Addy - The Australian Sea Lion

I went to AQWA yesterday (Perth's only underground Aquarium housing many different species from the sea). At 1.30 there was a "Seal Show". AQWA has had some dramas in the past with keeping animals in activity - there was a mystery illness that killed a number of dolphins and there are other issues I believe that they are trying to overcome for the future containment of the animals. There is now currently only one seal there - a 9 year old Australian Sea Lion by the name of Adelaide who arrived there 9 months ago from the wild. Expecting the usual parlour tricks and cute little behaviours I was pleasantly surprised and quite pleased when I sat back and listened to the female presenter/trainer/carer of Adelaide explain exactly why "Addy will NOT be balancing a ball on her nose". She touched on that generally the public have these expectations when they come to a marine show of any sort of seeing the animals doing all sort of tricks. As far as this woman was concerned anyone can teach a seal to do that in five minutes but do you ever see them doing these "tricks" out in the wild? It was as she put it, silly human desires to see the cute animal do something funny that spurs that expectation and it left no room for the animal to retain it's dignity and learm something that may help save it's life. Addy, as you can imagine coming straight out of the wild, was no very predisposed to her handlers or carers and she chose to bite people many times so her trainer decided she needed to work on getting her more used to accepting the care she needed to have to ensure her health and physical well being. SO after explaining how we wouldn't be seeing tricks of any kind the trainer tolds us that she would be asking Addy to move around onto a rock where she could be examined, to open her mouth so that she could touch her teeth, to lie down so she could check her body for any lumps or bumps, holding her hind flippers etc etc. Through all this Addy would be complying due to the reinforcment of food, Addy had been taught that if she allowed or demonstrated a behaviour that she would be fed. There was a high pitched whistle, dog whistle of some sort that the trainer used like a clicker really to mark the correct behaviour. I was absolutely enthralled and whilst those around me found that getting a sea lion to lie down was quite ho hum I clapped enthsuiastically wondering if many of the audience had any sort of inkling about how challenging and unnatural it was for a wild animal to lie down in such a submissive position. I doubted that such progress could be made if we were for example trying to care for a completely wild dingo or fox or wolf for that matter (not that there are wolves in Australia of course, apart from the Zoos). The handlers/carers of Addy had observed that she liked to jump and that she was very agile and had a very high jump (this was after a few patrons had their cameras taken off them) and so extra netting and wire fencing was employed. So one of the things Addy had to do was to jump out of the water to take the fish from the trainer's hand and this she did twice with extreme accurate jumps. So after showing all the animal husbandry techniques to be used on Addy the trainer got her to hold a flipper up and out to bid us goodbye. It was the first time such a show had not had the "wild" animals doing entertaining tricks for all the crowd to wow at and it was a refreshing change and certainly gave Addy alot more respect and dignity. They hope to get her a male mate soon. Can you imagine if this was the approach of all such animal shows around the world? What a much more pleasant world it would be for those animals.