A call to arms is echoing through South Australia.
Following a spate of shark attacks in the region – six in the last eight months, three being fatal – a local mayor is calling for the big fish responsible to be killed.
Elliston Mayor Andrew McLeod is leading the charge, urging the state government to address the issue. His solution? An eye-for-an-eye approach, targeting and killing the sharks responsible for human fatalities.
“If fisheries officers were able to attempt to terminate a shark following an attack, that would be a targeted approach … trying to terminate the shark responsible for the attack would not risk the survival of the species as a whole,” McLeod said, per ABC.
On January 9th, 64-year-old schoolteacher Murray Adams was non-fatally attacked while surfing in Elliston; two weeks prior, 15-year-old Khai Cowley was killed while surfing on the nearby Yorke Peninsula at Ethel Beach; then, back in May of 2023, another Eyre Peninsula schoolteacher was attacked, although sadly, he did not survive.
Even Mayor McLeod, the official pushing for the shark cull, had an encounter with a shark while surfing in Elliston a few years back.
“It is an absolute fluke that I didn’t get killed because if it had taken any of my flesh, I think it would have come back for more,” he told Yahoo! News. “It is ridiculous that they’re classified as endangered and they should be harvested like every other resource.”
However, shark experts argue that culling is ineffective and inhumane.
“You could go out and kill a bunch of sharks and you will never know if you got the one which is responsible … there is no real justice at that point,” said Dr. Chris Lowe, Director of the Shark Lab at Cal State University Long Beach.
Lowe continued:
“If you look at all the places where shark control has been used successfully … you’re taking out hundreds, if not thousands of sharks to do that. In the process of doing that, you kill lots of other things too, which means you’re going to have ecological effects.”
To cull or not to cull?
Stay tuned.
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