Shark Week In July, Shark Conservation All Year
Shark Week is a wonderful cultural phenomenon. Every summer, Americans flock to devices to watch nonstop content about one of the most feared predators out there. And while sharks certainly look the scary part, they have a lot more to fear from us than we do from them.
Shark Week may just be a week out of every summer, but shark conservation should be something we think about year round. Here are a few ways you can get involved in the fight to help protect sharks, regardless of how landlocked your state may or may not be:
Support conservation organizations
One of the simplest ways to get involved in shark conservation is to help fund the organizations already doing great work in this space. Want to contribute to something that is more research focused? The Shark Conservation Fund might be a good place for you to donate. Would you rather contribute to activism? Sea Shepherd Global is involved in direct action campaigns to protect marine life worldwide.
Don’t eat sharks
If you want to protect sharks, don’t eat them if you see them on the menu. Shark finning kills an estimated 100 million sharks every year. The finning process is incredibly cruel with the sharks typically being caught, having their fins sliced off, and getting thrown back into the ocean to die a slow and painful death. As free marketeers we know that we vote with our dollar and, considering what shark consumption is doing to these creatures and our oceans, finning is something that we should be financially voting against.
Choose your tourism wisely
Nearly everyone wants a shark experience. Whether it is as calm as swimming alongside docile whale sharks or as chaotic as cage diving with great whites, many of us want to get up close and personal with the animals we see on our screens. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if done properly.
But there are many sketchy shark tourism operators who create experiences that are entirely unethical when it comes to treating animals well. So do your research — ask lots of questions, read reviews, and look for tour operators who specifically talk about and can verify their humane treatment of animals. If you love these animals enough to want to be near them in the wild, you love them enough to avoid businesses that couldn’t care less about the welfare of sharks.
You don’t have to wait until next summer to be thinking about sharks. You can help support healthy shark populations right now, right from where you are. And who knows? By doing so you might just ensure that your great grandkids have a Shark Week they can tune into too.
