07.06
Three women donned scuba masks and jumped into the waters off Oahu’s North Shore, floating inside a submerged cage as about a dozen sharks glided toward bloody fish scraps tossed into the water by a tour company.
Tourist Kim Duniec said the experience of coming eye to eye with sharks was exhilarating.
“Their eyes were scary, but they were still graceful, absolutely beautiful,” the Beaver Dam, Wis., woman said.
Shark tours like this have become a popular visitor attraction in Hawaii, but a movement to shut them down is gaining momentum.
Some native Hawaiians consider sharks to be ancestral gods and view feeding them for entertainment to be disrespectful of their culture. Surfers and environmentalists fear the tours will teach sharks to associate people with food — leading to an increase in attacks — while disrupting the ocean’s ecological balance. Federal fisheries regulators are investigating the tours on the grounds that they are illegally feeding sharks.
Source: Honolulu Star-Bulletin
The Hawaii Kai Neighborhood Board passed a resolution on April 28, 2009, calling for a complete statewide ban on shark tours. You can see the reso, which cites several reasons, at http://twitpic.com/56krb.
Shark tours cannot exist without feeding the sharks, and feeding sharks is illegal. Also, when shark feeding does occur, sharks congregate, which is not good in Hawaii’s recreational waters. There are legal, ecological, environmental, cultural, and spiritual reasons to ban shark tours in Hawaii.