Shark should be alarmed

It has taken three fatal shark attacks in seven weeks, but West Australian authorities have issued their first catch-to-kill order in an attempt to eliminate the shark responsible.

The order seems overdue. For too long, we have been treating sharks as if they were friendly animals, anthropomorphising them into loveable rogues like Bruce, the Great White in the 2003 children's film Finding Nemo. Great Whites are no laughing matter, though, as Texan George Wainwright unfortunately found, and Bryn Martin before him, and the list goes on. Already. predictable critics are protesting the decision by Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett and State fisheries manager Tony Cappelluti to send a search and destroy team to Rottnest Island where Wainwright was mauled to death. Their cry is that we are in the shark's environment and we should accept some sort of natural order that puts the shark's appetite ahead of our survival. The sort of people saying this would never have made it in on mankind's Darwinian trek over the past several hundred thousand years. They would still be hiding up a tree trying to avoid the leopard's or cowering at the back of a cave. There is plenty of ocean for sharks to roam, as they do, and take their natural foods. There should be safe beaches where we can swim. The Western Australian coast does not have the bays that make the NSW coastal great for surfers, they are not easily protected by the sort of nets that have kept shark attacks at Bondi, for example, to a minimum. Then, too, there are the growing practises of shark feeding and cage diving off South Australia and South Africa. It does not seem smart to feed these huge monsters and dangle humans in the ocean (albeit protected by stout steel bars) at the same time. Sharks are not dumb. Why are they being trained to associate bloody hunks of tucker with people in this manner? Just last week, one of the nation's most respected divers, Hugh Edwards, a prolific author and great student of the Dutch wrecks along the WA Coast, was telling me that killer sharks should be found and killed. They are no different, he said, to the rogue lions and rogue tigers that have always existed in Africa and India. Beasts that have by whatever means adopted humans as part of their food chain. The West Australian government will be targetted by the shrill and uninformed, but the beaches must be made safe for the summer. .