Name: The Story of Phil Demers & Smooshi the Walrus
Uploaded: 2021-01-07T22:59:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Story of Phil Demers & Smooshi the Walrus' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Story of Phil Demers & Smooshi the Walrus' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-07. Transcript available.

Joe Marineland was my home. I was 12 years there. I still to this day I know I
can feel that place.
It was my home. Those animals were my family. It just was. It's in life when
you take for granted
when something is taken from you that you otherwise have. You know when I left
that place
those animals are still on my mind. They have names. They have personalities.
They have history
with me and these are some really powerful relationships that I had with the
animals.
But you introduced the likes of Smushy suddenly my walrus and now I become a
freaking mother to her.
I mean this is where things get really freaking weird. Well explain that to
people that have never
seen any of the earlier podcast. So I'll do a quick run up. In 2000 I don't
even remember now
at this point. 2012 I quit Marineland because the conditions were such that I
didn't have much of a
choice left. And so I did but in doing so I had to leave a walrus that had
imprinted on me.
She was a baby walrus that came into captivity from you know wild caught from
Russia. In fact
you saw the footage of the baby walrus. Is that awful? That guts me.
So it's awful where they describe how they kill the mother to take away the
baby.
That footage is. It's scary shit. In any event so my having been there as long
as I did and leaving I
I haven't felt like I left. I felt like there was unfinished business there. I'm
not leaving my walrus
behind. I'm just not. And so I'm very different. I'm a different person than
what I was eight years
ago. Joe when I was coming on here I was a person who was desperate with a
story to tell. Eight years
later people know who I am. They know what's happening. There's a film about me
now. If there's
ever been a time that I have a chance at saving this walrus it is now or never.
How old is she
now? She would be 18. Okay Joe I got stories to tell about what she's 18. I got
stories to tell
what's happened to her. Okay let me just give you a quick update since the.
Well explain the imprinting.
How that worked. People know how close you are to this walrus. Absolutely.
Because the documentary
is crazy. When you see that thing glued to you it just won't leave your side.
She thinks of me
every day. It's all she thinks about. This is where the tide changes for me
with captivity because
I am now witness to the trauma of what's become of an animal that's been
separated from its mother
because I know it. So explain to people who don't understand what that means.
Like what happens with
an animal when it imprints? Happy to. So herd animals such as walruses that are
otherwise in
groups of thousands. When their calves are born they need to imprint on the
mother. So what happens
is everything about them, every attribution whether it be their smell, what
they look like, the sound of
their voice, everything tattoos on that animal's brain so that baby is able to
identify that mother within
thousands. It's a scientific process that happens at birth. When Smushi came to
us at two years of age
we were doing a a procedure on another walrus and it caused her you know she
was in a heightened state
of emotion and whatnot. She was going she was climbing all the other trainers.
She was being a
problem so I I sought to pull her away from that situation. All I did was put
my hands in front of
her face and she opened her nostrils big and I knew in that moment something
had happened because now
she was following me everywhere and I couldn't have attributed that to anything
that I'd ever done in
all of my experience. So just the act of getting close to her and putting your
hands on her face? I believe it was during that traumatic
whatever happened her brain circuitry opened. And she realized that you're the
one who takes care
of her. I became her mom and so days go by and you know I'm going back there
and she's barking for
me and I opened the gate she's following me and you know she wasn't healthy
when we got her so now I was
spending my eight hour to 12 hour shifts actually just sleeping and Smushi's
laying on you see the
footage in the documentary she's just laying beside me she would only eat from
me it became this crazy thing
and that's what became I mean and that's when that's when the that's when the
world started to change
for me I don't have children Joe I don't I never did that I mean frankly it's
not an opportunity that would
have been allotted to a person like me trying to fight multi-million dollar
lawsuits and everything
else I had to put a lot of things on hold in life generally my life is on hold
in a lot of freaking
ways because of of of what Marineland has done I mean you see they're sending
the police to my house all
the time I mean over tweets and shit like what and they send the police to your
house over tweets like
what what do the police say when they show up well these days they look they
leave with
marine land stickers they kind of love getting that call but I don't think they
want to be there they
don't really want to be there but but why do they have to show up like what are
the tweets what are you
saying because twitter will ban you if you threaten people I so you're not
threatening anybody the tweet
that I sent that sent well one of them was life is short steal a walrus and
they sent the police to
my house because I had tweeted life is short steal a walrus I tweeted it I took
a shower I came back out
I saw the tweeted explode I said oh that's that's gonna get some attention and
the next day the cops pull
up I said you gotta be kidding me so I light up the camera the video of course
you got the video in the
film it's at the very end of the film you see it but here's what's become on
June 1st a former
employee of marine land who had been fired inexplicably she she herself couldn't
quite
understand although we sort of figured it out over some time she came to me and
she said she
had things to tell me about smooshy and the one thing she said that struck me
she said she was
pregnant I said that's an impossibility 17 year old walrus is a it would be
