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For years, Vancouverites did not seem to mind that the Vancouver Aquarium kept dolphins and belugas in its tanks. The city’s ranks of hardcore animal activists never stopped opposing what they have called a “whale jail” and an artifact of a “species-ist past,” but nobody seemed to be paying close attention.

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Tellingly, last November, when a local yogi held a protest outside the attraction to oppose the Aquarium’s new Yoga with the Beluga Whales program (a violation, she said, of yoga’s principle of “interconnectedness with all beings”) only about 20 people showed up.

But then Blackfish made the rounds.

The 2013 documentary chronicled the story of Tillikum, a captive SeaWorld orca that has killed three people, including Keltie Byrne, a trainer at SeaLand, a now-shuttered Victoria, B.C., marine park.

As director Gabriela Cowperthwaite would write later, “the most important lesson we learned from seeing killer whales in captivity is that they don’t belong in captivity.”

Annelise Sorg with the Vancouver group No Whales In Captivity described watching all of Blackfish’s grimmest details with a “big stupid grin” on her face.

“Sitting in the theatre, I couldn’t help but think of the reaction that ‘Blackfish’ will cause within the industry, the public and the government,” she wrote in an August, 2013, blog post.