Who's The Aggressor Here?

Another shark attack victim dies in Australia.

Amongst the polite pleas to not take it out on the sharks - like they did with stingrays after one of them shanked Steve Irwin, were comments calling for a shark hunt, and to "put 'em in their rightful place - a cat-food tin".

And what's this about "making an example of a few of them"? Did I read that right? Did they just compare animals to terrorists? Is there even a United Denizens of the Deep (UDD) we humans can negotiate with? Oh, yeah, like it will so work, well, because... we're, like, the good guys!

Aussie rednecks. They think anything is possible after a dozen beers.

Sharks, like all natural predators, eat the slow, weak, sick and dying (which sheds light on some surfers), leaving the seas to the strong, bright and healthy. They also keep the oceans clean by gobbling dead and decomposing sea creatures, lovely breeding grounds for potentially nasty bacteria. Sharks are also biological wonders whose healing and sensory powers are being investigated by scientific, medical and military agencies.

If they all ended up in cat-food tins, Neptune's realm will see a massive free-for-all that will have bigger fish gobbling up smaller table fish and their young. Unlike us, Ma Nature's hunter-killers don't catch more than what they could eat. We already kill tons of sharks each year - most of them finned, speared and as by-catch. On average, less than twenty fatal attacks are reported annually worldwide.

And so far, no spokesfish for the sharks have approached the UN asking for an audience or offering coral branches of peace.

Sharks may be ugly and uncuddly, but unless we're willing to replace them as the ecosystem's euthanists, garbagemen and biohazard crew, we should shut the hell up, give them a wide berth, and just be extra careful every time we go out to sea.