really grossly
irresponsible to allow for that to happen too what's their lifespan well in a
while they may go 30 35
years at marine land they don't last eight to ten smooshy is the last one alive
but what marine land
did is they negotiated a deal to have her transferred out on my birthday this
sounds crazy but I have the
documentation I maybe shouldn't admit that but I do they had plans to ship her
out on march 21 my birthday
it failed it failed because of covid they tried two days later I got a tweet
from the cfi from
an anonymous tweet from someone saying your friends at the cfia stopped an
export to germany to a
facility I believe and I don't want to absolutely attribute it to it but I
believe it's the tier park
zoo in hamburg germany they you know I've done some research they breed walruses
they know how to do it
this girl says to me I think like they were treating smooshy like she's
pregnant it's an impossibility
there wasn't a male walrus alive in the in the gestation period of a wall of a
walrus pregnancy in
fact the math is such that the last male died at the same time as you would
otherwise be getting smooshy
pregnant at marine at marine land now I worked there 12 years and at the time
we had like a lot of walruses
they never successfully were successfully bred in fact walrus breeding is a
very difficult thing in
captivity you need a range of very specific things you need a certain uv
lighting you need some fresh air
you need a number of things it's it's a it's a rare thing and it's quite
celebrated when it happens in
captivity I didn't believe her I wouldn't believe her but she kept telling me
of things that these
that she kept telling me that there were veterinaries from germany that were
there and that
they were manipulating her and it happened over some time and they were
monitoring her
now when I put two and two together okay we've got an export to to germany that's
supposed to
happen in march canceled on account of covet we've got uh we've got a girl
telling me now that there's
german veterinarians that are manipulating smooshy I tweeted I have something
to the effect I'm
paraphrasing but something to the effect of you know I have a good I have a
good reason to believe that
smooshy's been uh inseminated like she's been made pregnant and uh June 3rd
marine land tweeted that
smooshy had given birth to a calf there's not been a picture of smooshy since
over a year ago on account
of covid smooshy was never taken out the the park operated but you know
obviously there was not a lot
of numbers but they because of the rules of bill s203 which we had passed in
Canada which bans the
the captive of uh of whales dolphins and porpoises it also uh limits their
performance they they're not
actually allowed to perform for entertainment no more uh much of the
advertising is not allowed and whatnot
so when I read marine lens press release of what they you know of smooshy's
calf's birth which I
aptly named June which was the the month she was born and is also the name of
the uh marine lands
veterinarian um they said they were monitoring smooshy carefully and that you
know these this that giving
birth is a risky thing we've not seen a picture of her since there's not been
an iota of an update in
fact I started to at one point I tweeted it's time for me to accept that smooshy's
probably dead it had
been months and whereas marine land used to respond to my tweets with an update
of smooshy there was
nothing there was nothing now I knew that there was efforts to have her shipped
out and whatnot
so what happened was social media started getting flooded marine land social
media people started
saying where the fuck is smooshy not only supporters of mine people that
support marine land marine lands
response and this is a this was a national article in all of Canada they
completely ignored everything
all media requests my lawyers requests we just want to know where smooshy is we
want to know if she's
still alive they blocked everybody they're blocking fans they're blocking
everybody people started to
call marine lands lawyer marine lands lawyer who has attributed himself as
marine land spokesperson in
public was a pallbearer at john holer's death was now telling people if you
want answers about marine
land call marine land he is marine land he's the one that does the answers
where the fuck is smooshy
that's where i'm at today i don't know with absolute certainty that she's alive
but i should mention
that i have been told by a lot of people that she is i have reason to believe
that she is i don't
absolutely know like how does someone know that who is someone who works there
so because the people
that work there so so what i should mention is that girl who had told me this
information that got
fired inexplicably it turned out because she was like a junior trainer she was
inadvertently in a meeting
where they had gone over the details of the german vets coming in and whatnot
and one of the trainers
were actually trying to stop marine lands lawyer from revealing too much
because that girl shouldn't
have been there and a week later she was fired she doesn't understand what the
hell happened i don't
know that that's exactly the story because this is what she says to me now you
imagine former employees
come to me with stories and i typically tell people if you're a former employee
you know you're not
really good to me anymore i mean if you didn't have if you didn't have the gumption
to do something
while you're an employee don't come to me now because i don't know that you
haven't been fired
because you're a dickhead i don't know your backstory i don't know that i'm
able to trust your information
but hers came and i did do the tweet and it it wound up being absolutely uh
absolutely true
catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch
back catalog jre videos
on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio
experience on spotify you can
listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download
episodes to save on data
cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium
account to watch new
jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify
now to get this
full episode of the joe rogan experience

The Story of Phil Demers & Smooshi the Walrus

Joe Marineland was my home. I was 12 years there. I still to this day I know I
can feel that place.
