Whale Watching


© Jacqueline Dell

Whale Watching has become a major past time over here in South Australia in this last week. Not the usual kind of whale watching, but rather people converging from all parts of the state and even country, to watch Great White Sharks frantically feeding off the dead carcass of a whale. The town is Cape Jervis, and people are flocking from everywhere to try and catch a glimpse of this once in a lifetime opportunity. There may not seem to be anything wrong with this scenario. Surely it's just curious people out to take a look at something that happens in nature on a frequent basis, animals feeding off other animals. The story goes much further however, and this is where we see a perfect example of people overstepping the mark between the animal world and the human world.

Numbers of charter boats have been taking tourists out to the site of the frenzy day after day. The fascination with the event has become so huge that people have had to wait for hours just to book a place on a charter. Still there seems to be no problem, however, this is exactly when the problems began to start. Within one day of footage breaking that the whale had died and was now being consumed by hungry predatory sharks, we saw footage of a young man who decided to climb out of his charter boat and onto the back of the dead whale that was being constantly circled by a pack of sharks in a feeding frenzy. One slip and all of the tourists would have had a real show to watch, one I can guarantee they would never forget. If that man only knew what great whites are capable of doing, he probably would never have attempted to get so close in the first place. Following this man there was numerous people who felt that they needed to get up close as well. This included a parent who decided to step out onto the whale whilst holding their baby! A man who reached over the side of his charter boat and patted a great white shark on the nose as it was coming in to take another chunk out of the whale. The mans hand only needed to be a few inches closer and the shark would have had Whale and human flesh of some description for lunch. Then there is of course the other tourists that decided they would like to take home some souvenir blubber from the rotting whale carcass. Can someone please tell me what one does with a piece of smelly whale blubber? It is beyond me what all of these people are thinking.

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