Taiwan’s oceanariums face a critical turning point as new licensing rules push them to drop acrobatics in favor of animal welfare-centered shows, moving from spectacle to science.
In a landmark ruling this summer, Mexican lawmakers voted unanimously to ban whale and dolphin shows in the country. Animal welfare groups welcomed the move, having long argued that keeping intelligent and social species like dolphins in captivity is cruel and outdated.
For a while, it looked like Taiwan was going to make the same decision.
In 2022, the government effectively banned performances of wild, land-based animals with protected status under Taiwan’s Wildlife Conservation Act. Then, last summer, amended regulations made it harder for operators to get a permit to stage performances of any protected wild animal, both land- and ocean-based. Subsequently, State-run Central News Agency (CNA) ran a story headlined: “Farewell to Whale and Dolphin Performances: A new chapter in Taiwan’s animal protection.”
But the shows aren’t disappearing — they’re simply evolving.
The Ocean Conservation Administration (OCA), which oversees the protection of marine wildlife in Taiwan, is leading efforts to transition the island’s two existing dolphinariums — Yehliu Ocean World in New Taipei City and Farglory Ocean Park in Hualien County — toward more educational and humane performances that ditch tricks and acrobatics, a change that will be required for permit renewal next year.
But the measure risks a compromise pleasing no one. Animal welfare groups argue that keeping dolphins in concrete tanks is inherently inhumane, regardless of whether they perform, while dolphinariums depend on crowd-pleasing spectacles to sustain their revenues.
The global trend against oceanariums
As animal rights and wildlife conservation movements have grown, the world has been slowly turning against businesses that use performing animals. The 1993 movie, Free Willy,which follows a young boy who helps an orca escape a miserable existence in a marine park back to the ocean, also played a pivotal role in raising awareness about the fate of captive dolphins and whales.
Activists contend that stage training frequently involves punishment and food deprivation. The animals are confined to tanks far smaller than their natural habitats, they say, and forced to live in stressful, unnatural social groupings. Dolphins, for example, are long-lived, intelligent, and highly social — traits that, campaigners argue, make life in a bare concrete tank resemble a prison sentence.
“Their home is the ocean — a dolphinarium is not their home,” says Wu Hung, founder and chief executive of Taipei-based EAST (Environment and Animal Society Taiwan), an animal rights charity. “People don’t learn to respect animals at all from those performances.”
This widespread shift in attitudes has prompted more than a dozen countries to ban dolphin and whale shows. The UK-based charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) lists 14 countries, including Canada, the UK, France, and India, as having moved to outlaw or make it extremely difficult to hold performances.
More recently, South Korea banned new dolphinariums from opening as well as permits to import the animals. Since high infant mortality rates have made breeding in captivity difficult, this suggests that the country’s oceanariums will gradually disappear, according to the WDC.
No protection for marine species
In 2022, the Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency (FANCA), under the Ministry of Agriculture, released a letter clarifying that performances and human interactions involving protected terrestrial wildlife species are not permitted as part of commercial animal exhibitions. This move followed pressure from NGOs, which criticized a theme park in Hsinchu for allowing visitors to feed protected species such as lions and tigers. However, because FANCA’s authority extends only to land-based species, the policy does not apply to marine animals.
In 2024, following pressure from animal welfare groups and a request for clarification by a lawmaker, the OCA chose not to issue a document like FANCA. Rather, it decided to set up a working group composed of various stakeholders, including scholars, NGOs, and local government officials, to oversee changes in how ocean parks care for and use their dolphins.
In an email response to Taiwan Business TOPICS, OCA Deputy Director-General Shih Yi-che wrote that the working group’s goal is to “promote a transition toward welfare-centered and educationally meaningful exhibitions” and to phase out “entertainment-based performances.” Shih says the OCA is overseeing improvements to animal care, including through the provision of enrichment — providing toys and activities to keep the dolphins stimulated and improve their psychological well-being.
Illegal breeding, tiny pools
One morning this July, animal protection groups braved the summer heat to wave signs outside Yehliu, demanding the marine park stop breeding dolphins. They said Yehliu did not have permits for three of the six babies born over the last ten years and that half of those calves had already died, with an average age of less than one year. They were also protesting about the park illegally breeding dolphins, with the latest calf born last year.
The following day, the OCA announced it would no longer grant Yehliu permission to breed dolphins, confirming that the latest birth in the summer of 2024 occurred after the operator’s breeding permit had expired.
NGOs are not only upset with Yehliu over its breeding program but also criticize its facilities as ageing and inadequate in size for its 10 dolphins. “The most obvious problem is the size of the tanks,” says Connie Chiang, cofounder and executive director of the Taiwan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (TSPCA), part of the OCA’s working group and a July Yehliu protestor. “They’re only about three meters deep, which you can imagine is quite shallow. So the space problem is very concerning.”
Additionally, the tanks, like many in captivity, lack shade and protection. “It’s very bare, there’s nothing there,” says Chiang. “It’s just water.”
Shallow tanks mean the dolphins are unable to dive, forcing them to live on or near the surface of the water. In the wild, they spend much of their life deep underwater, sheltered from direct sunlight. The lack of shade leaves dolphins vulnerable to harmful sun exposure, notes Tsai Wei-Li, a board member of the Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation and a participant in the working group.
