First of all, if you have not seen the documentary Sharkwater, I highly recommend it. It will open your eyes to the incredible tragedy that is befalling one of the oldest species on the planet; sharks.
When you think of a shark, what is the first image that comes to your mind? Well, thanks to movies like Jaws, it may be of a creature that kills without remorse, stalking the seas for its next prey. While sharks are an incredible predator, they are not the immense threat to humanity that so many people seem to believe.
Our fear of sharks, and the desire for a delicacy called shark fin soup is destroying this amazing class of fish. Each year, 100,000,000 sharks are killed by hunters and fishermen. We kill them because we fear they may attack us and we kill them because we believe that their power can be transferred through us by eating their fins. This is an incredible tragedy. We try and save the seals, the pandas and all the other big cuddly animals on the planet. We ban whaling and severely limit what fishermen can do to protect species.Yet, with sharks, we seem to have no regard for them and we allow the slaughter to continue.
Each year, five people are killed by sharks. In fact, pop machines kill more people than sharks. Do we ban pop machines? No, but we kill the sharks. Even those people who are killed by sharks are killed accidentally. A shark does not want to eat us. We are bony, disgusting to taste and we have very little blubber. When they bite us, it is to test what we are. Sadly, our bodies are so frail that we usually die from that one bite.
This is why it is important to sign online petitions through websites like Care2.com that seek to ban shark finning. This species may be something we fear, not cherish like dolphins, but it is still important that we protect the greatest predator of all from the only other predator that can kill it; man.
You would not go into
the forest and start hassling bears, and you would not run past a pride
of lions, yet we think nothing of diving into the ocean where the
sharks reside. Then we get mad at the sharks when it does what it has
evolved to do.
Sharks
have survived for 400,000,000 years (400 million years). They are older
than dinosaurs, mammals, birds, reptiles and nearly every plant
species. Yet, this century we could see them completely wiped out.
