Drailed wrote:Its not life and death though, its a chosen hobby, a past time, sport. Put nets in, have a cull - I honestly don't give a fcuck but lets be honest about it, its just to save people who want to play in the water regardless of how seriously they take it.
you know my stance on the debate. live and let live. we go to them, they're not knocking on our front door and swimming through our windows and then eating us etc ... but, there is a pretty far reaching side effect from the attacks as far as businesses go around that area. many are going slowly broke.
sure, you could make the argument if you've built your life around the fickleness of the ocean you just gotta deal with it and all that. but, imo we should have more empathy than that. watching people go under with their businesses just doesn't sit comfortably with me. so if something needs to be done, then what?
it's a conflicting time, because i (and many others, who're much smarter than me) can't see how culling a few sharks would even fix the problem. nature has a way of not letting that concern it. like in magpie season, it's the male magpie which swoops people, protecting the female and the chicks. if that male gets killed, the female immediately calls another male to protect. you can kill 5 magpies each day and on the 6th day there'll be a new magpie waiting for you. rinse and repeat until the chicks are old enough to leave the nest. so culling a few big sharks, there's no reason to think they won't be just replaced. culling juveniles that aren't a threat to humans could have a devastating effect on their numbers, and there's papers out there suggesting that could in effect wipe the species out within 35 years.
so are we going to keep culling & wipe out a whole species until attacks cease? what's the actual plan for culling? the plan is, there is no plan. and there are lots of people in that area who have a problem with that particular non-plan.
the twits on facebook and surf sites calling for drumlines ... the white shark problem on the east coast is almost identical to the one on the west coast ... yet in the 8 month trial of drumlines over there, they accounted for exactly zero whites. they were all tigers caught. so there's no reason to think drumlines will work in ballina. and a big baited hook catching bulls and tigers while they slowly bleed out, there's a theory that will bring even more whites to the area, because whites love eating other injured sharks.
so that leaves nets.
nets are a mess. i've worked on them, i've protested against them and spent a year donating my time (ok, it was community service to pay 4 traffic fines, lol) to surfriders formally rallying the council against them. the amount of marine life caught in them all based on a theory that it "may" disrupt sharks swimming patterns seems like a big call to make.
i still paddle out semi regularly to the ones out near me and see all kinds of turtles, rays, big fish and the occasional dolphin in them. so i can see why people in the byron area are willing to cut them down as soon as they're up.
so ... like i said, the people directly effected – and i mean the ones suffering financially from business loss – should carry the most weight in this argument. talking heads not living in the area (like myself right now. haha) need to just step back and have faith that whatever is done, will be something meaningful and successful.
