Whales and dolphins in captivity exhibit welfare problems fundamentally linked to the constraints of even the best facility; the movement away from cetacean display reflects growing evidence of their cognitive and social complexity.
Cetacean captivity represents one of the clearest cases where the cognitive and social complexity of the species makes meaningful captive welfare provision structurally impossible. Orcas in the wild swim up to 160 km daily in complex family groups; the most spacious tank cannot provide meaningful engagement with these biological imperatives. The welfare costs are not failures of management but inherent to the confinement of wide-ranging, cognitively complex, socially bonded animals in fundamentally inadequate spaces.