I swore I wouldn’t go to SeaWorld during my San Diego visit.

The amusement value of watching a trainer ‘ride’ a dolphin is non-existent for any educated person and ditto to seeing ethereal beluga whales in a pool barely bigger than a swimming bath.

SeaWorld has also become synonymous with Tilikum (stage name “Shamu”), the killer whale who drowned two trainers and is suspected killing an intruder after hours. He still performs at SeaWorld in Florida.

But then my host produced free tickets, which she’d gone to some lengths to obtain: the kids jumped up and down in excitement and it would have been rude to refuse.

Even so, Tilikum was very much on my mind as we made our way to Mission Bay in West San Diego.

Having just done Disney, we were a little theme-park weary, but the entrance to SeaWorld had a visually arresting wave sculpture that leads to the sparklingly new Explorer’s Reef, a series of shallow pools filled with the kind of sea creatures that don’t mind being handled too much.

We stroked brown-banded and white-spotted bamboo sharks and let some of the 4,000 cleaner fish nibble our cuticles.

To get our bearings, our next stop was the SkyTower, a revolving doughnut that circles its way up a 120-metre column for a bird’s eye view of the park.

Up there, I caught an unsettling glimpse of the orcas, roaming their stadium pool.

From the air, the confines of this living space for creatures that can weigh well over 5,000kg were starkly clear, especially as we could see the open ocean just a few metres away.

What a heart-breaking contrast.

Our hosts were keen to show us their favourite show, Pet’s Rule. Alongside human cheerleaders, various rescue dogs and cats performed balancing tricks, appeared out of barrels on cue and splashed the first few rows of spectators with water.

It was a harmless enough display of domestic animals having fun and the children were entertained despite the broiling midday sun in the exposed Pets’ Stadium.

The dolphin show was another matter. While the trainers faked smiles and clapped their hands in the air, these intelligent animals were reduced to leaping out of the water for fish rewards as thousands of visitors brayed with glee.

There were high-quality aquariums with decent interpretation, moving walkways to manage the visitors and great views of the fish and animals

The finale was a trainer straddling two dolphins with nooses round their noses.

It felt like a show from another century, one sending out dangerously poor messages about how humans should interact with wild animals and it held all the appeal of watching an idiot stick his head in a lion’s mouth.

To recover, we entered the weird world of the Sesame Street Bay of Play.

Quite what this has to do with SeaWorld is anyone’s guess, but they’ve done their best to incorporate an oceanic theme into the rides, so Elmo appears as a flying fish, Oscar is an eel and Abbey mans the Sea Star Spin.

The kids couldn’t have cared less whether it made any sense, they loved all of them and when Elmo and Oscar appeared on stage for a meet and greet, my youngest nearly swooned with joy.

My five-year-old son was less impressed that the pirate ship and most of the climbing area were closed.

What he did love was the Wild Arctic, an innovative exhibit that flies you via a rocking simulator over the frozen tundra to the base camp of a group of Arctic scientists.

On your exit, the corridors are packed with authentic-looking crates of equipment and the walls are made of ice, with little tunnels and caves to hide in.

As long as you close your eyes past the beleaguered belugas in their tiny pool, it’s a great experience.

SeaWorld was also at its best in the Turtle Reef, Shark Encounter and Freshwater exhibits.

These are high-quality aquariums with decent interpretation, moving walkways to manage the visitors and great views of the fish and animals.

And, in a promising move away from using cetaceans as entertainment, the performers were human at the Cirque de la Mer.

Acrobats dressed in fantastic metallic fabrics shimmied up free-standing poles to hang upside down way above our heads while a member of the audience was ritually humiliated by being trapped in a floating Zorb (an enormous inflatable ball) and harried by a man on a jet ski dressed rather like Caesar Flickerman from The Hunger Games.

After a quick spin on the high-octane rides (the highlights were the Journey to Atlantis log flume, the Manta roller coaster and the Shipwreck Rapids), we wrapped up with the Madagascar Theatre Show.

A rock band serenaded the group of peppy dancers can-canning with a huge hippo, a parade of penguins and a Lemur King.

Sitting in the front row, the children were slack-jawed with astonishment.

Our verdict? SeaWorld should have been a great experience: it was bright and shiny; it wasn’t overcrowded; even the food wasn’t bad, by theme park standards.

But they are still running shameful dolphin and orca shows. Keeping these social, highly evolved animals in small tanks for our entertainment is inhumane and it’s wrong. There’s no other way to put it.

According to Blackfish, the hard-hitting documentary on SeaWorld, Tilikum was taken from his mother as a young whale in a hunt that left three other whales dead.

The mature females he was placed with bullied him mercilessly. He spent years swimming in circles with his dorsal fin flopped over (a sign of stress and poor condition), pleasing his trainers over and over again until he was goaded into killing one and then returned to performing to kill again.

Under those circumstances, it’s impossible to recommend SeaWorld.

But once they ban those shows (and surely, it must only be a matter of time), I might even consider paying to go back.