Desmond Bellamy, PETA Australia
We were all horrified to see two people being rushed to hospital after shark attacks in the Whitsundays last week. But the response of the government has been a panicked, knee-jerk reaction – five sharks have been killed in the space of a week, with no evidence that any human has been made safer.
Sharks have inhabited the oceans for 34 million years, earning their right to live in their natural habitat without being hunted and killed. Last year, there were only five fatal shark attacks recorded globally, despite billions of people entering the oceans.
In Australia, an average of 280 people drown every year in our waterways, yet this receives far less paternalistic attention from the authorities.
Humans pose a far greater threat to sharks than they ever will to us. Every year, humans pull roughly 100 million sharks from the water, slice off their fins to make soup, and throw their mutilated bodies back into the sea to bleed slowly to death. Yet we are afraid of them?
Polls have consistently shown that an overwhelming number of Australians oppose culling of sharks. In almost every case of a shark attack, people are back in the water, often before the beaches are officially reopened, well aware that the sharks in the water present an infinitesimally smaller risk than that posed by driving their cars to the beach.
The old 100 million sharks myth lives on lol..
I agree with you Desmond to the extent that the killing of sharks was more about public perceptions that something needed to be done than protecting people. Catching sharks only for their fins also seems a waste and is cruel if the shark is not killed . However that sharks have lived in the natural sea environment for however many million years does not entitle them to protection from predators, including humans. Nature does not work on entitlement. Humans evolved as omnivores and have been hunting wild animals in the natural environment, including in the littoral of our seas. The littoral is part of our natural environment too.
We should however follow Crocodile Dundee’s advice and make sure we eat everything we kill , except of course for the anopheles mosquito about to bite us or any other animal that is an immediate and unavoidable threat to our safety .