National Geographic USA – June 2019

She says she fell in love with dolphins in the

late 1980s when she read a book by John Lilly,

the American neuroscientist who broke open our

understanding of the animals’ intelligence. She

has spent 30 years training marine mammals to

do tricks. But along the way she’s grown heartsick

from forcing highly intelligent, social creatures

to live isolated, barren lives in small tanks.

“I would compare the dolphin situation with

making a physicist sweep the street,” she says.

“When they’re not engaged in performance

or training, they just hang in the water facing

down. It’s the deepest depression.”

What people don’t know about many aquar-

ium shows in Russia, Azovtseva says, is that the

animals often die soon after being put in cap-

tivity, especially those in traveling shows. And

Azovtseva— making clear she’s referring to the

industry at large in Russia and not the Moskvar-

ium—says she knows many aquariums quietly

and illegally replace their animals with new ones.

It’s been illegal to catch Black Sea dolphins in

the wild for entertainment purposes since 2003,

but according to Azovtseva, aquarium owners

who want to increase their dolphin numbers

quickly and cheaply buy dolphins poached

there. Because these dolphins are acquired ille-

gally, they’re missing the microchips that captive

cetaceans in Russia are usually tagged with as a

form of required identification.

Some aquariums get around that, she says,

by cutting out dead dolphins’ microchips and

implanting them into replacement dolphins.

“People are people,” Azovtseva says. “Once

they see an opportunity, they exploit.” She says

she can’t go on doing her work in the industry

and that she’s decided to speak out because she

wants people to know the truth about the origins

and treatment of many of the marine mammals

they love watching. We exchange a look—we

both know what her words likely mean for her

livelihood.

“I don’t care if I’m fired,” she says defiantly.

“When a person has nothing to lose, she becomes

really brave.”

I

’M SITTING on the edge of an infinity

pool on the hilly Thai side of Thai-

land’s border with Myanmar, at a

resort where rooms average more than

a thousand dollars a night.

Out past the pool, elephants roam

in a lush valley. Sitting next to me is 20-year-old

In a forest outside

Moscow, Stepan,

a 26-year-old brown

bear and social media

star, sits between an

angel-wing-clad model

and his owner, Svetlana

Panteleenko. Moscow-

based photographers

pay $760 each to cap-

ture the scene for

their Instagram feeds.

74 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC