Greece’s main zoo on Wednesday said it would transfer its five dolphins to a Florida aquarium, after a long dispute with animal organisations.
“It’s not easy to keep dolphins,” Jean-Jacques Lesueur, founder of the Attica Zoological Park, told Mega television.
The dolphins will be transferred to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida by May, he said.
Animal groups for years had accused the park near Athens of holding dolphin performance shows, contrary to Greek law.
Lesueur on Wednesday insisted that the dolphins were part of “educational programmes” which had not been held in the last two-and-a-half years.
The privately-run park was “under no pressure” to relocate the dolphins, he said.
Inaugurated in 2000, the 20-hectare park east of the capital hosts more than 2,000 animals from nearly 300 species, according to its website.
In 2022, it was criticised after shooting, for safety reasons, a chimpanzee who had escaped his enclosure. A similar incident involving two jaguars occurred in 2018.
Source: AFP
