Bottlenose dolphins held in marine parks and swim-with programs face severe welfare challenges from confinement in pools that cannot meet their social, cognitive, and spatial needs.
Dolphin captivity suffers from the same fundamental problem as orca captivity: no pool can provide the space, social complexity, or behavioral opportunities that these cognitively sophisticated animals evolved for. The welfare evidence — shorter lifespans, stereotypic behaviors, stress-related disease — consistently points toward significant suffering in captive cetaceans. Swim-with-dolphin programs additionally remove the animal agency to avoid interaction, which is a core welfare concern. The sea sanctuary model developing for cetaceans offers a genuine improvement for individual animals, and consumer choice to avoid captive dolphin entertainment is the most direct action available.