I’ve been putting off writing about this. I had so much to say, but couldn’t figure out how to say it. Anger is hard to express articulately, and rage and grief even more so. I’m talking about the movie Sharkwater I saw last week. It’s a documentary about the slaughter of sharks and their subsequent precipitous drops in abundance. The narrative thread was the story of making the movie, the things the maker (a Canadian in his early twenties) went though to get it made: 5 years, murder charges, flesh-eating bacteria, etc. Because it was told through his eyes, he featured heavily in it. The main criticism I’ve heard of this movie was that it was self-indulgent. I agree that the filmmaker did seem to love himself very much, and was not afraid to feature himself on camera in a speedo. However, the movie wasn’t really about him, it was about sharks. He simply made an error in including himself too much. It was not a vanity project by any stretch of the imagination; I truly believe this movie was made to benefit sharks, not himself.
The other criticism that I’ve heard of this movie is the lack of women that appear in it. I was really surprised when I heard this. I was so distracted by the horrific content, I barely noticed when my former Dalhousie prof Boris Worm appeared on screen, let alone the fact that women didn’t. I think the lack of women is indicative of the lack of women in fisheries in general. I know of no female fisheries biologists, and can’t think of any female marine ecologists that would give the movie clout. This lack-of-women thing is a non issue in my book.
I already knew about the population declines and I knew about the finning. What I did not know about was the scale of the finning, about the horrible mistreatment of the sharks, the appalling waste of their lives. Knowing and seeing are two different things. I’ve worked with sharks, I’ve hauled them by their eye sockets and cut them open; I’ve felt their hearts beat. I believed, when I did that work, that I was helping to make the best of a lamentable situation. I still believe that. Nothing I experienced before prepared me for what I went through watching this movie. I’ve always been sensitive to animals in pain, and to watch a shark dragged aboard a boat, to have its fins cut off, and thrown back into the water STILL ALIVE to die slowly and painfully on the ocean floor was unbearable. A lot of people know about finning (the removal of shark fins to use in shark fin soup), but they don’t really let themselves see what it is. The sharks are often alive when their fins are taken; they are thrown back into the water to die. This isn’t a few sharks we’re talking about either: it’s hundreds of thousands of sharks. Why is this acceptable to us? If hundreds of thousands kittens or polar bears were tortured and left to die every day we wouldn’t tolerate it for a minute. When it happens out in the ocean where we can’t see, it’s somehow not worth our attention.
This shark fin soup thing really bothers me. Shark fin is apparently tasteless, so the soup is flavoured with chicken or beef, and the fin is just put there for show. It’s a sign of wealth and status. What happens if they wake up tomorrow and decided that golden eagle eyes or panda infant livers are the new status symbol? But that won’t happen, as shark populations decrease even further, fins will increase even more in their worth. Remember the story of the Great Auk?
The other criticism that I’ve heard of this movie is the lack of women that appear in it. I was really surprised when I heard this. I was so distracted by the horrific content, I barely noticed when my former Dalhousie prof Boris Worm appeared on screen, let alone the fact that women didn’t. I think the lack of women is indicative of the lack of women in fisheries in general. I know of no female fisheries biologists, and can’t think of any female marine ecologists that would give the movie clout. This lack-of-women thing is a non issue in my book.
I already knew about the population declines and I knew about the finning. What I did not know about was the scale of the finning, about the horrible mistreatment of the sharks, the appalling waste of their lives. Knowing and seeing are two different things. I’ve worked with sharks, I’ve hauled them by their eye sockets and cut them open; I’ve felt their hearts beat. I believed, when I did that work, that I was helping to make the best of a lamentable situation. I still believe that. Nothing I experienced before prepared me for what I went through watching this movie. I’ve always been sensitive to animals in pain, and to watch a shark dragged aboard a boat, to have its fins cut off, and thrown back into the water STILL ALIVE to die slowly and painfully on the ocean floor was unbearable. A lot of people know about finning (the removal of shark fins to use in shark fin soup), but they don’t really let themselves see what it is. The sharks are often alive when their fins are taken; they are thrown back into the water to die. This isn’t a few sharks we’re talking about either: it’s hundreds of thousands of sharks. Why is this acceptable to us? If hundreds of thousands kittens or polar bears were tortured and left to die every day we wouldn’t tolerate it for a minute. When it happens out in the ocean where we can’t see, it’s somehow not worth our attention.
This shark fin soup thing really bothers me. Shark fin is apparently tasteless, so the soup is flavoured with chicken or beef, and the fin is just put there for show. It’s a sign of wealth and status. What happens if they wake up tomorrow and decided that golden eagle eyes or panda infant livers are the new status symbol? But that won’t happen, as shark populations decrease even further, fins will increase even more in their worth. Remember the story of the Great Auk?
I tend not to get too personal with my blog entries. I’m not one of those people who routinely bare their soul on the internet. I will say that this movie really got to me. I cried while I watched it, and I wept when I got home and continued to think about it. My faith in humanity has decreased, after contemplation of this situation. I don’t believe that we will save the sharks, even if we are capable of somehow enforcing international law in international waters. I think that massive shark extinctions or extirpations will occur in my lifetime and when there are no shark fins left, some other absurd and arbitrary food item will become the fashion.
If you still have hope, you should see Sharkwater, and you should sign the on-line petitions to stop finning. And you should give this guy money, because even though what he’s doing is morally ambiguous, he’s actually doing something.
No comments:
Post a Comment