Sea Shepherd President Involved in Captive Dolphin Trade

While non-profit activist organizations tend to come under a lot of public scrutiny for various reasons – most criticisms are usually petty, minor, and inaccurate. Some criticisms, on the other hand, can completely change the public perception of the entire organization. Recently, news spread like wildfire about Greenpeace’s recent support for the seal fur industry. Organizations and people around the world were shocked by this news to the point of dropping all support for Greenpeace. This has been one of the largest news stories regarding Greenpeace in years.

Shepherd has also been in the news lately so I decided to visit their website and see what they are really about. Initially I was impressed with all that they seem to be doing for animals. While seeing Pamela Anderson on their board of directors was a bit of a shock, that was nothing compared to what I discovered soon after. The president of their board of directors, Pritam Singh, takes proud ownership of various companies, some of which have captive dolphins and offer fishing charters, not to mention sell all sorts of seafood. This makes the recent news about Greenpeace seem less atrocious in comparison, as Sea Shepherd has active campaigns seeking to protect dolphins from captivity and slaughter. Sea Shepherd solicits donations to pay for these campaigns – so not sure if you can get any more hypocritical than that – asking people to donate money to protect dolphins while at the same time profiting from their exploitation!

At first, I thought this was some sort of mistake – that either I was mixing up this person with someone else, or that maybe the Sea Shepherd website had been hacked or something. After all, there has been no news of this that I could find on social media outlets. Though after a few minutes of simple Googling, I found that this is no mistake. This person, Pritam Singh, Sea Shepherd’s president has been connected with Sea Shepherd for some time, and is in fact responsible for captive dolphins, the fishing charters and even sells various seafood, meat, and wool clothing at the hotels he owns. For an organization that prides itself on saving and protecting marine wildlife, as well as promoting a vegan lifestyle, this is a blatant contradiction, and ultimately a slap in the face to all the supporters of the organization who may not be aware of this. Upon further searching on the web, I found more and more negative publicity surrounding this Pritam Singh, who was born Paul LaBombard. It turns out, that not only does he have these captive dolphins and supports the seafood industry, but he has also turned a large number of the Key West and Florida locals against him because of his unethical business practices. It’s rather hard to believe that this is the President of Sea Shepherd!

Upon further research, it turns out that he has been the subject of criminal investigations for racketeering, has been accused of corrupt business practices several times over, and even claims to have been enlightened after reading a book whose author is a known pedophile! The more I looked online, the more I found he has left a wake of damage in his path that he somehow manages to keep from catching up with him. Maybe his money plays a role in this. Perhaps he has financially influenced Mr. Watson to get on his good side to help keep his own status quo intact or perhaps he has manipulated Watson the same way he seems to have manipulated many locals and institutions in Key West. Either way, this is not good PR for Sea Shepherd and I would urge donors and supporters of Sea Shepherd to think twice before contributing to this organization.

You can see Sea Shepherd’s current board of directors here: http://www.seashepherd.org/who-we-are/board-of-directors.html

Some interesting info on Mr. Singh and his relationship with Mr. Watson and Sea Shepherd here: http://brianoconnor.typepad.com/animal_crackers/2005/10/sea_shepherd_co.html & http://canadafreepress.com/2005/higgins100705.htm

A list of the current dolphins in captivity at Dolphin Connection / Village at Hawk’s Cay: http://www.ceta-base.org/captive/cetacean/dolphin-connection.html

Mr. Singh’s website that lists the above mentioned Village at Hawk's Cay: http://www.pritamsingh.net/entrepreneur/resort-management
On this page, you can simply click "The Village at Hawks Cay" to be taken to the booking site for Mr. Singh's hotels, which has multiple captive dolphin programs listed there: http://www.keyscaribbean.com/adventure/attractions.php

A website exposing Singh that has since been removed, though archive.org still retains a single snapshot of it here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090430100933/http://pritamsinghscrewedmeover.com/

For fear of Sea Shepherd and Mr. Singh removing information from their websites, I have refrained from contacting them for comments yet until after this article is published and made public. I plan to forward this information to various news outlets, as I feel it is the right of the public to know the truth about the organizations they are supporting.