It was my home. Those animals were my family. It just was. It's in life when
you take for granted
when something is taken from you that you otherwise have. You know when I left
that place
those animals are still on my mind. They have names. They have personalities.
They have history
with me and these are some really powerful relationships that I had with the
animals.
But you introduced the likes of Smushy suddenly my walrus and now I become a
freaking mother to her.
I mean this is where things get really freaking weird. Well explain that to
people that have never
seen any of the earlier podcast. So I'll do a quick run up. In 2000 I don't
even remember now
at this point. 2012 I quit Marineland because the conditions were such that I
didn't have much of a
choice left. And so I did but in doing so I had to leave a walrus that had
imprinted on me.
She was a baby walrus that came into captivity from you know wild caught from
Russia. In fact
you saw the footage of the baby walrus. Is that awful? That guts me.
So it's awful where they describe how they kill the mother to take away the
baby.
That footage is. It's scary shit. In any event so my having been there as long
as I did and leaving I
I haven't felt like I left. I felt like there was unfinished business there. I'm
not leaving my walrus
behind. I'm just not. And so I'm very different. I'm a different person than
what I was eight years
ago. Joe when I was coming on here I was a person who was desperate with a
story to tell. Eight years
later people know who I am. They know what's happening. There's a film about me
now. If there's
ever been a time that I have a chance at saving this walrus it is now or never.
How old is she
now? She would be 18. Okay Joe I got stories to tell about what she's 18. I got
stories to tell
what's happened to her. Okay let me just give you a quick update since the.
Well explain the imprinting.
How that worked. People know how close you are to this walrus. Absolutely.
Because the documentary
is crazy. When you see that thing glued to you it just won't leave your side.
She thinks of me
every day. It's all she thinks about. This is where the tide changes for me
with captivity because
I am now witness to the trauma of what's become of an animal that's been
separated from its mother
because I know it. So explain to people who don't understand what that means.
Like what happens with
an animal when it imprints? Happy to. So herd animals such as walruses that are
otherwise in
groups of thousands. When their calves are born they need to imprint on the
mother. So what happens
is everything about them, every attribution whether it be their smell, what
they look like, the sound of
their voice, everything tattoos on that animal's brain so that baby is able to
identify that mother within
thousands. It's a scientific process that happens at birth. When Smushi came to
us at two years of age
we were doing a a procedure on another walrus and it caused her you know she
was in a heightened state
of emotion and whatnot. She was going she was climbing all the other trainers.
She was being a
problem so I I sought to pull her away from that situation. All I did was put
my hands in front of
her face and she opened her nostrils big and I knew in that moment something
had happened because now
she was following me everywhere and I couldn't have attributed that to anything
that I'd ever done in
all of my experience. So just the act of getting close to her and putting your
hands on her face? I believe it was during that traumatic
whatever happened her brain circuitry opened. And she realized that you're the
one who takes care
of her. I became her mom and so days go by and you know I'm going back there
and she's barking for
me and I opened the gate she's following me and you know she wasn't healthy
when we got her so now I was
spending my eight hour to 12 hour shifts actually just sleeping and Smushi's
laying on you see the
footage in the documentary she's just laying beside me she would only eat from
me it became this crazy thing
and that's what became I mean and that's when that's when the that's when the
world started to change
for me I don't have children Joe I don't I never did that I mean frankly it's
not an opportunity that would
have been allotted to a person like me trying to fight multi-million dollar
lawsuits and everything
else I had to put a lot of things on hold in life generally my life is on hold
in a lot of freaking
ways because of of of what Marineland has done I mean you see they're sending
the police to my house all
the time I mean over tweets and shit like what and they send the police to your
house over tweets like
what what do the police say when they show up well these days they look they
leave with
marine land stickers they kind of love getting that call but I don't think they
want to be there they
don't really want to be there but but why do they have to show up like what are
the tweets what are you
saying because twitter will ban you if you threaten people I so you're not
threatening anybody the tweet
that I sent that sent well one of them was life is short steal a walrus and
they sent the police to
my house because I had tweeted life is short steal a walrus I tweeted it I took
a shower I came back out
I saw the tweeted explode I said oh that's that's gonna get some attention and
the next day the cops pull
up I said you gotta be kidding me so I light up the camera the video of course
you got the video in the
film it's at the very end of the film you see it but here's what's become on
June 1st a former
employee of marine land who had been fired inexplicably she she herself couldn't
quite
understand although we sort of figured it out over some time she came to me and
she said she
had things to tell me about smooshy and the one thing she said that struck me
she said she was
pregnant I said that's an impossibility 17 year old walrus is a it would be
