Amusement-park operator SeaWorld (SEAS) admitted Thursday that employees have posed as animal rights activists to spy on critics and that the company will end the practice.
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The company’s first public admission, made during a quarterly earnings call with investors, comes after the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals accused a SeaWorld San Diego worker of infiltrating the group to get intel and rile up members. SeaWorld Board of Directors chose to drop the practice after an investigation performed by outside counsel.
Last year, SeaWorld San Diego announced that it would phase out its killer whale show by 2017.
SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby read from a statement that the company plans to post online at some point today, acknowledging that SeaWorld employees had posed as animal rights activists, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
The group said Mr McComb, who is still employed by SeaWorld, attempted to incite violence during a peaceful protest.
SeaWorld could face civil, and even criminal, legal exposure depending on the information it obtained from McComb about PETA and what the company did with the information, said Sharon Sandeen, a law professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. In a more recent campaign against the theme park, PETA has taken issue with artificial insemination of orcas.
Manby did not say who in the company authorized employees to spy.
In the final quarter, the company reported a net loss of $11 million, or 13 cents per share, compared to a loss of $25.4 million, or 29 cents a share, in the last quarter of 2014.
McComb was placed on administrative leave but has since returned to SeaWorld in a different department, the park said in its statement on Thursday.
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PETA has been one of the theme park’s chief opponents since the release of the documentary “Blackfish”, which is critical of SeaWorld’s handling of killer whales. Mr Manby reveled recently that he was putting on hold a $100 million plan to double the volume of the San Diego park’s orca whale tanks and would divert a large portion of that budget to a “marketable attraction”. SeaWorld did not admit at the time that the espionage had been sanctioned by the company.
