A Brief Look at Shark Culling

“The Misunderstood Shark” was written by Gregory Skomal, a biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and shark fanatic. His article was published by The Wall Street Journal on August 7, 2015. The engaging title, itself grabs the reader’s attention, making the reader feel sympathetic towards the shark. Upon hearing the word, “shark”, an individual may cringe. The author makes a solid claim that our attitudes about sharks are changing, but not towards direction it needs to be. He supports his argument with strong appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos throughout the article.

This is true because you may think that sharks are everywhere in the ocean. This is not true. They are sometimes found in an unusual place, but this is because with us taking over their habitats, and polluting them where else can they go? We have all of the lands, but we also take over the ocean, home to many sea creatures. That just makes us selfish. We can’t get mad at sharks when they would be perfectly fine if we just left them and their home alone.

In Australia, sharks kill an average of three people every year. In Queensland 2017, to counter this, 667 sharks were culled to protect human’s safety on Australian beaches along with 100 accidental deaths of turtles, dolphins and dugongs. This was done with no scientific evidence to support that culling would work. All over the world 90% of shark species are threatened to become extinct with people killing 273 million sharks every year. This is why we must ban and make sure shark culling stops and never ever starts again. Shark culling is ludicrous, you have more of a chance dying from a coconut falling on you than a shark attack, coconuts actually kill 150 people every year does this mean we are going to kill all the coconuts? Here are a few arguments why shark culling must stop.

Sharks are vicious creatures and eat humans. Don’t go into the water if you see a shark nearby or they will come after you. These are a few of the many things you will hear from the television or even people you may know. Humans are not a part of the shark diet so it is highly unlikely that a shark would randomly go after a human. The media likes to make their shark stories more exciting by adding words like “aggressive” or “threatened.” There was a total of 4 deaths caused by sharks in 2014 which is a large contrast to the 11,417 sharks that are killed per hour by humans. sharks) need to be preserved and protected in order to preserve our oceans. Laws that are more strict should be implemented in order to achieve this goal.

Adapted for a wide range of aquatic habitats, various shark species inhabit shallow coastal habitats, deep-water ocean floor habitats, and the open ocean. With a wide selection to feed off of, as a whole the shark species feed on just about everything. Their diet consists of fish,

Shark culling has become the new issue for Australian media. Shark culling is not the answer for safer oceans. We would be far better allocating resources to achieving a greater understanding of ecology and behaviour of these large predators. Tagging sharks and following their movement over time will show were they are likely to attack next. The marine ecosystems needs the sharks at the top of the food web, removing the sharks you would see more lower ranked fish. The marine ecosystem will have to do some

The issue surrounding the Western Australian shark cull initiative will be the central topic of discussion in this critical essay. A rise in shark attacks in recent years has caused the Western Australian government to employ the Department Of Fisheries Western Australia to pursue a systematic and regulated cull of sharks. However the Greens – who are a political party and pressure group – are advocating for this cull to be stopped through lobbying.

In the 1960’s and 70’s Hawaii implemented a similar proposal which did more bad then good. The program failed to create any kind of significant decrease in shark attacks but managed to kill over 4000 sharks.

People visceral when they see a shark and they try to capture and kill it. Only some people want to protect sharks. Sharks help by keeping the fish population down First, we can protect sharks by doing little things such as stop finning sharks, picking up our trash. Next people destroy environments by oil spills. Not picking up trash. Last if people don’t stop finning sharks and not throwing their trash away our environment will smell bad and we will have no sharks left.

To this day, many of us still see them this way. In fact, coastal states stared to host shark culling events. In these sometime month-long events, a state government will pay any fishermen to bring in a freshly killed shark generous amounts of money. Peter Benchley, the author of "Jaws" doesn't support shark culling, he in fact helped raise awareness about sharks becoming endangered. He wrote articles about how misunderstood sharks are (Benchley, Peter). This is now illegal in the United States, but is still practiced in countries such as Japan and Australia. Even in those countries, shark culling is on its way out. But

According to sharkfinning.net, a website devoted entirely to the prevention of shark finning, the population of several different species of sharks have decimated over 95% since the 1970s.

Sharks are a fundamental aspect of Australian waters, but shark culling has rapidly decreased the numbers over the past few years. The government definitely should not adopt a policy on shark culling, as sharks are the cornerstone to the contribution of social, environmental, economic and political aspects of our nation. If governments adopt this policy on shark culling, it will undoubtedly have a deliberate impact on the food chain. Additionally, even killing small numbers of already-threatened sharks will rapidly increase extinction risks of sharks. To conclude, humans contribute to the killing of more deaths than the opposite action done from sharks.

II Over the years there has been a huge drop in the population of sharks, because of the popularity of Shark fin soup in china, and this can later on lead to the ocean ecosystem to be disrupted, if sharks are extinct.

One of the many marine life animals that gets overfished today are sharks. If sharks keep getting overfished, the entire marine food chain will become greatly affected. Humans continuously eliminate sharks, which are the leading predators of the oceans, at a such fast rate and will cause a trophic cascade. A trophic cascade is when the top predators in any system are being eliminating. Due to the fact that sharks are being killed constantly, its prey are growing rapidly in population and offsetting marine life (Irish Times). Sharks are very important within the ocean and are a big part of the ecosystem. Without them, the ecosystem would become very unbalanced which will happen if overfishing the sharks continues. Not only are sharks being overfished, but scallops and other shellfish are too. The result of this leads to water quality suffering (Irish Times). With bad water quality, it makes it harder for all types of marine life to live their day to day life at full potential health.

Governments and the public are at a critical point in terms of conservation. Many of the worlds species are at threat and without adjustments of legislation and actions this trend will continue. Sharks unfortunately are a species that are at high risk due to the actions of humans. Yet until recently they weren’t given very much attention. So now that the public is aware that something is going wrong with sharks what can they do to change it. The public could start with simple things to just become more environmentally friendly. They could recycle their plastics, try to reduce their contribution to climate change and become more educated about sharks. The next step they could take is donating to a well-recognized organization that works towards shark conservation. Perhaps the biggest thing that the public can do is to advocate to governments to make stricter regulations for the oceans. Since so much of the ocean is unregulated there is a lot of unknown activates going on that could be negatively impacting sharks. This needs to be regulated and it needs to happen soon or else there will be no sharks left in these areas. This can be done through joining advocate groups, writing letters, voting in parties that are more environmentally orated, and educating people about the effect they are having on shark populations.