.
They've hijacked the process, is what it's called.
Where you just inundate the courts with a bunch of different things.
And every time a court date seems to come up...
It gets adjourned.
Or we do, in fact, I mean, recently I'd lost my lawyer.
He's moved away, so I was having to find another one.
Marieland pounced.
Immediately called for a motion.
All of a sudden, okay, so now I'm defending, or rather it happened to my girlfriend that she had to go in, but my court date ultimately did get adjourned because my girlfriend was successful in actually having the motion adjourned, despite the fact that they're continuing with these motions.
It's hard to explain.
I'm not a lawyer.
I can't really get down to the nitty gritty of it all.
I can only just offer you the perspective of someone who's being punished unjustly with a process that is inherently abusive.
Well, it's a problem because getting a publisher is tough right now.
I mean, if you're going to publish my words, you're going to be sued.
You know, I assume there was a documentary that was in its initial stages.
It is gone.
There was a big story in Outside Magazine that was coming out.
This was the feature piece.
It got quashed.
A lot of people show fear when it comes to lawsuits.
Thankfully, Ontario passed what's called anti-slap legislation.
We got the thing.
And I mentioned this in the earlier podcast.
We were getting anti-slap legislation.
The problem is, and there's a major conflict of interest, is that Ontario's premier, she herself, had a slap suit against one of the MPPs during the elections.
She launched a lawsuit so that they couldn't talk about this controversial issue, which was this gas plant scandal.
And so what she did when she reintroduced the bill Is that she took out the retro clause.
This was our home run, dude.
We were out.
Not only that, Marineland was going to be up against some major punitive damages, as per the letter of the law.
It's just so bizarre that no one from the government recognizes what a horrible thing this is, not just in terms of the injustice that's being done, but also in terms of the PR for their legal system.
Now, granted, I remember touring a lot of public figures during my time at Marine Land, including Jean Chrétien, who was a former prime minister's son, who still goes there.
So there's still some government ties to Marine Land.
It just seems like Canada has so many great things going for it.
When I hear lawsuits like this that are so insane, that last for so long, and then that your counter lawsuit doesn't get any traction at all, and that no one's paying attention to it, I just don't understand how they can allow that to happen.
And oh, here's the challenge, and I offer this to all your millions of viewers and listeners.
You find a single video of the last day, I can't remember shit, I think it was April, I think, I believe it was, uh...
Oh shit, why do I not know the date of this?
Let's call it October 17th, I believe, 2012. Marineland alleges that I broke into the park with these legions of animal rights activists, which actually did happen.
I wasn't there.
I was on public property.
I did not go into the park.
But, you know, hundreds did actually storm the gates.
And what Marineland alleges is that I trespassed in there.
And there's tons of videos.
I mean, you can get 15 different vantage points.
Any single person finds me in that video...
I will personally cut you a check for $1.5 million.
So the writer was staying at our place, and at the time, I believe, we had...
there were um uh there were people watching us and i had specifically said because his his rental vehicle was parked across and here he was sitting on the couch and you know we're talking talking and i looked and it was a truck that repeatedly drove by and stopped and went to the other end of the street turned around i said fuck you're being you're being watched like and he's just like you know i think at this point he didn't truly appreciate the depths that we were in and at this point i don't we weren't even sued yet and uh sure shit
marine land named him by name the author, and that was it.
So he tried to get the article to run, but outside ultimately said, like, we're not interested in being sued.
Now it's a different time.
There's anti-slut legislation now, so outside if you're listening.
I think that when you live under an oppressive and difficult situation, especially with regards to your relationship with your father, that maybe you resort to methods to ease that pain, maybe.
Well, they're going to sue, I assume, to try to have that overturned, which I hope the California Coastal Commission would reconsider their approval of.
I mean, I wish there was a way that they could hook up a fucking machine to a pond or a pool where an orca is and have that orca communicate and have it broken down to English.
You know, we have Google Translate for Russian and Spanish.
How about an orca translate?
If they figured out a way to scientifically, without debate, analyze the sounds and break them down into an English language that we could read and understand Yeah, people would be mortified.
Oh my god, what if orcas just start saying really racist shit?
Well, maybe not the orcas, but dolphins and whatnot have reason to hate the people of Taiji, Japan, who are just repeatedly hacking them up.
And then, of course, in the Faroe Islands, and I watched a documentary on what's called The Grind, is when they do these drive fisheries.
They drive the animals.
They're sonic animals, so you pound the bottom of the ocean floor or these metal rods into other steel structures, and then it herds the animals onto the land.
Well, what they do here in the Faroe Islands is they grab these hooks, And they embed it in the fucking blowhole of the pilot whales, for instance, and there's a long rope and then the people drag these things up and then they go up and hack their throat, right?
They want to call it subsistence hunting, but it's hard to call that subsistence hunting.
Maybe historically it has been, but it's pretty brutal.
They will use anything to defend the culture of killing these dolphins, but really it's fueled by the captivity industry.
Those dolphins are invaluable, and places like And I'm not going to say SeaWorld now because it's been a number of years, but they have historically acquired animals from these dry fisheries, but they buy these animals.
And these hunters are driving around fucking Porsches and shit.
It's not because they're chopping the dolphins up for meat.
They take so many of the animals, they take the more aesthetically pleasing ones, they sell them for the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then they chop up the dolphins, and then they, whatever, I guess they give them the supermarkets and whatnot.
They're plucking elephants out of Thailand and stuff.
I mean, wild-caught, wild-born baby elephants, they're stripping them from their mothers and they're shipping them to these places in China now, these zoos.
I mean, this is another thing that has to stop now, right?
I think we've got basically an expiry date of, I think they said 2040. I watched a documentary called End of the Line recently, and they basically said that 90% of the ocean's fisheries are decimated.
Fucking gone.
And tuna, especially, is really susceptible to extinction.
I mean, you got these trawlers that are setting up nets that are the size of football fields, and they're just grinding the ocean floor, and it's just decimating the ocean.
It all comes down to what you can do with your wallet if you don't, if you're not spending the money to go to, you know, Nobu and get that piece of tofu, or rather that tofu shit.
That piece of tuna, then you assume that in some way, shape, or form that that's going to curb this behavior.
The only people that are doing it is Sea Shepherd, and unfortunately, Paul Watson is considered a terrorist in a lot of countries and can't actually set foot on firm land.
Well, one of the things they've done in Japan, where they've sort of skirted around this whale-killing thing, is they say that they're doing it for scientific research, but then they take these animals on board, and they butcher them, and they sell the meat.
But it's so fucked up, all they have to do is, like, pretend to run a few tests, and they've documented this.
Well, what they're doing is if people have a video, like a cell phone video or something like that, and you film a Pigs in captivity or chickens or anything in agriculture where they have factory farming, you can get sued.
But my point is, it's like I enjoy that relationship, and I know that not everybody can have that sort of a relationship, but...
That is what you want if you want eggs.
Like PETA has these really ridiculous campaigns against chickens and against eggs where they call it a chicken period and they have a frying pan on their website with a pair of panties that has like a fucking bloody spot on the panties and you're frying the period.
It's just like, if you don't think that that cat wouldn't fucking eat you if it was just a significantly larger, believe me, you'd have a different respect for...
And it's all about a bunch of different subjects, too.
Like, he had a really cool one with David Byrne from The Talking Heads about creativity, and he's just a really interesting, curious guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson.