By Walter Bernadis, the Shark Whisperer and owner of African Watersports.
Photo by Bernard Cole
Who knows what the trigger will be? The Dodo has come and gone. Hundreds of species have suffered a similar fate and where doomed to extinction and yet we are still here. What is all the fuss about, so what if all the Rhino are killed, lions, tigers all gone? We will still exist! Will we?
The people on Easter Island thought the same way. They would go on forever. They had technology so advanced that that they could move statues of gigantic size, great distances and yet they disappeared. They didn’t realise when they cut down that last tree that that was their civilizations trigger. No tree, no wood, no wood, not boat, no boat, no food … end of story!
A lot of people seem to think that if we save the dolphins and whales we are going to save the world? This view is simplistic and wrong! We have to have a holelistic approach to conservation, a plan that encompasses our entire natural world not just a few selected species. We can’t just focus our attention on the cute and furry creatures. …
Every day another species is eliminated, we mess with the balance of our environment and one day we are going to mess with the wrong species or combination of species and the result is going to be disastrous for us as the human race.
Take one example. The ocean supplies most of our oxygen demands worldwide. This is mostly supplied by plankton and as long as we have plankton we have oxygen. The biggest threat to plankton is squid. They grow in huge no’s and it’s these numbers that are kept in control by different predators. Of these predators the main one is the shark. Take the shark away, and you have a population explosion of squid. The squid eat all the plankton, no oxygen… we die as a species. A simplistic view of things but one that highlights the need to view conservation holistically, what I mean by REAL conservation.
Unfortunately we only conserve what we love, we only love what we understand and we only understand what we are taught and at the moment, when it comes to sharks, all we are taught is fear. How can we hope to get people to love sharks if everywhere we look fear is drummed down everyone’s throat?
The only way is hidden in the key work “taught” we only understand what we are ‘TAUGHT’. We have to start with our children; we have to teach them to understand “REAL CONSERVATION”, to love nature as a whole and not only the fury, cuddly ones, but from the little tree frog to the wildest of animals, the shark and all our predators.
This is REAL conservation and our only chance at saving our natural planet. It’s time to stop playing Russian roulette with our remaining species. No-one knows what the trigger will be and every time an animal or plant is labelled extinct we are pulling the trigger. How many shots have we got left?
