The Story of Phil Demers & Smooshi the Walrus

Joe Marine line was my home. I was 12 years old and still to this day I know I can feel that place. It was my home. Those animals were my family. It just was. It's in life when you take for granted when something is taken from you that you otherwise have. You know, when I left that place, those animals are still on my mind. They have names. They have personalities. They have history with me. These are some really powerful relationships that I had with the animals. But you introduced the likes of Smooshy suddenly, my walrus. And now I become a freaking mother to her. I mean, this is where things get really freaking weird. Well explain that to people that have never seen any of the earlier podcasts. So I'll do a quick run up in 2000. I don't even remember now at this point, 2012 I quit Marine land because the conditions were such that I didn't have much of a choice left. And so I did. I was doing so I had to leave a walrus that had imprinted on me. She she was a baby walrus that came into captivity from you know, while caught from Russia. In fact, you saw the footage of the baby walrus. Is that awful? That's also it's awful where they describe how they kill the mother to take away the baby. That's what it just it's scary shit in any event. So my having been there as long as I did and leaving, I haven't felt like I left. I felt like there was unfinished business there. I'm not leaving my walrus behind. I'm just not. And so I'm very different. I'm a different person than what I was eight years ago, Joe. When I was coming on here, I was a person who was desperate with a story to tell eight years later, people know who I am. They know what's happening. There's a film about me now. If there's ever been a time that I have a chance at saving this walrus, it is now or never does she know she would be 18. Okay, Joe, I got stories to tell about what she's 18. I got stories to tell what's happened to her. Let me just give you a quick update since the book, explain the imprinting, how that worked because what became would know how close you are to this walrus. Absolutely. So was the documentary is crazy when you see that thing glued to you, it just won't leave your side. She thinks of me every day. It's all she thinks about. This is where the tide changes for me with captivity because I am now witness to the trauma of what's become of an animal that's been separated from its mother because I know it. So explain to people who don't understand what that means. Like what happens with an animal when an imprints? Happy to. So herd animals such as walruses that are otherwise in groups of thousands, when their calves are born, they need to imprint on the mother. So what happens is everything about them, every attribution, whether it be their smell, what they look like, the sound of their voice, everything tattoos on that animal's brain so that baby is able to identify that mother within thousands. It's a scientific process that happens at birth. When Smooshy came to us at two years of age, we were doing a procedure on another walrus and it caused her, you know, she was in a heightened state of emotion and whatnot. She was going, she was climbing all the other trainers. She was being a problem. So I sought to pull her away from that situation. All I did was put my hands in front of her face and she opened her nostrils big. And I knew in that moment something had happened because now she was following me everywhere. And I couldn't have attributed that to anything that I'd ever done in all of my experience. So just the act of getting close to her and putting your hands on her face? I believe it was during that traumatic, whatever happened, her brain circuitry opened. And she realized that you're the one who takes care of her. I became her mom. And so days go by and you know, I'm going back there and she's barking for me and I opened the gate. She's following me and you know, she wasn't healthy when we got her. So now I was spending my eight hour to 12 hour shifts actually just sleeping and Smooshy's laying on, you see the footage in the documentary, she's just laying beside me. She would only eat from me. It became this crazy thing. And that's what became. And that's when the world started to change for me. I don't have children, Joe. I never did that. I mean, Frank, that's not an opportunity that would have been allotted to a person like me trying to fight multi-million dollar lawsuits and everything else. I had to put a lot of things on hold in life generally. My life is on hold in a lot of freaking ways because of what Marine Land has done. I mean, you see they're sending the police to my house all the time. I mean, over tweets and shit. Like, what did they send the police to your house over tweets? Like what do the police say when they show up? Well, these days they leave with fuck Marine Land stickers. They kind of love getting that call. But I don't think they want to be there. They don't really want to be there. But why do they have to show up? Like, what are the tweets? What are you saying? Because Twitter will ban you if you threaten people. So you're not threatening anybody. The tweet that I sent that sent one of them was life is short, steal a walrus. And they sent the police to my house because I tweeted life is short, steal a walrus. I tweeted it. I took a shower. I came back out. I saw the tweet exploded. I said, that's going to get some attention. And the next day the cops pull up. I said, you got to be fucking kidding me. So I light up the camera, the video, of course, you got the video in the film. It's at the very end of the film. You see it. But here's what's become. On June 1st, a former employee of Marine Land who had been fired inexplicably, she herself couldn't quite understand, although we sort of figured it out over some time. She came to me and she said she had things to tell me about Smooshy. And the one thing she said that struck me, she said she was pregnant. I said, that's an impossibility. 