Would you want someone teasing apex predators with bait in your front yard on a daily basis?

Close to 400 people live on Stewart Island, New Zealand, and many of us have spent years campaigning against the shark cage dive companies that have been operating in Foveaux Strait a few miles (approximately 3.8) from our home. During shark season these boats have been baiting and rewarding sharks with tuna chum on a daily basis, all while a human being wiggles around in a cage beside their boat. The Stewart Island community has a long tradition of diving, swimming, and boating and we have been horrified to see the change in the behaviour of the great white shark population here since the cage diving began. Locals who have fished here for decades have noticed the sharks have become unusually aggressive toward boats in recent years.

Recent media reports have made this issue about the paua (abalone) industry versus the shark cage diving industry. The paua industry is part of the picture, and commercial paua divers certainly are concerned. But there is a whole community of people living here who are also extremely worried about the effect the chumming has had on the shark population. We are families, business owners, long-time residents, crib owners … and all of us are recreational water users. Foveaux Strait is our front yard, our playground, and for many of us, our workplace. Now we share these waters with great white sharks which have been trained to associate boats and human beings with an easy efficient meal.

Great white sharks aka white pointers are a protected species in New Zealand, and the NZ Wildlife Act of 1953 mandates that protected species should be protected from harassment. That is the duty of the Department of Conservation. Yet DoC has allowed these shark cage diving boats to drop steel cages into the sharks’ environment, and tease them with a food not naturally found in Foveaux Strait. Steel bars are also not naturally occuring in a shark's environment, and it has been well documented that wounds on these sharks are caused by impact with the cages. (Can you imagine the uproar if a commercial tourist operation caused injuries to kiwi, or dolphins?) These sharks should be hunting seals, not hanging around boats like Labradors. This is an unhealthy environment for these sharks and has clearly modified their behaviour. And it has created an unsafe environment for the humans using these waters.

We are asking our government to please do the right thing and shut down these operations immediately.

For more information about this issue go to the page Stop Shark Cage Diving Near Stewart Island on Facebook.