Sea Shepherd Australia and the Greens publicity stunt creates mass hysteria in Western Australia

In Western Australia, seven fatal shark attacks in three years have given many beach lovers and surfers serious concerns about entering the water. Attendances at popular beaches, such as Cotteloe, have dropped by as much as two thirds, according to some estimates.

The key players

Jeff Hansen, Managing Director, Sea Shepherd Australia, part of the militant international group that has been described as an eco-terrorist organisation.

Sea Shepherd founder, Paul Watson, believes that humans should be culled, not sharks. “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to to fewer than one billion … Cutting a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biospehere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach”

One of the key protest organisers, Ross Weir, has vowed to “do whatever it takes” to stop the cull.

Professional protester, Simon Peterffy. On 7 May 2012,Peterffy was convicted of criminal damage and received a six-month suspended jail sentence following a protest stunt at the offices of Western Australia’s Forest Products Commission. He has paid tens of thousands of dollars in fines over the years as a result of his protest stunts.

Adrian Thomas used  a hammer to smash several windows at Premier Colin Barnett’s Cottesloe office and spray painted  the word “egomaniac” on  the front of the building

But today the lack of swimmers is extraordinary. A cheerful, hardy few are still out there but remain very close to shore.

In November 2000, swimmer Ken Crew was attacked at North Cottesloe. Ken’s friends were heroic: they got him to shore, but he died on the beach, leaving the tight-knit community stunned and devastated. Another swimmer, Bryn Martin, lost his life at Cottesloe in October 2011. Bryn’s body was never recovered, but the evidence was that he was taken by a great white shark.

The  shark attacks have had a huge impact on the local community. People on the beach talk about sharks, people in shops talk about sharks, patients and staff at the doctor’s surgery talk about sharks.

Shark sightings and beach closures are a daily prospect for WA surf lifesavers.

In response to the fatal attacks  and rising public concern, the WA government decided to follow Queensland’s example and  set up baited drum lines and kill orders for sharks of more than 3m in length off Perth and the state’s southwest beaches to cull predators near the shore.

Sea Shepherd Australia and its cohorts in the Greens Party saw an opportunity to cause mischief and raise their profile (and membership funds).

They used their extensive network of Greens activists, conservation groups and professional protesters to orchestrate  a large demonstration at Cottesloe beach.

The gullible, well-meaning people taking part in these protests would do well to read a little of the history of Sea Shepherd and its founder, Paul Watson to better understand the nature of the organisation that manipulates them for their own nefarious agenda. See Sea Shepherd’s violent history.

The usual suspects stirred up the crowd. The media loved it. The more gullible people became emotional, and death threats were made following the protest meeting.

One loony went so far as to violently attack Premier Barnett’s Cottesloe office. In the rampage he smashed windows with a hammer in front of terrified staff and spray-painted the word “egomaniac” on the building.

The  media lapped up all the protest activity. Radio station 6PR is owned by the notoriously leftist Fairfax group.  Its lefty, bleeding-heart morning host, Gary Adshead stepped over the line to become  a vocal advocate for the activists.

All of the hype, threats and media coverage contributed to the creation of an amazing group think on sharks. People began mindlessly parroting phrases such as, “the ocean is the shark’s domain”, “mass slaughter” and “culling the species”, and  “great whites have rights”.

For just over half a century Queensland fishermen have been carrying out the very practices now driving the WA protest movement.

More than 350 yellow buoys sit about 400m off 85 of the State’s most popular beaches and are connected to baited drum lines which, with shark nets, have caught between 500 and 700 sharks a year since 1962.

While the introduction of drum lines in WA has been the subject of death threats, vandalism and fierce debate, they are “part of the furniture” in Queensland, according to the State’s deputy director-general of Fisheries and Forestry, Scott Spencer.

“You can stand on most south-eastern Queensland beaches and see the buoys. People know what they are and move on,” he said.

“We don’t get a lot of people raising the issue. It’s apparently working and it’s been such a long-lived program.”

The drum lines and nets give peace of mind to locals and tourists.

 Anti-cull campaigner and professional protester, Simon Peterffy, who has formed a “marine response unit”, pledged: “We’ll be stopping the hunt, we will be neutralising these drums and we’ll be doing rescues of dolphins and other by-catch.”

As the drum lines were rolled out the activists and their followers bombarded talk-back radio and letters to the editor columns, the media went into meltdown. Media boats shadowed fishing boats attending the drum lines, filming their every move. Helicopters hovered overhead, sending video back to their newsrooms.

If the hysteria and saturation media coverage doesn’t soon end, there will be serious consequences for the Western Australian tourism industry.

The public lunacy needs to put into some perspective.

This is the fearsome monster the shark huggers revere. It can grow to 6 metres in length  and weigh up to 2,000 Kgs. It defies logic that anyone could consider the life of this monster more valuable than a human life.

 When the activists and their gullible followers talk about “mass slaughter” and “species cull” they should bear in mind there are thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of white pointers and tiger sharks roaming the vast 73 million square kilometres of Indian Ocean.

There will most likely be more white pointers and tiger sharks born in any one day than will be culled in a year from the drum lines set along a very small edge of the Indian Ocean. At about 70 kilometres long and one kilometre wide, the drum line-protected area represents about one millionth of the Indian Ocean area.

 According to a report from the Fishing Research and Development Corporation, Australians last year consumed 6,000 tonnes of shark.

Not one word of protest.

Most of the 6,000 tonnes of sharks killed for consumption were harmless gummy sharks, whiskery sharks and similar species. The activists seem to have no problem with the killing of thousands of harmless sharks, but when they reserve a special affection for dangerous predator sharks you know it is a publicity-seeking stunt.

 

“I say I have more chance of being hit by a bus than eaten by a shark”

The comments (below) by the person calling himself (or herself) Southpaw is very revealing of the mindset of the Leftist/Greens/socialists/ Marxists who take part in these demonstrations of mass hysteria.

Southpaw is bursting with self-righteous indignation that there are people who don’t subscribe to his distorted, left-wing view of the world. But because he (she) operates on emotions rather than clear-headed logic, Southpaw has to resort to foul-mouthed abuse to attack the non-believers.

Just look at some of the propganda terms Southpaw is mindlessly parroting: “apex preadtor”; “right wing exploitive anthropocentric”.  And to complete the picture, Southpaw is a global warming believer.

See also, Wasting breath on the shrieking left.

Editor