Listening to the news at work yesterday, I was utterly dismayed and distressed over one of the stories they broadcasted. It was a reference to a man who lives around Tampa Bay who finds great sport in catching sharks. Obviously Tampa Bay has sharks in it – any water source connected to the Gulf or an Ocean is going to have sharks.
This man and his buddies would catch sharks and supposedly release them back into the water once they had their pictures taken with them. On this particular day, they caught a 9 ft bull shark on their line and spent hours toying with this beautiful creature until it was too tired to go on. They wrestled it on shore – the man said it took 6 or 8 men to get it up on the dock – so they could take their picture with it. Because the shark was “pretty much dead” when they pulled it from the water, they felt no qualms about killing it so they could mount it’s teeth in their club area.
I don’t think I’m the only one out there that finds this to be an atrocity. Sharks are graceful creatures who are not only beautiful to look at but also help keep the ecosystem in control. If you doubt me, read the chapter in Peter Benchley’s “Shark Attack” about a northern village that was over run by seals because the sharks had been killed for their fins. Ecosystems don’t recover – something we should have learned from all the other decimations we have conducted around the world.
Nature curtails the amount of sharks born each year because sharks are at the top of the food chain. Sharks are meant to keep the food chain in balance so too many would be detrimental to this cycle. Only the strong survive to adulthood. For every ten we kill, only one is born…as with everything else, we keep killing them anyway. This man in Tampa not only killed this bull shark, but it was a female and it was pregnant, so he did twice the damage. What aggravated me even more was how the reporter went on to tell us that bull sharks “hunted” man and that there had been 3 attacks on humans in Florida in the past 50 years. Sharks don’t hunt man – we go into their domain to play. The amount of people that actually get a shark bite in relation to how many people go into the water is so small that you have better chances of being struck by lightning or winning the lottery.
Then, to my utter amazement, a Mote Marine scientist was briefly interviewed and he said nothing about the atrocity that had occurred. He merely pointed out that the inland waters of Bays made good places for female sharks to have their babies.
This whole thing saddens me. Not just about the shark but also the way humans feel about nature as a commodity that is theirs to use and abuse. What will it take for people to start thinking conservation? Why hasn’t the conservation movement taken off like some of the other campaigns have? What can I do to help give the movement more momentum? Outrage is unproductive if it doesn’t make a person act.
Why do some people always see beautiful skies and grass and lovely flowers and incredible human beings, while others are hard-pressed to find anything or any place that is beautiful? –Leo Buscaglia