really grossly
irresponsible to allow for that to happen too what's their lifespan well in a
while they may go 30 35
years at marine land they don't last eight to ten smooshy is the last one alive
but what marine land
did is they negotiated a deal to have her transferred out on my birthday this
sounds crazy but I have the
documentation I maybe shouldn't admit that but I do they had plans to ship her
out on march 21 my birthday
it failed it failed because of covid they tried two days later I got a tweet
from the cfi from
an anonymous tweet from someone saying your friends at the cfia stopped an
export to germany to a
facility I believe and I don't want to absolutely attribute it to it but I
believe it's the tier park
zoo in hamburg germany they you know I've done some research they breed walruses
they know how to do it
this girl says to me I think like they were treating smooshy like she's
pregnant it's an impossibility
there wasn't a male walrus alive in the in the gestation period of a wall of a
walrus pregnancy in
fact the math is such that the last male died at the same time as you would
otherwise be getting smooshy
pregnant at marine at marine land now I worked there 12 years and at the time
we had like a lot of walruses
they never successfully were successfully bred in fact walrus breeding is a
very difficult thing in
captivity you need a range of very specific things you need a certain uv
lighting you need some fresh air
you need a number of things it's it's a it's a rare thing and it's quite
celebrated when it happens in
captivity I didn't believe her I wouldn't believe her but she kept telling me
of things that these
that she kept telling me that there were veterinaries from germany that were
there and that
they were manipulating her and it happened over some time and they were
monitoring her
now when I put two and two together okay we've got an export to to germany that's
supposed to
happen in march canceled on account of covet we've got uh we've got a girl
telling me now that there's
german veterinarians that are manipulating smooshy I tweeted I have something
to the effect I'm
paraphrasing but something to the effect of you know I have a good I have a
good reason to believe that
smooshy's been uh inseminated like she's been made pregnant and uh June 3rd
marine land tweeted that
smooshy had given birth to a calf there's not been a picture of smooshy since
over a year ago on account
of covid smooshy was never taken out the the park operated but you know
obviously there was not a lot
of numbers but they because of the rules of bill s203 which we had passed in
Canada which bans the
the captive of uh of whales dolphins and porpoises it also uh limits their
performance they they're not
actually allowed to perform for entertainment no more uh much of the
advertising is not allowed and whatnot
so when I read marine lens press release of what they you know of smooshy's
calf's birth which I
aptly named June which was the the month she was born and is also the name of
the uh marine lands
veterinarian um they said they were monitoring smooshy carefully and that you
know these this that giving
birth is a risky thing we've not seen a picture of her since there's not been
an iota of an update in
fact I started to at one point I tweeted it's time for me to accept that smooshy's
probably dead it had
been months and whereas marine land used to respond to my tweets with an update
of smooshy there was
nothing there was nothing now I knew that there was efforts to have her shipped
out and whatnot
so what happened was social media started getting flooded marine land social
media people started
saying where the fuck is smooshy not only supporters of mine people that
support marine land marine lands
response and this is a this was a national article in all of Canada they
completely ignored everything
all media requests my lawyers requests we just want to know where smooshy is we
want to know if she's
still alive they blocked everybody they're blocking fans they're blocking
everybody people started to
call marine lands lawyer marine lands lawyer who has attributed himself as
marine land spokesperson in
public was a pallbearer at john holer's death was now telling people if you
want answers about marine
land call marine land he is marine land he's the one that does the answers
where the fuck is smooshy
that's where i'm at today i don't know with absolute certainty that she's alive
but i should mention
that i have been told by a lot of people that she is i have reason to believe
that she is i don't
absolutely know like how does someone know that who is someone who works there
so because the people
that work there so so what i should mention is that girl who had told me this
information that got
fired inexplicably it turned out because she was like a junior trainer she was
inadvertently in a meeting
where they had gone over the details of the german vets coming in and whatnot
and one of the trainers
were actually trying to stop marine lands lawyer from revealing too much
because that girl shouldn't
have been there and a week later she was fired she doesn't understand what the
hell happened i don't
know that that's exactly the story because this is what she says to me now you
imagine former employees
come to me with stories and i typically tell people if you're a former employee
you know you're not
really good to me anymore i mean if you didn't have if you didn't have the gumption
to do something
while you're an employee don't come to me now because i don't know that you
haven't been fired
because you're a dickhead i don't know your backstory i don't know that i'm
able to trust your information
but hers came and i did do the tweet and it it wound up being absolutely uh
absolutely true
catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch
back catalog jre videos
on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio
experience on spoti