Jim Bullard on Shark Baiting

Recently Jim Bullard, a 38 year scuba diving veteran, wrote this article about baiting sharks on a commercial level.

Our entire industry will have to do a lot better in response to the perception that we condition sharks, exploiting them for personal gain.

That process might start with individual operator website outreach.

More on the controversy of chumming.

Jim Bullard on Shark Baiting

I am neither a marine biologist nor a psychologist. I am not even an animal rights activist. I am a scuba diver and an outdoor enthusiast, and these two endeavors have brought me in close proximity with a myriad wild animals, in their natural habit.

Over the thirty-eight years I have been diving, I have seen many sharks, but I have never been tempted to offer these magnificent creatures anything to bite. Just to clarify my position, I do not fear any animal in the sea, but I do respect them and their habitat. My very first dive instructor advised not to drag around dead fish while diving and that blood would attract sharks and other unwanted visitors. These practices, which I have avoided during my diving career, are now used by dive operators to intentionally attract and feed sharks.

The practice of shark feeding is nothing but an exploitation of a shark’s natural behavior for the dive operator’s personal gain. Though observing a shark feeding is an exhilarating experience, I believe the participants take part unaware of lasting and potentially dangerous effect this activity has on the natural feeding habits of these predators.

In the 1901 Ivan Pavlov developed the concept of "conditioned reflex", meaning a response controlled by a stimulus, by studying the gastric function of dogs. Pavlov externalized a dog’s salivary gland in order to s analyze what response it had to food under different conditions. It is popularly believed that Pavlov always signaled the occurrence of food by ringing a bell. However, his writings indicate that he used of a wide variety of stimuli, including electric shocks, whistles, metronomes, tuning forks, and a range of visual stimuli, in addition to a ringing bell.

The United States Forestry Service has observed a similar Pavlovian response in the activities of bears in national forests. The signs cautioning "DO NOT FEED THE BEARS" are not there because peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and fried chicken are bad for the bears (though they may not be their natural diet), but because the bears’ keen sense of smell and desire for an easy meal have resulted in injured tourists and some vehicles becoming "pop top" food containers.

Shark feeding is just another example of animal behavior being altered by humans. These animals will, if they have not already, associate boats and divers in the water with food. Research continues to be done on sharks’ feeding patterns, and we do not yet know how far each species of shark range in their search for food. However, I cannot help but be concerned that the boat and the divers I am with may be mistaken for a shark feeding when diving in waters where shark feeding is permitted. I fear that a shark feeding will go badly and an observer will be injured or killed, or a diver will be attacked by a hungry shark that has lost some of it natural ability to hunt its normal prey. The inevitable human response to this would be something like what was seen in the movie Jaws - an outcry of "Kill the Sharks!"

The consequences of shark feeding would have an adverse effect on the institutions that implemented it. It will become even harder to see these magnificent creatures in their natural habitat. If a dive operator can take divers to an area where sharks are known to gather, and can show divers sharks without interacting with them, then so be it. However, in my experience, most shark encounters have been pure happenstance; I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that when humans intercede in animal behaviors, there are consistently devastating consequences for the animal. It seems that the only animal that has not learned from this behavior is the human.

Jim Bullard
Scuba Diver

Tiger Sharks and Commercial Shark Diving S.A - Glenn Ashton Weighs In

When a series of starkly shocking industry images recently surfaced of a well known commercial shark diving operation in S.A, the ensuing industry backlash was both unnecessary, ugly, and tribal.

We posted our thoughts on the ensuing fallout here and were happy to discover well known journalist, writer and photographer, Glenn Ashton wading into this issue with an open letter to S.A dive operators.

Glenns letter is not only great industry thought, it is real leadership. Kudos to Glenn for not only taking the time to review this industry issue from all sides, but to distill it down to the fundamentals.

Are we as an industry ready to embrace standardized practices, both baiting and film and television, that benefit our primary clients, the sharks, first and foremost?