On the day Yehliu was banned from breeding dolphins, park manager Liao Chun-pin hit back at NGO accusations about the quality of its dolphin care, stating its facilities comply with U.S. standards and claiming that the animals have not suffered any ill effects from the size and depth of the pools nor the lack of shade.
“After decades of observations in our park, our dolphins have not had any trouble caused by the depth of the pool,” Liao wrote in an email to TOPICS. “These animals are our partners… No one would maltreat them here.”
Alternatively, the facilities at the Farglory dolphinarium, which are larger than Yehliu’s, are home to five female dolphins. Some pools have a maximum depth of 7.2 meters, but the average of the four largest pools, according to a blueprint provided by Jen I-fan, the park’s Marine Department director, is 5.25 meters.
Can education be entertaining?
According to NGOs, both Yehliu and Farglory have already begun adjusting their dolphin shows to be more educational, with content that focuses on environmental protection, conservation, and dolphin biology. The animals are now tasked with showcasing more natural skills, such as leaping and swimming fast, rather than giving trainers rides and jumping through hoops.
Earlier this year, TSPCA’s Chiang noticed something surprising on her latest inspection visit to Yehliu as part of the working group. A large portion of the audience appeared to be bored by the dolphin performance and left in the middle of the show.
“I was very surprised,” she says. “There were a lot of tour groups and a lot of seniors and retirees. It was really sad to see. They just stood up and lined up to go out because they didn’t want to hear the educational aspects. They just wanted to see dolphins jumping through hoops.”
Liao agrees that the audience response to these changes at Yehliu has been negative. “They do not really like the current educational [part] for sure,” he says. “The feedback from the audience is that they come here for joy, not for lessons [or] dogma. We are trying to make some adjustments at this point.”
Farglory has had more time to experiment with making education fun. According to Jen, the ocean park began changing its shows to be more educational and display the dolphins’ natural behaviors many years before the OCA launched its working group. This was confirmed by Kuroshio’s Tsai, who remembered it as a response to NGO protests at the time.
“We started to change [the program] around 2013 or 2014,” says Jen. “Now it is very different. In the past, it would be like a circus.” He adds that Farglory began adding enrichment for the dolphins around the same time.
Jen notes there was some resistance at first from tour agencies, who were worried that their customers would be disappointed not to see all the acrobatics.
“In the beginning, actually, some travel agents were arguing about the new show,” he says. But Jen dismissed these concerns, saying that from his perspective, audiences have mostly welcomed the new format. “We also receive some encouragement from guests from [online reviews],” he says. “Some say, ‘The show is really good,’ and ‘I learned something — I now know how to protect the sea.’”
Jen believes animal performances can be both entertaining and educational. They just need to be designed more carefully with the help of science. One of the working group’s tasks, he says, is to try to overcome the challenge of reforming the shows in a way that still attracts paying customers. “We have many different ways to show how unique animals are,” he says. “We don’t have to ask a bear to ride a bike… we can let the animal behave as they would in the wild and [interpret it for the guest].”
What’s next for these dolphins?
With an outright ban on performances unlikely anytime soon, NGOs are now urging Taiwan to prohibit the breeding and import of dolphins. The move would make the country’s 15 captive dolphins its last, gradually bringing dolphinarium operations to an end as the animals age.
“I really wish the OCA would work on the legal aspect,” says Kuroshio’s Tsai. “That is to have a clear statement of banning breeding and banning imports.”
But a ban may prove ineffective without meaningful penalties, as illustrated by the recent illegal dolphin birth at Yehliu. The fine — just NT$10,000 (about US$340), according to Chiang — offers little deterrence, critics say.
With an all-female pod, Farglory will not be able to breed any more dolphins. Like Yehliu, Farglory has struggled to keep its dolphins born in captivity alive. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any calves alive now,” wrote Farglory’s Jen in a follow-up email. “The longest living one was four years old and died in 2022. Most of the calves died from infection.”
NGOs hold out hope that some — or all — of Taiwan’s captive dolphins might one day be freed. At the very least, they argue, there should be a pathway to relocate retired animals or confiscate them in cases of illegal breeding.
Rehabilitation and release are difficult for cetaceans that have spent decades in captivity because they will struggle to live in the wild without having mastered survival skills. A viable alternative is moving the animals to a seaside sanctuary — a coastal enclosure that would give the dolphins more space and a natural environment to live out their days.
Chiang is hopeful that Taiwan can implement the latter — for example, around abandoned fishing ports — and says she has been pushing the idea in the working group to some success.
The OCA has now initiated a study of “recent international practical cases of phasing out, transitioning, and sanctuary mechanisms for performing cetaceans,” says OCA’s Shih.
Both marine parks, unsurprisingly, oppose relinquishing their dolphins.
“We have spent a lot of money on our dolphins — if we release them, who will refund us?” says Jen. Neither he nor Yehliu’s Liao think sanctuaries are in the best interests of the dolphins.
“We have spent a lot of money on our dolphins — if we release them, who will refund us?” says Jen. Neither he nor Yehliu’s Liao think sanctuaries are in the best interests of the dolphins.
But NGOs are cautiously excited. “Something positive came out of this working group,” says Chiang. “This is crucial as they (the government) have never done this before.”
Taiwan may not be about to retire its performing dolphins any time soon, but at least the conversation of freeing them one day has begun.
