DAVAO City Councilor Diosdado Mahipus Sr. on Tuesday contradicted an appeal made by City Councilor Danilo Dayanghirang about releasing balloons to show the city’s support for Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential candidacy, saying animals are intelligent enough not to eat balloons.
“I think dolphins and turtles just like any living creatures they always try to find out first what they eat. I think these plastic containers contain food inside and it is smelled by the marine creatures and that is the time that they started swallowing these containers. I know that marine creatures are intelligent creatures because they are created by God. They will not eat the balloons unless you put food inside,” Mahipus said as he took the podium after Dayanghirang delivered his privilege speech.
Dayanghirang first took the podium to deliver his appeal to organizers of Duterte rallies not to release balloons as show of support as these would end up in the sea and pose danger to turtles and dolphins who could ingest this.
Dr. Roberto Puentespina, a veterinarian who has been active in environment conservation agrees that marine creatures are intelligent.
"Yes they are intelligent creatures but they are stupid with regards trash ingestion," he said.
Dr. Jimely Flores, a senior marine scientist at Oceana, a non-government organization on marine resources conservation, in a text message to Sun.Star Davao Tuesday, also said that turtles and dolphins do ingest plastics and that there is already a study conducted on that.
Darrel Blatchley, owner of D’Bone Museum and is a constant volunteer on marine animal stranding, said that marine animals ingest these non-biodegradable items as they wrongly consider it as food and most of these ingested items found inside dead marine animals do not contain food or anything.
u201dSea turtles eat jellyfishes, plastic balloons may look like jellyfishes when floating in the sea. They feed on something that looks like their food, they do not have taste buds like humans, and once they feed and swallow it, they cannot puke it out anymore,” Blatchley said.
Balloons, while released up to the air will drop back after a while adding that there was even an instance when 100 balloons were released from as far as Mati but ended up a few meters from the sea near the Bone Museum.
“Ito yung balloons will go up, mahulog balik sa dagat and will kill many marine animals, everything, pawikan. So releasing balloons for Duterte, who is for the betterment of all, is an actual opposite of what we should be doing,” Blatchley said.
What Duterte supporters can do is embark on activities that benefit the environment instead, like tree planting.