While Johnny Knoxville is spending his post-Jackass years trying to make a sitcom about his life, another former Jackass star is using his penchant for stupidity to raise awareness about how much he hates SeaWorld. At least that’s the story Steve-O gave when he was arrested recently after climbing up a crane in Hollywood, dropping a killer whale balloon that had “SeaWorld Sucks” painted on it, and then setting off fireworks. It does seem hard to misinterpret his message there.
Unfortunately, like most things Steve-O has done in his life, this stunt wasn’t cleared through any proper channels, so Los Angeles’ emergency services didn’t know if he was a former Jackass star protesting animal cruelty or just some other guy with a tattoo of his own face who had somehow gotten stuck at the top of a 100-foot crane and needed to be rescued. Because of that, five ambulances, a helicopter, and over 80 firefighters had to be sent to the scene to try and rescue him.
After the authorities got Steve-O down—and charged him with a bunch of stuff—he admitted that his stunt was a response to Blackfish, the 2013 documentary that exposed the horrible things that SeaWorld does to its orcas. We don’t want to tell Steve-O how to do his job (which involves climbing stuff he’s not supposed to climb), but it would be a lot easier—and less illegal—to protest SeaWorld the same way we all did after we saw Blackfish: by telling people on Twitter that they have to go watch Blackfish. Seriously, it’s on Netflix, and it’s fucked up.
If you’d like to learn more about Steve-O’s wacky adventure, he posted a bunch of videos on his Facebook page (and there’s the Instagram shot below), or you could just wait for Blackfish 2. We imagine it’ll cover this if it ever gets made.