Jonathan Kieran

I knew that the indescribably tragic death of the 15 year-old South Australian surfer, Khai, after being attacked by a Great White Shark was going to result in rumblings and reactionary talk of culling the animals. Hint: READ THE COMMENTS beneath this article and remarks made within the piece itself about how the situation is only going to get worse for surfers in South Australia. That’s what I projected in yesterday’s post. It is not only a fact, it is present reality.

With all due sadness for the lost young fellow and his grieving family, I can’t get on the same page with those who think we should just start killing crucial apex predators so that human beings can engage in unnecessary recreational activities. Humans do not eat Great White Sharks as a food product, just as they do not, generally, hunt and eat lions and leopards and panthers and grizzly bears for sustenance. If shark populations are becoming healthy again around the world, that means that their existence has become sustainable in their own environments once again, which is vastly more important for the health of our oceans than the pleasure experienced by a creature out of its habitat (i.e. human being) when catching a wave.

I say this as a former surfer.

By adhering to the same kind of emotional thinking that others begin to espouse when such tragedies occur, we might as well eliminate all grizzlies, lions, panthers, and other animals from our forests so that we can all take delightful hikes in the woodlands for our pleasure, spreading litter and starting fires as we go. That’s such a typical human answer to the realities of the world: kill or destroy whatever makes our unnecessary recreational activities inconvenient. Now that killer whales are taking a liking to the sinking of pleasure craft in some parts of the world, should we start culling orcas in order to protect the all-holy yacht?

Human arrogance and impunity are partly what got us into an ongoing ecological nightmare to begin with, which in turn gave birth to fanatical reactions on the other side of the spectrum—“activist” reactions that strain credulity (and ethics) just as ridiculously. I don’t want to listen to those people yammer on about the need to protect cockroaches and Murder Hornets and their supposed “rights,” believe me.

Great White Sharks—and all sharks—play an indispensable role in the health of our oceanic environments. Period. Swimmers and divers and surfers and joyride boaters do not. We are foreign to the element of water. We are guests, at best, and awkward ones at that. Even if we had gills and elongated flippers and could spend days flitting beneath the waves, we would still be prey for hungrier, bigger, faster creatures native to the habitat. Them’s the breaks.

It’s beyond harrowing to countenance the loss of a child or any other human being to a dangerous predator doing what it does in its own environment, but the answer is simple: find another sport or risk it, biscuit.

—————

[ Delightful new work by Jonathan Kieran is slated for major release in 2024 so brace yourselves and think of England. This stuff is built for speed. Stay tuned for more … ]

#GreatWhiteSharks #SharkAttack #Surfing #Khai #Culling #Perspective #SouthAustralia #Environment #AuthorJonathanKieran #JonathanKieran #WriterJonathanKieran #CaliforniaLife #OnTheEdge #NewNovel #JonathanKieranTheAuthor #JonathanKieranMusic #JonathanKieranArtist #Jericho #JonathanKieranJericho #JerichoAlbum #WritersOfInstagram #ArtistsOfInstagram #AuthorsOfInstagram #PopCulture #RandomCommentary #SatiricalAttitudes