Posted by on April 16, 2005 at 09:27:18:
In Reply to: Gill nets still haunts Great Whites posted by Mojo Mike on April 16, 2005 at 08:36:17:
What you have here is a series of very stupid actions...
Some guys saw a great white swimming around the boat, and wrongly assumed it was a mako. (stupid)
They gaffed the freeswimming great white. (illegal)
They pulled it on deck stabbed it repeatedly until it was dead, then cut it up into steaks and took it home. (illegal)
Another guy then came online and posted about the whole thing: http://fishingnetwork.net/forum1/viewtopic.php?t=8952
It's now ditted but originally it had numerous pictures of them killing and butchering the shark (unbeleivably stupid)
Well what happens.... Several people notice that it's a White, tell them so, the story chnges and the pics are removed.
Unfortunately someone by that time had copied one of thier photos on MOF
The photo above is taken from that MOF photo. All I did is double the size crop it and lighten it up so you can see the shark and the nature of it's wounds.
I'm no expert but I've caught a few sharks give or take a few hundred let me tell you what I see.
That shark is very much alive. He's been stabbbed in the gills three times but he is stll very much alive. He's bleeding to death.... That's what happens when you stab them in the gills.
He's arched his back and has his mouth wide open. That is an aggressive posture. Like a viper rasing it's head. He's trying to fight back.
He can't though because they have a gaff in his head and one in his tail. He's stretched out on the deck and the guys standing on him to hold him down while they kill him. He's going to die, he doesn't have a chance but he's still fighting back, that's a shark for you.
You can't see it in my pic but the guy with the boot is holding a knife at ready, and I'd bet money they stabbed him a few more times before he died. Bleeding to death takes time.
Now if they knew anything about sharks at all they would of stuck the knife through the nerve cord at the back of the neck and killed him quickly but obviously they didn't know jack or they wouldn't of killed him in the first place.
As is... he's on the deck being held down, while he slowly bleeds to death.
Since the guys figured out they illegally killed a White, much has been made of the gillnet injury.
Now they say he was on deaths door, that he was just flaoting around barely swimming and that they had to put him out of his misery.
Sharks don't float. They are not bass. They don't have a swim bladder so when they are near death or weak they just sink out.
When they say it was near death that's just plain BULL####
I've cut nets off sharks in far worse shape then that White. Take a good look at the photo, especially where the gilnet line goes across the white skin between the pecs. The line hasn't even begun to cut into the shark, and that's the thinnest part of the skin on the shark.
If it's still on the surface there he's not hurt, and he could of gone for months before it became a real problem.
These are tough animals with tuff skin, to say he was dying from that injury is ridiculous.
From my experiance sharks with net problems have trouble feeding. Eventually they get very thin, maybe even starve if they can't get out of the net, but that takes a lot of time.
That's actually probably why he came up to the boat. He was having trouble catching fish, smelled the chovies in the tank and came up to investigate.
If it was near death it wouldn't have come up to the boat. That shark was hungry, that's why he came up, not because he was dying.
If he was hungry he was doing just fine. Fish don't eat when they are dying. It takes too much energy to digest the food.
Anybody who owns an aquarium knows this, the first indication somethings wrong with a fish is they quit eating.
That shark is not even thin. I'd say he could of gone months before he was in any real trouble.
They didn't kill him because he was sick or weak, the original post showed photo's of them butchering the shark.
They killed him to fill plastic bags with shark steaks.
I guess the question is always what would you do differen't.
If it had been me I'd of illegally baited the white. pulled it to the side of the boat, tail roped it then hoisted it up cut the net off and released it.
Technically that is wrong. We are not supposed to touch them at all, but it's what I would of done.
What they did: Free gaffing, killing, and steaking, was not the right thing to do. No amount of rationalisation will change that. You don't kill protected fish and take them home to the table.
Jim