17 year old walruses a, it would be really grossly irresponsible to allow for that to happen to what's our lifespan. Well, in a while they may go 30, 35 years at Marine Land. They don't last eight to 10 Smooshy is the last one alive. But what Marine Land did is they negotiated a deal to have her transferred out on my birthday. This is sounds crazy, but I have the documentation. I maybe shouldn't admit that, but I do. They had plans to ship her out on March 21, my birthday. It failed. It failed because of COVID. They tried two days later. I got a tweet from the CFI, from an anonymous tweet from someone saying, your friends at the CFI stopped an export to Germany, to a facility. I believe, and I don't want to absolutely attribute it to it, but I believe it's the tear park zoo in Hamburg, Germany. They have done some research. They breed walruses. They know how to do it. This girl says to me, I think they were treating Smooshy like she's pregnant. It's an impossibility. There wasn't a male walrus alive in the gestation period of a walrus's pregnancy. In fact, the math is such that the last male died at the same time as he would otherwise be getting Smooshy pregnant. At Marine Land. At Marine Land. Now I worked there 12 years and at the time we had a lot of walruses. They never were successfully bred. In fact, walrus breeding is a very difficult thing in captivity. You need a range of very specific things. You need a certain UV lighting. You need some fresh air. You need a number of things. It's a rare thing and it's quite celebrated when it happens in captivity. I didn't believe her. I wouldn't believe her, but she kept telling me of things that she kept telling me that there were veterinarians from Germany that were there and that they were manipulating her. It had happened over some time and they were monitoring her. Now when I put two and two together, okay, we've got an export to Germany that's supposed to happen in March, canceled on account of COVID. We've got a girl telling me now that there's German veterinarians that are manipulating Smooshy. I tweeted, I have something to the effect. I'm paraphrasing, but something to the effect of, you know, I have a good reason to believe that Smooshy's been inseminated. Like she's been made pregnant. And June 3rd, Marine Land tweeted that Smooshy had given birth to a calf. There's not been a picture of Smooshy since over a year ago. On account of COVID, Smooshy was never taken out. The park operated, but obviously there was not a lot of numbers, but because of the rules of Bill S203, which we had passed in Canada, which bans the captive of, of Wales Dolphin and Porpoises, it also limits their performance. They're not actually allowed to perform for entertainment no more. Much of the advertising is not allowed and whatnot. So when I read Marine Land's press release of what they, you know, of Smooshy's calf's birth, which I aptly named June, which was the month she was born and is also the name of the Marine Land's veterinarian. They said they were monitoring Smooshy carefully and that, you know, this is that giving birth is a risky thing. We've not seen a picture of her since there's not been a Niota of an update. In fact, I started to, at one point I tweeted, it's time for me to accept that Smooshy's probably dead. It had been months and whereas Marine Land used to respond to my tweets with an update of Smooshy, there was nothing. There was nothing. Now I knew that there was efforts to have her shipped out and whatnot. So what happened was social media started getting flooded. Marine Land social media, people started saying, where the fuck is Smooshy? Not only supporters of mine, people that support Marine Land, Marine Land's response, and this is a, this was a national article in all of Canada. They completely ignored everything. All media requests, my lawyers requests. We just want to know where Smooshy is. We want to know if she's still alive. They blocked everybody. They're blocking fans. They're blocking everybody's people started to call Marine Land's lawyer. Marine Land's lawyer who has attributed himself as Marine Land's spokesperson in public was a pallbearer at John Holers death was now telling people, if you want answers about Marine Land, call Marine Land. He is Marine Land. He's the one that does the answers. Where the fuck is Smooshy? That's where I am at today. I don't know with absolute certainty that she's alive, but I should mention that I have been told by a lot of people that she is. I have reason to believe that she is. I don't absolutely know. Like how does someone know that she is someone who works there? So because the people that work there, so what I should mention is that girl who had told me this information that got fired inexplicably, it turned out because she was like a junior trainer. She was inadvertently in a meeting where they had gone over the details of the German vets coming in and whatnot. And one of the trainers were actually trying to stop Marine Land's lawyer from revealing too much because that girl shouldn't have been there. And a week later she was fired. She doesn't understand what the hell happened. I don't know that that's exactly the story because this is what she says to me. Now, imagine former employees come to me with stories and I typically tell people, if you're a former employee, you know, you're not really good to me anymore. I mean, if you didn't have, if you didn't have the gumption to do something while you're an employee, don't come to me now because I don't know that you haven't been fired because you're a dickhead. I don't know your backstory. I don't know that I'm able to trust your information, but hers came and I did do the tweet and it wound up being absolutely, absolutely true.