Category Archives: Activism

Day 52 8/16/13: Strange Bedfellows

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Today’s action: Write to Sharksavers Board of Directors

OCEARCH at work

OCEARCH at work

Ugh. It’s so upsetting to me that Sharksavers (the charity I chose for the JAWS benefit), is supporting OCEARCH, an ultra-shady shark “research” outfit that uses brutal hook and haul methods to tag great whites often inflicting severe damage to the animals in the process. Their mission is suspect, (are they glorified fishermen or actual researchers?) their methods are barbaric and unfortunately they appear  sceince-y enough to be media darlings.

To learn more about OCEARCH’S macho “science” read this. 

(Thanks to Sarah Mucha & the Stop Ocearch FB group for the sample letters!)

Day 48 8/12/13: Two Blocks of Sea

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Today I went to Santa Monica for a beach clean up, but I must have got the details wrong since I couldn’t find anyone there. No loss. The air felt nice. The ocean looked a little bit wild. My friend Jen and I picked a bit of trash here and there and waited out the traffic over beer and sweet potato french fries and talked about the writing life and our fathers who are both gone but who loom large in memory.

At home again, late with homework to do, I still wanted to do something about sharks. Since I’m going to South Africa, I decided to go donate Two Blocks of Sea to the great whites of Dyer Island, a rich nature reserve. The stretch of water between Dyer Island and nearby Geyser Rock (an island home to 60,000 Cape Fur Seals), is also called Shark Alley, a treacherous stretch of sea familiar to anyone who watches shows like “Air Jaws Apocalypse.”   I felt moved by the language of the donation form: 2 Blocks of Sea to the Great Whites of Dyer Island.

On a recent architecture tour in downtown L.A., the docent talked about a guy who purchased “air rights” so he could build skyscrapers. Air real estate. Two blocks of sea. I imagine some cut-away science text book diagram of green-blue water and a curved ocean floor.

Measuring the sea seems like trying to measure time. In November, my father will have been gone a year. But what does one year even mean? In a few minutes, I walk two blocks in a city that is both utterly foreign and oddly familiar. A thousand memory fragments surface and dissolve. Time is scrambled. What does a shark experience in two blocks of sea—the electromagnetic fields of distress, the rise and fall of tides?

Sharks don’t strike me as nostalgic creatures, but I wonder if they experience that confusion of memory when they move through some well-traveled stretch of open oceans only to discover it strewn with a ragged web of nets, or find a channel once plentiful with fish, strangely, suddenly empty.

Day 47: 08/11/13: 12 Random Shark Facts

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Thanks to Randomhistory.com for these fascinating fragments:

1.  Even though almost equal numbers of men and women spend time in the ocean, no one knows why sharks seem to prefer to attack men. In fact, nearly 90% of shark attacks have happened to men.

2. Hammerhead sharks’ heads are soft at birth so they won’t jam the mothers’ birth canals.

3. The first pup to hatch inside the sand tiger shark mother devours its brothers and sisters until there are only two pups left, one on each side of the womb. This form of cannibalism is called oophagy.

4. Sharks belong to a group of fish known as the elasmobranchs, or cartilaginous fishes. Rays and skates, which may have evolved from sharks, also belong to this group.

5. Recent research indicates that when a shark plies surface waters (when the dorsal fin cuts through the sea’s surface), it could be detecting pressure waves associated with a struggling animal nearby.

6. In 1977, Happy Days’ Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli jumped over a penned-in shark while on water skis, giving birth to the expression “jumping the shark” to describe a desperate dramatic measure by a TV show.

7. For every human killed by a shark, humans kill two million sharks.

8. Solomon Islanders believed that when people died, their ghosts inhabited the bodies of sharks.

9. The second-most dangerous shark in the world, the tiger shark, is sometimes called the “garbage can of the sea” because it will eat anything, including animal carcasses, tin cans, car tires, and other garbage. One was even found having a chicken coop with the remains of bones and feathers inside its stomach.

