Why is Premier Collin Barnett’s Western Australian government killing great white and tiger sharks again? It is a haunting question that has badgered me for a couple years.
There have been two shark incidents over the past fortnight in Western Australia, caused by people interacting with sharks along the coastline of southwestern Western Australia. Barnett’s government knee-jerk reacted by baiting drum lines to brutally ensnare and slowly kill sharks along several reaches of state coastline.
Each year globally sharks kill six people. People kill 100 million sharks.
Since 2000, shark populations globally have been decimated — 90 percent of most shark species are missing. Nine out of 10 sharks that were living in the ocean 16 years ago are gone.
Sharks perform a crucial ecological role. They keep their prey fit by culling the old, weak and sick. Sharks help prevent diseases from becoming epidemics.
Sharks are winding up in soup bowls as shark fin soup, due to poaching, rather than fulfilling the necessary role, as managing director of Sea Shepherd Australia Jeff Hansen calls them, “doctors of the sea.”
Sharks have swam the seas for 440 million years. They survived the Permian/Triassic Third Great Extinction that removed 96 percent of all sea life 252 million years ago. Today humans are driving the Sixth Great Extinction.
What Barnett does not understand is that killing sharks will not make diving or surfing safer in the Indian Ocean. The government’s program of killing sharks is impoverishing the ocean — that’s ecocide.
Western Australia has a homegrown solution. Perth residents Leanne and Craig Moss designed an EcoShark Barrier. It is made from durable nylon that bounces sharks and other sea creatures off the flexible barriers. EcoShark Barrier protects people from sharks and sharks from people since 2013 at Coogee Beach, Western Australia.
Anyone who believes that gentrifying nature is the answer to interacting with nature is, in fact, fueling The Sixth Great Extinction.
Since 1970, 50 percent of all land wildlife on Earth is gone. North America is missing one billion birds, and a third of the remaining birds or 432 species are threatened with extinction.
The oceans are in far worse condition. Two hundred and thirty million sea birds or 70 percent of all species are gone. Most of the commercial fisheries are teetering on collapse. Bluefin tuna — the Rolls Royce of fish — are critically endangered on the edge of extinction. Extinction means forever.
If you’re into the wild, enjoy it, take pictures, but don’t kill it because there’s very little left of it. What we do to the animals, we do to ourselves.
It is time to save nature now. Please support my colleagues at Sea Shepherd because they are protecting the “doctors of the sea” — the sharks.
Earth Doctor Reese Halter is the author of “Shepherding the Sea: The Race to Save Our Oceans.”