10,000 signatures reached
To: The Premier of Western Australia, the Hon. Colin Barnett, and the Western Australia Minister for Fisheries, the Hon. Ken Baston
Stop culling the WA sharks!
Dear Premier and Minister,
Please do not go ahead with plans to allow shark culling in Western Australia.
It is not humane for the Western Australian government to implement shark culling as a method of reducing the risk of shark attack. When we use the ocean, we are entering a shark’s natural habitat and we should be responsible for our own safety and awareness.
The $6.85 million that the Western Australian government is investing towards shark culling plans, as part of “shark mitigation strategies”, would be better spent towards building public awareness and education, safety initiatives, scientific research into shark behavior and other ethical strategies.
As our Premier and Minister of Fisheries, you can stop the implementation of shark culling and help protect our threatened shark species and marine environment.
We can do better, culling sharks is not the answer.
Why is this important?
Experts do not agree that plans to cull sharks will reduce shark attacks. “[W]ill culling sharks actually reduce the risk of an attack? The answer is no.…Pre-emptively killing sharks is a response based on emotion rather than of scientific data”, wrote Ryan Kempster, Shark biologist at University of Western Australia, and Shaun Collin, Winthrop Professor at the School of Animal Biology and the Oceans Institute at University of Western Australia1.
The Department of the Environment lists nine shark species inhabiting Australian waters as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable and culling plans would not only drastically affect their populations but the surrounding marine ecosystems.
In Western Australia, the White Shark (or the Great White Shark) is listed as “rare or likely to become extinct”2 and in 2002, the Australian Government came up with a Recovery Plan to promote the conservation of this species. But now the White Shark it is at great risk because the Western Australian Department of Fisheries has listed the white shark as the main cause of fatal shark attacks WA.
Please sign the petition and tell the WA government that to stop plan to cull sharks.
Sources:
1 Ryan Kempster and Shaun Collin, “How to prevent shark attacks”, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/how-to-prevent-shark-attacks-20890, 29/11/13
2 The Australian Government Department of Environment, “Carcharodoncarcharias — Great White Shark”, Biodiversity
Species Profile and Threats Database http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=64470, 16/07/13
3 The Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Recovery plan for the White Shark, http://www.environment.gov.au/resource/recovery-plan-white-shark-carcharodon-carcharias, 2013
