These animals are certainly wild but I've been told that they are like ambassadors for truly wild sea creatures and I can see that logic too. They educate and people learn to appreciate them.
Maybe they shouldn't perform but I can't see turning at least mostly tamed whales out to forage for themselves either. It worked with Willy but it was difficult.
Sea World also does a great deal of good. So there's that too.
I'm trying to confirm this but there are reports that this whale is the only captive whale involved with human deaths. That is interesting if true.
Not true 24th Decemeber 2009 a trainer in Loro Parque wasa killed by a killer whale
http://oceanicdefense.blogspot.com/2010/01/killer-whale-drowns-trainer.html
Have a read of what real research has found about whales and dolphins and then explain how we have the right to do what we do at Seaworld to the second most intellegent species on the planed
http://current.com/items/91825903_scientists-say-dolphins-should-be-treated-as-non-human-persons.htm
Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.
In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.
After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.
There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.
Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.
When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.
What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.
Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.
Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.
Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.
“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.
You want us to show our "humanity" declare whales and dolphin sentient stop all hunting, and leave them in the wild where they belong not perfominng parlour tricks which only teaches us that we are some how better than them and we deserve to see this fun.
We were at Sea World in Orlando just a few weeks ago. Toward the end of the show, the trainers jumped out of the water and ran up and down the aisles shaking hands with audience members. I was sitting on the end of a bleacher with my grandson on my lap, and a female trainer stopped and high-fived him. Now I'm going to wonder... 
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