Ahead of World Orca Day (14 July), three PETA “orcas” wearing chains burst into TUI’s Manchester branch – the city’s airport is the company’s biggest UK base – and took over the store windows holding signs reading, “Help Me!” and “Free Me!” Two other PETA supporters held a banner that read, “Orca Suffering for Sale Here!” at the entrance to the store. This is PETA’s latest action to urge the travel provider to sever its ties with marine abusement parks that hold orcas and other dolphins captive in the name of entertainment.

PETA notes that while orcas in nature form complex relationships, work cooperatively to find food, and traverse up to 150 miles of ocean every day, those at marine parks are housed in incompatible groups in cramped tanks. Held in these concrete prisons for decades and forced to perform tricks for tourists, the majority die far short of their natural life expectancy.

Most leading companies, including rival Jet2holidays, have ended the promotion of dolphin prisons. TUI’s propping up of the notorious SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida, and promotion of other abusement parks like Loro Parque in Tenerife, Spain, is an embarrassment to the entire travel industry.

“TUI should be ashamed to promote businesses that cause the pain, suffering, and premature deaths of orcas and other dolphins,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “By profiting from animal abuse, TUI is alienating caring British holidaymakers and compassionate travellers everywhere.”

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment or abuse in any other way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.