Open letter to the SA shark dive industry re: best practices

Hi All,

As a journalist and observer to the debate about best practices concerning shark attraction methods and the shortcomings of some methods, it is clear that the issues that have been raised are extremely important to deal with in order to ensure that our South African shark diving industry has a reputation that we can indeed be proud of.

This cannot only come from a shark diving industry perspective but from a conservation perspective, a tourism perspective, a best practice perspective and most of all for promoting an open and transparent dialogue about the matter - shark diving, either in cages or without - for profit.

There is nothing wrong with generating profit from shark diving. The dive industry is a powerful tool to assist in protecting sharks, in getting the public to understand them and in taking their plight to a wider audience.

Public oversight has assisted in improving practices in all aspects of the shark dive industry and indeed in all related aspects of human/ shark interaction. This mirrors the experiences of other conservation practices in other nature conservation fields which have often learned and advanced themselves through outside pressure.

However it serves nobody when baseless allegations are thrown around, when issues become personalised for reasons that are completely unrelated to the issues at hand and when discussions that are aimed at improving industry practices are marginalised because of illogical and ill informed inputs.

It cannot be denied that public oversight and pressure to change from shark enthusiasts have improved the cage dive industry hugely. The cage dive industry would like to take most of the credit for themselves but that is just human nature.

The same goes for shark diving on the Aliwal shoals and other offshore shark diving spots. The methods used to attract sharks have been shown to be damaging to sharks and yet those who rely on these flawed methods have denied any cause for concern and have instead attempted to sidetrack and personalise the discussion and debate. Others have worked hard to clean up their acts and have listened to outside inputs.

Denial of any problems in how sharks are chummed and attracted obviously serves nobody except the denier and it does not move the debate forward. As a journalist and someone involved in covering environmental management in South Africa I am quite prepared to go out and expose any dangerous or damaging practices to the widest possible audience so that things do change, through either the force of public opinion or the force of law. Both are equally relevant in this case.

It would however be far more beneficial for all of the role players in this debate, especially the shark dive charterers who have been criticised for poor baiting practices, to play a far more mature and responsible role in this discussion. There clearly are operators who have tried different methods of baiting which appear to be non damaging to sharks - through encasing cables and chains in polypropylene pipe - which is rigid and extremely tough and non damaging to shark mouths, compared to exposed cables and chains. Why can this and other useful discoveries not be made best practice?

An industry standard should be agreed upon and any parties who continue to practice dangerous methods of attracting sharks, just as those who do not properly care for, or endanger their divers and customers, or who follow other dangerous practice, must be sanctioned and isolated, if shown to be intransigent in the face of changing toward best practice behaviour.

If we wish to have an industry that is good for tourism and for our image as a leading nature and eco-tourism destination then we must pursue best practice in all aspects of environmental tourism in South Africa. If we wish to be the world leaders in this field, that we claim to be, then we must behave like world leaders. Accordingly the industry must support a move toward transparency and best practice and engage with each other in a constructive way that promotes mutual interests

The alternative is to identify and deal with those who refuse to play the game according to mutually agreed rules and isolate them utterly. The choices are simple. So lets rather consider moving on toward finalising what is essentially a straightforward procedure.

A useful first step would be to invite all shark tourism operators to sit down around a table, at a shark tourism conference, of SA operators, and start to hack out the issues, formalise them and put these steps into practice. SA tourism and other regional tourism boards would be supportive - we all know that the industry brings in significant money. Any other relevant parties must also come aboard, including government (Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and Dept of Environment and Water, and possibly Tourism and also the Shark Board but there may be ambivalence about this).

It would just take a few champions of the cause, from within the industry, to drive this. They could reap huge benefits by being shown to lead the way toward the most progressive and ecologically sound practices, and could accordingly advertise along these lines.

This should ideally happen from within the industry - self regulation is always preferable to having regulations imposed on you. But if nothing happens then imposition of tighter regulations may just follow.

Over to you, the people who want to do the right thing, the people who make money out of sharks and those who want to conserve the resource for the benefit of all. Lets see the changes roll on!

Glenn Ashton

Freelance writer, researcher, author and editor.
Cape Town South Africa