There's also the fact that farming aquatic life can pose dangers to wild aquatic life. There are a lot of variables that need to be considered for aquatic species, eg. runoff from fish farms introducing parasites and other garbage into wild fish populations. Not only would there be a transition involved, existing practices still need to change, or it would just be a matter of trading one method of ruining the environment for another.

Despite living just a few miles from the shark attack capital of the United States, I love sharks... they're very neat animals, and like most fish, they're waaay smarter than people give them credit for. I hate the fact that people cut their fins off and leave them to starve just so they can make soup from them. People treat sea life in the worst ways.    The hammerhead is my favorite kind too... and have been since I was at least five. They just look s'dang cool.

Marine: "Is this what I think it is?"
IS: "Yep, that's a fist all right."
Marine: "Cool, where'd you get it?"
IS:  :blink:

I got Sharptooth too. No surprise?

Granted, unfortunately it's just not in your size. Too small, you see.

I wish I had an ice cream sandwich.

I was looking for information. I can't remember what it was I originally wanted. A few Google results brought me here. Curiosity brought me back.  

I don't think that it's cruel just to use an animal for entertainment IF it's happy and healthy and its needs are actually being met. But I don't believe that orcas' needs are being met in captivity. The kind of setup you see at SeaWorld seems to be working okay for dolphins, but dolphins have drastically different behavior in the wild from orcas.

Bottlenose dolphins live in "fission-fusion" groups in the wild. They aren't all related, and they come and go as they please, kinda like human society. But orcas are extremely social and close knit. Even the males stay with their mother's pod their entire life. Studies of orca vocalizations even show that distinct groups have their own "dialects"--different pods don't make the same noises, or the same combinations of noises. Even when they are captive bred there are still "social deficiencies". I remember that one of the details mentioned about one of the "aggressive" orcas was that they'd been keeping him totally solitary, no other orcas around at all, just the trainers when they decided to interact with him.    For an animal that social, that's really, really sad. I don't know that keeping a parrot or even a dog in similar conditions would be considered humane.

The effect on their physical health alone should be an obvious indication that something is very wrong with how people are handling their care. The norm is for captive animals to live longer lives than their wild counterparts--this is true for birds, wolves, cats, ungulates, reptiles, etc.--but from what I've read, captivity apparently shaves decades off of an orca's life. If an animal that can live to be 60-70 years old in the wild, is only surviving 20 on average... what is going on?

Maybe Littlefoot just didn't get much socialization when he was little. Doesn't he say something along the lines of having nobody to play with? We do know that he was the only baby in his herd, so he wouldn't have really had much (or any) socialization with dinosaurs his own age until he met Cera. It could help explain why he was nicer in the sequels too--not only was his mother's death not so recent, but he had had time to hone his social skills and learn to "play nice" with other dinosaurs.

Somewhat of a side note, but I don't find it terribly odd that Spike's lack of speech wasn't brought up sooner... I mean, it's at least implied that some time passes between Littlefoot's hatching and the events that happen later. He doesn't look like a newborn so to speak. Same's true for Chomper. So perhaps they all just assumed Spike would learn to talk eventually, and only started to notice something was odd after a few years.

Yeah... it wasn't my personal opinion, I just realized as I was typing that someone might think so, and didn't want to trod on any toes. But I'm glad you like.  

I could've done without them, yeah. Don't get me wrong, I think some of them were really catchy, but still it just wasn't the same. "We all feel sad so let's sing about it!" just didn't have the same emotional depth we saw in some of the scenes in the first movie, and the happier songs really made it blatant that it was a movie aimed at little kids, which the original movie kindly refrained from doing.

But having grown up watching things like the original LBT, The Rats of NIMH and Watership Down when I was four and five, I doubt my tastes are especially common. And it's pretty obvious the sequels did not intend to stick to the "flavor" of the original movie. The characters and settings are the same, but in other ways it's like an entirely different franchise.