Mike Leven, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Georgia Aquarium: Free Atlanta's Whale Sharks

No animals should be kept in captivity. Visiting the aquarium made me very sad and listening to the hosts talk about "the happiness" of the trapped creatures to young children who don't know better made me very very angry und frustrated.
Yes, save them if mistreated in the wild, nurture them to their full health but don't keep them longer than it takes to recover. They don't want to eat your dead fish, they don't want to swim in circles with people hitting the glass and taking flash photography. They want to have their freedom, chase and choose their food, choose who to live amongst and how deep/shallow and at what speed to swim ‐ without restrictions.
Do your research while they recover away from the public. Children need to grown up knowing animals don't belong into tanks. The aquarium saved the whale sharks from Taiwan and flew them into a landlocked county in 2006. Since then Taiwan banned whale shark consumption back in 2008. That is TEN years ago. Ten years too long these four captive whale sharks have been swimming the same circles.
We need to get the government on board to ban shark finning, set captive animals free to return to their natural ways of life. While we are at it, let's ban plastic from all this as well&excl