Anne Hegerty, Mark Labbett and Shaun Wallace from ITV’s ‘The Chase’ (a British television quiz show) take to the road in a new series Trains, Brains and Automobiles. The programme looks at intelligence and in Episode 1, the chasers investigate whether animal intelligence is underestimated, as part of this Hegerty, Labbett and Wallace visit Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys to interact with the captive dolphins.
ITV’s press centre for the series describe dolphins as ‘well-known geniuses of the ocean’, yet the producers felt it appropriate to use captive animals to highlight this, giving no thought to the daily suffering and stress which captivity has on confined dolphins, a highly intelligent species, which when deprived of space and environmental complexity, develop abnormal stereotypic behaviours.
Please send a message to Lianne Hickey, Head of Production at Fremantle UK (whose subsidiary Boundless TV produced the programme), expressing your disappointment at them promoting this facility and condoning cetacean captivity. Request that their production teams look at alternatives to captivity when producing such programmes in the future.
The programme airs tonight, Thursday 21 January at 9pm on ITV (UK).
