Merlin abandon fish in closed Bear Grill’s adventure

A video, originally posted in January and reposted on Sunday shows urban explorers exploring the Bear Grill’s Adventure in Birmingham which closed in October has shown dead fish and abandoned animals including sharks.

You can watch the full video here.

The video shows Tokyo Matilda and friends exploring the closed site in January where most attractions remained in one piece. During the visit they reported all fire doors were open which allowed them access and encountered no security (although thought they did hear some at one point however, the free explore suggests that if security were present they weren’t monitoring security cameras).

Animal Welfare

Most concerningly, despite Merlin telling the public that when the attraction closed they would be re-homing their animals, 3 months on from closure the explorers encountered fish and Nurse sharks and also reported seeing 2 dead fish in one of the tanks, suggesting regular monitoring of the creatures was not taking place.

Injunctions

Merlin have reportedly tried to block the video and have threatened injunctions but, after obtaining legal advice Tokyo said in a statement at the end of the video that they were still able to post it.

What does this mean for Merlin?

At the time when Merlin are reporting huge losses, changing staff high-up at their attractions, making redundancies, trying to sell attractions and running attractions like Alton Towers really badly this additional bad press is both shocking but not surprising.

For Merlin to choose a legal route rather than trying to address concerns around animal welfare in the video is incredibly concerning for a company who run numerous Sealife attractions across the world alongside the zoo part of Chessington World of Adventures…this isn’t to suggest that any animals in those attractions are being harmed but not correctly monitoring animals is concerning.

We’ll post more if there’s any additional updates on this.

Watch the full video here.