I'm not sure it is so much the humans hiring the whales as opposed of the whales hiring the humans :D

Partly because there are animals with larger brains which we now know are not very intelligent, with no assumptions needed, and partly because some of the most intelligent non-primate animals that we know of actually have very small brains - like crows and other birds in the corvid family.

edit: I originally wrote out a long comment about exactly why your comment doesn't make sense to me, but after posting it I felt it was ridiculously long for its purpose, so if you want to waste time reading it you can find it here - https://pastebin.com/Y11P8ETs - but I think asking you to explain what you meant more clearly is enough for here :)

Not being afraid of orcas is a show of lack of respect for them. They can weight up to 10,000 pounds, swim at bursts of 35 mph, swim at slower speeds for huge stretches, launch their bodies tens of feet out of the water, and kill anything from salmon and rays to great white sharks, humpback whales, and even blue whales. There is a lot of argument that they may be the greatest predator ever, on land or sea.

A domestic cat can easily wound a human and can usually get away. That is not true of a human in the water and an orca.

Yes, orcas are extremely, extremely intelligent, and there's zero reason for them to eat us for nutrition, as they are highly tuned eaters that maximize their calorie intake per effort. However, a human is completely within an orca's decision process as to whether the human lives or not.

>> https://roaring.earth/feed-photographer/

Is them attacking luxury yachts the equivalent of my cat knocking down glasses of water?

That paragraph you quoted is pretty hyperbolic. Many orcas hunt live and dangerous animals for food. Their prey can seriously injure and even kill them. Because orcas are tight family units with several generations of females and males in the same pod who never leave the pod and because of their intelligence, orcas engage in teaching the younger orcas and each other. So this can very easily look like tortue when it's in fact how orcas train each other to work together. They will also share food readily between each other, so this is why it will also appear to be toying with food.

Yes, there is no doubt that orcas will also legimitaely play with food, but even then, it's a human judgement on a wild animal that can't go pick out meat in a box that comes from an animal raised and slaughtered in a cage.

Orcas are indeed dolphins, and also whales.

Wiktionary supports that etymology, and it is generally a high-quality source for etymology, but it's troubling that this one isn't cited.