There is a world-wide slaughter going on, which is not known to the public. Big fisheries and countries like Costa Rica, Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan and Spain, are killing between 100 and 150 million sharks every year. In addition to that, Japan kills tens of thousands of dolphins & and hundreds of whales each year. Sharks caught by long-line fishing boats get their fins cut off while they are still alive and are then thrown back into the sea, where they die an excruciating death. The dolphins, which are brutally killed in Japan, are hacked to pieces by Japanese fishermen, who behave worse than the most primitive cave men. That is barbaric and needs to be stopped. The shark fins go to China for shark fin soup. For every affluent Chinese wedding 30 to 40 sharks are brutally tortured and left to die. The dolphin meat is sold in Japan as whale meat. We need to keep one thing in mind: The oceans are our life support system; if we lose the sharks - we'll lose the oceans, because sharks maintain the biological balance in that very complex ecosystem. Without healthy oceans, we humans have no chance of survival, because the oceans produce 70% of our oxygen. ..My website: www.sharkprotect.com will tell you more. If we don't stop this senseless slaughter we might soon be looking at one of the greatest ecological disasters of mankind. Sharks are not killers and man- eaters, but that's what some in the media want us to believe. They don't want to hear what I have to say, because horror stories sell; the truth is not news-worthy. Unfortunately, Discovery Channel is not helping with their ridiculous Shark Week. Even NBC and Animal Planet have recently broad-cast horror stories, which people might have believed 150 years ago. Some call it good entertainment, but "Shark Week" is really one big lie, and NBC and Animal Planet don't seem to like the truth either. Sharks are not as dangerous as people think. In order to prove that, I swim with them all the time. I have been in the water with as many as 30 Caribbean reef sharks at one time, with tiger sharks, lemon sharks, bull sharks, black tip sharks, hammerheads, Silvertips, et cetera. In more than a hundred shark dives I have never been threatened by a single one of them. Of course, sharks are predators and we need to respect them. But humans are not really on their menu and, contrary to common believe, they do not react to human blood at all. Imagine: Sharks have controlled 2/3rds of our planet for over 450 million years. They were already 130 million years old, before the first dinosaurs appeared on this earth. That is hard to believe but true. However, in the last 30 years alone we have managed to bring 100 of the 500 shark species to the brink of extinction. The Spielberg movie, based on Peter Benchley's book "Jaws", started a world-wide hunt for sharks. Peter Benchley, who became a shark protector later in his life, said: "If I had known then what I know now, I could never have written that book. The monster I created is pure fiction." But Discovery and some in the media still don't get it. Sharks need as many friends as they can get. We need young people to cry out against this senseless and brutal slaughter. This is your world; you and your children have to live with the terrible things my generation is doing to the environment. Keep in mind: "If we lose the sharks - we'll lose the oceans" and when we lose 70% of our oxygen we have no chance of survival. I am glad to see that Mr. Hasselhoff is also a shark fan and hopefully he will go public and join me in this very important cause.
I am also on Facebook under Jupp Kerckerinck
Jupp Kerckerinck zur Borg
www.sharkprotect.com