Shark Culling Persuasive Essay

Sharks have always been an important part of Earth. Many cultures - beyond just the Chinese with their famous shark fin soup - consider them to be powerful symbols, deities, or sacred animals. They help keep the ecosystem in check. This, in turn, highly benefits the economy. It’s difficult to imagine a world without sharks - considering that sharks have existed for over 400 million years (What If There Were No Sharks?). This makes them approximately three million eight hundred years older than us. Unfortunately, with the rise of anti-shark movies such as Jaws, people have begun to fear sharks. Many of them wish to kill them, and will not mourn their loss. However, if one looks deeper into this solution, one will discover a myriad of problems. Problems which are guaranteed to occur if shark culling is continued. If the ocean is to be saved and humans are to be kept safe, an environmentally safe alternative to shark culling must be discovered.
Shark culling, in the simplest of terms, is the act of catching sharks with the use of baited drum lines and nets, and killing them without
Pavan Sukhdev studies “the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity” (Sukhdev), as well as how businesses need to change to create a greener world, which involves looking at the costs of losing biodiversity and ecosystems. According to him, around 500 million people - presumably more, as time has gone on - rely on the types of fish that thrive in coral reefs to survive. If the coral reefs disappear, these people have no jobs and descend into poverty, which is terrible for the economy. There’s also money from tourism to consider. In just the Bahamas, a single sharks - a living one - gains them around $250,000 from the cost of diving. A fisherman who catches, kills, and sells a shark, on the other hand, only makes about $50 (“The Importance of Sharks”). That’s a decent sum of money, but not nearly as good as the live shark’s