Scubaroo once bubbled...
Because I know who took the photo? It was a 3 day liveaboard DIVE boat out of Cairns, and the boatcrew chummed the sharks using fish pieces for divers who were in the water, and they brought this one on board for a closer look.
Hardly an environmentally sound practice.
Okay, agreed. Sorry... Just checkin' the reference. You know how things can get misconstrued on the 'net.
Yeah, that's not cool.
Last I looked, annually, there's about 7 people attacked every year by sharks (with an even rarer fatality). Yet millions of sharks are killed by humans annually; many of which are caught, definned, and then released, only to be dined opon (to death) by their peers.
Interestingly, shark attacks happen even MORE rarely to divers. Almost always, it's a surfer or a swimmer. We just don't look, smell, or act like food. Of those divers who are attacked, it's almost always a provoked attack.
Check the online shark attack files. They support this. I believe that in the past decade, there's been only a handful of divers attacked by sharks, and you could count on one hand how many were fatalities. If my memory serves, it was something like two in the past decade... Both of which were fatalities caused by bleeding and improper treatment, not from being eaten.
I've dived with sharks... When I was a volunteer diver at the SC Aquarium. I was more in danger of being bitten by the puffer fish and by the loggerhead turtle (both of which could remove either a finger or limb with ease) than by the sharks. Comparably, I was much more in danger driving my car to the Aquarium than I was in the tanks. And no, they were not "domesticated" sharks.
Yeah, I could go on and on about the cruelty... So I'm with you on this one. But I'm not shocked... I live on the water, and every day I see fishermen go out and catch fish. I believe it MUCH more cruel to catch and kill than catch, pet, and release.
Of course, all of it's hard to justify.
Perhaps if we put these people in scuba gear and showed them the glory of these beasts in their own environment... Perhaps then we could drive home the cruelty of man. Perhaps then we could make a difference.
