WEEKEND ADVENTURE

 

Thursday 6 February 2014

Blood in the water down under

 

Like many people, including thousands of Australians, I'm horrified by Western Australia's now-active catch and kill policy targeting tiger, bull and great white sharks. It was recently initiated against a tide of opposition, as a witless attempt to stop fatal shark attacks along that coastline. The crusade involves a death row of 72 drum lines; long chains tied to buoys, with huge baited hooks dropping down to the ocean floor. You can imagine the agony of a shark caught on the hook for many, many hours; before it gets hauled up to the surface to be shot in the head and dumped unceremoniously back into the sea. Smaller sharks (less than 3m long)  haplessly caught on the hooks will be released - that is, if they're still alive. Dolphins, turtles and other marine species could also fall foul of the hooks.

 

 

This female shark was one of the drum lines' first "approved" victims

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why "witless"? Because Western Australia's unilateral crime against nature isn't just killing off "their" sharks - it's killing off the sharks of South Africa, too, where great whites remain a protected species. "Their" sharks are effectively our sharks, since large shark species, especially the great white, migrate frequently back and forth across the Indian Ocean. These are the Indian Ocean's animals; the world's animals - yet W.A. thinks it has the right to cull them. What's more, killing these apex predators along with other random drum line victims will definitely destabilise the marine ecosystem. Finally, environmentalists have evidence, from as long ago as the 1950s, that killing sharks doesn't prevent attacks.

 

If you follow this idiocy to its logical conclusion: given sharks' tendency to range so far and wide, Western Australia would basically have to wipe out every large shark inhabiting the open ocean to safeguard the sunbathers of Gracetown. It's not like you can just kill off the "local" sharks and that would be that - what happens when the next great white arrives from South Africa, or Mexico, or California? These sharks don't understand "local". Nor will they, in time,"learn" to retreat from the drum lines - any shark that "learns its lesson" will already be a hooked, doomed shark.

So the only way to really be sure your coastline is "safe" from shark attacks for posterity would be to kill off all the tigers, great whites and bull sharks. Perhaps that would be Perth's ideal outcome - but it doesn't have that right.

 

Q: Why on Earth isn't the W.A. government putting more money into shark safety awareness campaigns instead;         or deploying shark monitors like Cape Town's highly-regarded Shark Spotters? Why doesn't it commission humane exclusion nets like the one installed at Cape Town's Fish Hoek?  Is it about money (the nets don't come cheap),             or is it purely vindictive - a human eye (or 7) for a piscine eye (or 700)?

 

Either way, Western Australia is now sailing into the same choppy waters of public opinion as the Japanese               with their dolphin massacres at Taji.

 

 

What you can do:

 

Support Western Australians for Shark Conservation:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Petition W.A.'s Premier Colin Barnett to end the senseless cull:                                      This guy (screenshot off The Age):

Office of the Hon Colin Barnett MLA Premier;

Minister for State Development; Science 1 Parliament Place

West Perth, Western Australia 6005 or emailing wa-government@dpc.wa.gov.au.

 

 

 

 

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