Swimming with dolphins and playing tag and fetch with them is the kind of experience that either makes your eyes get all misty/dreamy or makes you snort in derision and launch into a condemnation of tree-hugging Van Driessen types. My career as a journalist and lifelong cynic (or is that redundant?) has conditioned me to pretty regularly fall into the 2nd category. The whole “Hey ittle dudes, let’s swim with the dolphins, mmm-kay? And remember that Gaia – that’s Mother Earth in Greek, you know – is a part of us all and we’re a part of her? So show some respect and love, mmm-kay?” – ethos is one that grates with me.
I grew up out in the country and the description of “nature, red in fang and claw” rings a lot truer with me than the Disneyfied experiences offered up by shiny sanitized-for-your-protection hucksters like Sea World and their ilk (and yes, I’m looking at you Steve Wynn, because those dolphins swimming around and around and around in that barren concrete tank out back of the Mirage have that desperate look in their eyes because they know they’re in the MIDDLE OF A GODDAM DESERT!).
But on the island of Roatan, at a place called Anthony’s Key Resort, they have a program wherein the dolphins can come and go as they please. They’ve given these animals the choice. The net they’ve strung up over the entrance to the bay is there more to keep predators out than it is to keep the dolphins in, and the cetaceans can and often do just jump out over it. But they have always come back – and why not, because they get 35 lbs. of tasty fish a day and pretty young trainers pet them and make a fuss over them.
So yeah, I went into this expecting the worst from the experience, and I have to say that while it was not the same as when I went snorkeling off Kauai and ran into a wild dolphin that scarfed up the fish that we’d been feeding and then played tag with us … it was still amazing. 
The dolphins, as has been observed many other times in many other places, are basically just big swimming golden retrievers who want to play and who seem to have an amazing affinity for humanity.