Australia: Come for the Sharks, Stay for Dinner

I love newspapers, the tiny little snippets of news they give to fill out the commercials frequently fill me with joy. Just the other day I read about an heroic surf boarder who punched a shark and then rode a wave to safety. What a guy! Very impressive of course but I would have been happier if it had been the other way round. Imagine how cool it would have been if he had punched a wave and then rode a twenty four foot, fin bedecked killing machine to safety. The shark would have come to a stop on the sand with a screech and he could have jumped off looking all cool and chiseled. His mates would have been impressed and his mates younger sister who has had a crush on him since she was twelve would have thrown herself at his feet. Opportunity missed son.

We in Australia have a strange relationship with sharks. We love the fact that our sharks are some of the most go to predators in the world but then we get all worked up when the occasional one predates on us. We can't get through a Summer without having the "Should we kill every shark in the world just to be on the safe side" debate. Sharks kill fewer people each year than a good Saturday night at the pub but the debate continues nevertheless. Personally I think we are under utilizing our shark resources. Humans love dangerous, risky activities while at the same time being terrified of quite ordinary things. A sixteen year old girl sails solo round the world and she's a hero but if a ten year old plays in the park alone Social Services will be visiting her parents.

Back to sharks; we need to market them. We need to promote Australia as a shark friendly environment. At the present moment we have whacking great nets that fence off a number of beaches during the Summer months. The intention is to keep sharks on the other side so people can swim in safety. What they actually do is kill marine life (except for seahorses which like them, something else I learned in the paper). My proposition is this; remove the nets from all beaches and then market swimming at them as an adrenaline sport. We can charge thrill seekers simply for dipping a toe in the water on the offchance that a hungry sea denizen will bite it off.

Australia has always been a little short of impressive killer animals. Yes we do have some of the deadliest animals in the world but they're not the right type. Kenya has lions, we have funnel web spiders. In Kenya the presence of lions has led to safari parks, high end tourist traffic and Big Cat Diaries. The presence of funnel webs has led to nothing more than a slight increase in sales of pesticide. Funnel webs are about as deadly as small animals get but nobody is going to pay thousand of dollars to be driven around the bush in a land rover looking for one. Especially when you can find them in your bed free after heavy rain. We have snakes too of course, again some of the deadliest in the world but lets face it, nobody goes to see a snake unless its around the neck of a stripper and those usually aren't the deadly ones.

What we do have is sharks. The extreme swimming idea is just the beginning. People pay to go whale watching, that is they shell out good money to go and watch gargantuan lumps of blubber wallow about the ocean. Surely people would pay more to go shark watching, particularly if there was a danger of being eaten. For starters sharks are more interactive than whales. People can swim up to and on occasion climb on top of whales. Try that with a shark. Even if the swimmer himself isn't pleased with the result I'll bet it will be must see viewing for everybody else on the tourist boat. Then of course we can have the shark activists who will be complaining about the cruel exploitation of these misunderstood Samaritans of the deep and will try to ram fishing vessels that catch them. At this point I can hear Japanese fishermen banging their heads and wondering if they can ever win a trick but the sacrifice (by them not us) will be worth it. Shark activists will publicise sharks and bring people flocking to see them, play with them, feed them and occasionally die horribly in close proximity to them. If the shark activists really get bent out of shape we can point out that being exploited by humans is how other animals survive. Despite all the beef eating the cow isn't exactly an endangered species.

Hopefully after a few years of this policy the nations coffers will be full once again and sharks will have heard the news and come flocking if not to our shores then at least to our just offshores. Come on sharks, you know it makes sense. Crocodiles have been carrying the burden for far too long.