"I'm just going to write because I can't help it."- Charlotte Brontë


Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Jaws-Droppingly Stupid


So over in Western Australia, the solution to humans and beasts sharing the planet is the same old same old - the onus is on the animals having to somehow (instinctively?) comprehend human society and understand that if they don't adhere to human rules, they'll be justly slaughtered.

In a program to make the beaches once more safe for the good citizens of WA, the first uppity shark was recently snagged by the drum lines and shot four times in the head. Obviously, it didn't realise that the shark mitigation plan was already underway:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/21036468/first-drum-lines-set-off-wa-coast/

Maybe it missed the warning email sent out to all monsters of the deep by the government.
Anyway, scientists, environmentalists and folk from all walks of life who think it's a little unfair to cull a species because of communication breakdowns have signed a letter of protest, but to no avail.

Less blood thirsty methods of keeping our beaches safe - signs, tagging, patrols, protected areas, education-  have been tried and tested overseas, but they would be, well, apparently far more difficult to instigate than hunting down these nasty, vicious, amoral beasties to whom food is just food, even the talking sort, and slaughtering them. A lot less fun for some people too, I suspect. Drones patrolling a beach and people having to get their butts out of the water in the spirit of inter-species harmony is far too soggy-hearted a solution.

We visit the sea. We can come and go as we please. To kill the creatures born in the sea and who cannot leave  the sea and who are acting according to instincts that have kept their kind alive for millions of years because of our own paranoid belief that it's all personal and they're out to get us, possibly annihilate us, just makes us look a little silly. Our indignation at the way sharks ignore human specialness, and the resulting indiscriminate vendettas based on the fact that these "monsters" repeatedly refuse to understand that the supposed sanctity of human flesh automatically takes us off Mother Nature's great menu, merely show us up to be the ignorant brutes in this scenario.
 

No comments: