"Amity, as you know, means friendship. So make friends with a shark."
Posted on 06/21/2020 4:35:33 PM PDT by Capt. Tom
Because of our menacing great white shark and the seal overpopulation dilemma, Cape Cod is in an ecological, public safety and economic crisis.
The exploding seal population is a consequence of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act, which allowed for the rapidly growing seal overpopulation. Seals attract great white sharks, which feed upon them and ferociously attack humans.
We once had a thriving fishing industry, kept healthy in part by a bounty system of predator control. That ended in 1972 with the passage of the protection act, which not only lifted the bounties on fish-eating predators like seals, but placed them under perpetual protection, immune from mitigation.
Now fully recovered, the seal population has grown beyond what any reasonable person would consider healthy. We are in a twilight zone of regulatory madness that endangers public safety, threatens our regional tourism economy and depletes fish stocks.
The legislation is fatally flawed, as it fails to address what ensues after a marine mammal population recovers. It fails to provide for delisting or managing recovered species.
It must be amended so the unhealthy seal population can be culled, thereby solving our multidimensional shark and seal problem.
Ron Beaty
A quarter century after writing what Beaty, 56, described as “graphic letters” threatening to kill the President George H.W. Bush, Senator Edward Kennedy and Massachusetts State Senator Lois Pines, Cape Cod voters in 2016 elected Beaty, a fiscal conservative, staunch Donald Trump supporter, and outspoken critic of government as one of three county commissioners.
Tom here- I added in the biography of the letter writer, since a persons background can totally cloud what they are saying.
I agree with MR. Beaty on the cause of the seal and shark problem .(the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act)
IMHO the seal problem is unsolvable at this time. -Tom
We can learn so much from Sharks.
They’re developing driverless cars.
Excellent Post, Captain.
Here’s an excellent film on the subject, free. My kids love it.
https://video.kpbs.org/video/great-white-shark-new-perspectives-of-an-ancient-predator-zidgxv/
"Amity, as you know, means friendship. So make friends with a shark."
Alewives Matter
Here’s an excellent film on the subject, free. My kids love it.
https://video.kpbs.org/video/great-white-shark-new-perspectives-of-an-ancient-predator-zidgxv/
Capt.Tom here- We are into the early stages of the white shark season here in Mass.
We have waited too long to address the seal shark problem on Cape Cod and other Mass. waters , and it is now too late to do anything about seals and white sharks that are now both protected by the Federal Govt.
As some people like to say. "People aren't in charge now, the events are in charge". -Tom
A good low-tide strafing run from Monomoy up North Beach to Nauset would do the trick. Tide comes in and takes away the...remains. sharks & everything else get a nice buffet for a couple of days and then things might calm down.
Sigh. You would think they would have learned that any time humans get in the position of trying to protect something, they are just as likely to make it worse than improve it.
I recognize there are times and places for government involvement, but I have alway felt the lightest touches were the best...if at all.
Most of the time, it is a heavy handed bureaucratic cudgel that is full of things that don’t drive the desired effect and worse, are infested with unforeseen circumstances and results.
It happens so often that you wonder how someone would have the courage to pull the trigger on an environmental management scheme when all those failed and stupid ones from the past stare them in the face.
But pull they trigger they do. Every time, like clockwork. “It will work this time...”
Heh, I was thinking more along the lines of: "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we will be lucky to live through it."
A person, no matter what he/she is changing, should always have in the back of their mind- "Is today's solution, tomorrow's problem?"
You have to shake your head at the absurdity of this one, thought.
“WE’RE STUCK IN A VICIOUS CIRCLE! AAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!”
Perhaps more LGBTQI in Provincetown and Cape Cod will help? The Shark gods will be pleased with the reverent political correctness and simply quit biting people!
If you will watch the movie, and share it with your friends... One of the problems for our fisheries is that seal pops have gone unchecked for far too long. The reintroduction of GWS is a critical part of balancing the ecosystem. GWS eat seals... Not fish. Watch it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3ytTKZf344
Yes, they do eat seals. Apparently they don’t eat enough to keep them from biting and killing humans.
Increase the Orca population - that’ll help with some of the seal problem.......now, what eats Orcas......gotta think of the next phase....
Forget the seals and deal with the politicians and bureaucrats.
Just watched “The Meg” last night on cable......Good movie, if you ignore some of the inaccuracies..........................
The issue is that they mistake the shape of a surf board for the shape of a seal. Then when they come up for a bite, they realize that they made a mistake. Unfortunately, that initial bite is sometimes fatal.
Tom,
Now that there are so many sharks and many are tagged, are there any Captains taking people out to see sharks?
Instead of taking people out to fish for stripers or blues maybe there is money to be made if you can get people up close to a Great White Shark. Similar to what they do down in Cape Town, SA.
Put people in a cage and feed the sharks.
Drag a seal shaped rubber decoy behind the boat and get the sharks to come up for a bite. Just like on shark week.
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