Photo: The Daily Examiner
The Moerman family’s routine trip to a popular beach in New South Wales (NSW) ended in sheer horror and tragedy yesterday, when they found a female bull shark gasping for air after it had torturously been finned. Without its distinguishing features, the Moermans first thought it was a log. When they discovered that it was, in fact, a mutilated shark, they assumed it was dead. However, after seeing its eyes and gills moving, they realized the shark was still alive and suffering from something horrible. Knowing that the only thing that could be done for this victim of the shark fin trade was to humanely end its suffering, they desperately tried to get help from authorities. The nearly ten foot (2.98 meter) beauty’s dorsal, tail, and pectoral fins had been sliced off, and her stomach had been cut open, presumably to fin any babies she may have been carrying. Moerman first called the Coast Guard, as they had a station nearby, but there was nothing they could do. After attempting to reach a ranger and being funneled through several unanswered phone circuits, the woman finally called the police. “I was informed that it was too far and that I should take a large rock to the beach and drop it on its head,” she said. “How barbaric!” After an entire hour had passed, their efforts to get help turned out to be fruitless. In utter dismay, her husband decided that something simply had to be done. He was able to end the shark’s suffering with one heavy strike to the head from a sledgehammer. Fisheries officers later inspected the carcass and estimated the animal to be about 20 years old. It always strikes me how afraid most people tend to be of sharks, even without any proper justification. The fact that about 75-100 million sharks are slaughtered annually by man, mainly because of their fins, shows that sharks should fear us instead of the other way around. Even the magnificent whale shark, a completely harmless filter feeder, is speeding towards extinction because he poses an easy target to greedy or sometimes poverty-driven fishermen. And I truly get sick and tired of people like Vic Hislop (if you are really looking for a genuine nutjob, google the internet for this guy) who still portray sharks as maneating monsters instead of the truly magnificent creatures and vital apex predators they really are.
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