10. When a shark eats food that it can’t digest (like a turtle shell or tin can), it can vomit by thrusting its stomach out its mouth then pulling it back in.

11. The first written account of a shark attack is found in Herodotus’ (c. 484–425 B.C.) description of hordes of “monsters” devouring the shipwrecked sailors of the Persian fleet.

12. Dreaming has been observed in bony fish, but not yet in sharks.

Until I read that last fact, I never considered the title of this blog from the perspective of dreaming sharks.

And so, in yet another effort to overcome this innate self-centeredness, I joined The San Diego Shark Protectorate, a meetup group devoted to shark conservation.

Day 46: 8/10/13: “Life is a Great Surprise”

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The title is a quote from the great Vladimir Nabokov. I always think of Nabokov’s words when I have a particularly lovely experience. Today I went on a hike led by my friend Dan, an intrepid urban explorer. These hikes are always a surprise, as Dan has mapped so many forgotten and unseen places—odd urban pathways between hotels, a gorgeous park that smells of mountain sage hidden in the middle of a desolate nameless neighborhood between downtown L.A. and Echo Park. Exploring the unknown heightens the beauty of the familiar city places:  the gorgeous Victorians of Angelino Heights, the lotuses and lilies of the reborn Echo Park Lake.

I met so many bright, interesting people on the hike–professors of Latin and Math, a fellow English instructor and a guy who told me about rescuing a small blue shark from a reactionary mob of Santa Monica bathers during the height of “Jaws” mania/paranoia. Even though the poor shark was only about three-foot long, the hysterical swimmers and even the lifeguards were ready to beat the creature to death when it beached itself until this kind man set the shark free again in the ocean.

This anecdote is a nice transition to the benefit–using “Jaws” as a tool to save sharks rather than argument for their destruction. In Elysian Park, Dan introduced me to the hikers and I gave a brief little spiel about the JAWS benefit for Sharksavers.

Talking about my shark project, I always try to balance the humor with the dire truth about shark extinction, which is sort of tricky. While I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news,  we tend to forget that we are  living through a mass extinction event. As  Derrick Jensen once wrote, “there is no roll call on the nightly news” for the 200 plants and animals that disappear from this planet every day.

But this entry was about joy. Surprise.

I usually write about “forgetting” in the context of human denial and selective memory. But I’m just as guilty of picking and choosing.

It’s easy to remember the angry mob on the beach and forget the solitary guy who saved the little shark.

Day 44: 08/08/13: Cranky Quint & The Horror of Gill Nets

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Here is a rather candid remembrance of Robert Shaw from Jeffrey Vorhees, who played “the doomed Alex Kintner” (a.k.a. boy on the raft) in “Jaws”:

“Everyone filming it here was really nice, except for one guy, the old drunk, Robert Shaw. He ignored the island kids. They would have baseball games and cookouts for all the extras and kids on the island—-all the actors would show up, except for Shaw. He wanted nothing to do  with “The Island People,” as he called us. As a little kid, I would go over and talk to him, “Hi! How are you today?” He would just glare and say, “Just go away.” He was always drunk, just a mess….”   From “Just When You Thought it Was Safe: A Jaws Companion.”

Hopefully a small donation I made to ban gill nets made the ocean a little safer for sharks. Here’s the deal:

Each year, California drift gillnets kill more than 3,500 thresher, mako, and blue sharks as they fish for swordfish. The bycatch rate of sharks – as well as ocean sunfish, marine mammals and sea turtles – in California’s drift gillnets is the highest of any fishery along the US Pacific Coast.

Day 40: 8/4/2013: Shark Angels in Santa Monica

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After spending the afternoon at a popular seaside tourist destination, I have one, single burning question:

How can shirtless men wear backpacks? Don’t the straps pinch? What about sweat? I’m no fashion maven, but that look is just…WOW…not..good….

