from the perspective of the law they’re just livestock.

Yeah that’s a problem. That’s why I make an effort to let people know how unacceptable the situation is. Because we need better laws. It is our government’s responsibility to write better laws, and maybe if we continue highlighting and criticizing the issues being raised here, they will.

I don’t know anything at all about this company

Well there’s your problem. I do. There’s an awful lot of speculation in your post for someone who doesn’t know anything at all about this company. They own a thousand acres of prime land in the tourist area of Niagara Falls, within sight of a world-renowned natural tourist attraction that is basically a license to print money and they’ve been operating on the backs of their animals for many profitable decades.

They have only recently started subdividing and mortgaging this incredible piece of land as they move towards the inevitable shutdown and sale. This is what I refer to as “letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die”. The original and former owner of Marineland, John Holer, was a real uniquely offensive piece of work and if you don’t know anything about him you don’t know anything about the context of this park. He only died less than a decade ago, and in the care of the family, the park’s business has been (thankfully) winding down since then. One of the most important tricks businessmen love to use is to cry poor and talk about their debts. When they do that, you have to remember that their single largest and most important debt a business always has, is to their owners. This is a family owned business. It is usually the owner themselves crying about their “debt” but most of that debt is inevitably to themselves. What they really mean is that they want to squeeze out every last drop of “equity” they feel entitled to. They take on new debt specifically to do that, to keep the lights on and the doors open while they’re hauling away bags of money. Then for a huge suitcase of cash, they sell the ownership forward to someone willing to dismantle things further and the cycle of looting accelerates.

Finally, when there is nothing left to take they tell us a sad story about how the business was not successful (ignoring the chain of owners who walked away with millions upon millions for their brief efforts) and maybe they’ll grudgingly admit that one or more of those looting owners “mismanaged” some things, and they’ll tell you that’s why they simply won’t be able to follow through on all their debts and obligations and responsibilities at this point. And they’ll leave people they don’t give a shit about holding the largest amounts of debt they are suddenly unable to repay. Sometimes it’s some foolish lenders they were sneaky enough to con into funding the ends of their adventure who were told they had a healthy operating business that was going to be ongoing for years. More often, it is the employees who are intended to be left holding the bag. Suddenly “discovering” you are bankrupt allows you to avoid paying employees what they are owed in wages and severance and benefits and pensions, which can add up to many millions of dollars. But that’s only the easiest option. The highest and most cherished possibility though, is to arrange the finances in such a way that it’s the government who is left with the responsibility, so the cleanup is left to all the people of the regional tax base, or the provincial one, or if possible even the national one. That’s the holy grail. Make society pay what the market won’t so they can make sure they get every last cent they possibly can out of their business now that they don’t want to do it anymore. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits.

Doing these things can be risky, if they do it wrong, they can get accused of fraud and even may end up in jail. Do you think that will stop them from trying to do it though, if they think they can cover their ass and have plausible deniability about what they’ve done and why they’ve done it? Shutting down a large and profitable business before it actually becomes unprofitable, by making it unprofitable, is an art form and is a process executed with calculated expertise. Don’t let them convince you they haven’t thought of or planned for this.

Successful businessmen are really great at pretending to be failing businessmen whenever it suits them, and it always suits them to do so when somebody wants money out of them. In the words of Bill Gates on the Simpsons, “You don’t think I got rich by writing checks, do you?”