Anyway, I had misgivings go to an aquarium. It seems somewhat hypocritical to protest the circus and then support so-called “aqua-prisons,” but Julie Andersen of Shark Angels was giving a talk at the Santa Monica Aquarium and so I paid my five bucks.  The little shallow tank of leopard  and swell sharks that allows kids to touch them, sort of bummed me out, although one of the leopards actually lifted (her?) head out of the water when I approached and I made eye contact with her.

DIGRESSION ABOUT THE AWKWARD DAWNING OF SEXUAL KNOWLEDGE: As a child, of course, the New England Aquarium was mecca to me. I loved the circular tank with the snuggle-toothed sand sharks. I remember once buying a postcard of a sea otter in the gift shop of the NEA in 1976. Otters can stand on their hind legs, and this guy clearly had an erection, captured in the lurid sort of messy color of the old 60s/70s postcard. “He has a hard on!” shrieked my sister’s friend Denise. It was the first time I ever heard the term.

Continue reading →

Day 39: 8/03/2013: Part 2: At the Circus

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I decided not to have an emotionally charged pitch, but passed out flyers to incoming families saying “Free Information about the Circus.” Eric from PETA was even nicer. “Did you get one of these?” he’d ask with genuine warmth. “Thanks a lot. We’re asking people to make this their last visit to the circus.” He was a pro. No wailing guilt trips or useless harassment as I’ve seen from some so-called activists. Many people assume that “everyone” at a protest is from PETA or some other animal welfare organization. Not true.

In the late 1980s, During my early days at anti-veal and anti-vivisection protests, a random guy named Jingles would come all dressed in bells and baggy hippie-clown attire while the organizers from Last Chance for Animals would arrive in suits. ANYWAY, although I felt fairly robotic in comparison to Eric’s humanity, I learned that it was effective to just hand out the flyer without a preamble. Perhaps some people felt “tricked” into being handed a depressing image, but others seemed quite open.  I didn’t see a lot of these pamphlets littering the ground the way I do when Vegan Outreach comes to Glendale College and I scoop up the numberless images of factory farms blanketing the campus. Only one person at the circus handed the flyer back to me. This year, like last year, a couple of people who didn’t yet have tickets to the circus changed their minds after looking at the literature–probably the baby elephants being “trained” with ropes and bull hooks. One woman actually broke down. Continue reading →

Day 39: 8/03/2013: Part 1 Elephant Sharks & Circus Elephants

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This isn’t an elephant blog, it’s a shark blog. But I like that it sometimes meanders into interesting places—into the realms of other animals—pet shop fish, frogs, elephants and tigers. But before I talk about my annual summer circus protest, I will at least talk about the elephant shark because this oddball fish offers me an interesting transition to the circus in Part 2.

First, the elephant shark (also known as the “ghost shark”) lives in the waters of Australia and New Zealand. It’s silvery and strange and vulnerable to overfishing. It ends up in fish and chips a lot. With its eerie color and the floppy “hoe-like” appendage hanging off its snout, (it can sense the movement and weak electrical fields of prey), the elephant shark frankly makes the goblin shark seem a creature of sublime beauty.

As alien as these sea beings are, they are also being studied as a link to human ancestry, in the elephant shark genome project. I couldn’t find a way to save elephant sharks tonight, but I did stop to sign this petition about ending shark finning in New Zealand where elephant sharks live. I admit, it’s a rather thin connection, but a rising tide lifts all sharks or something like that.

Day 38 8/2/2013: Absurdly Simple Shark Activism For All Ages

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Marine Conservation, Shark Charities, Shark Finning and tagged , , | Leave a comment

SharkSavers is a great resource.

Click here to find out what restaurants in your area are serving shark fin soup.

Click here to download & print a “FINished WITH FINS letter to send to the restaurant.

This is so cool/cute. Click yet again here to download an educational shark coloring book for your kids or for yourself if the waxy intoxication of crayons makes you nostalgic for those early years when you fell in love with utter terror and majesty of apex sea predators.