Ninth fatal shark attack on Reunion Island in six years. Crazy, no?
Like terrorist attacks in Paris and London and so forth, it ain’t easy to keep a handle on shark attack fatalities in Australia and on Reunion. You have to re-read the latest news to make sure you’re not scrolling through an old story.
But, it’s always new, there’s always more.
Yesterday, a bodyboarder who was “devoted to warning people about the animals was mauled to death” near Saint Leu. In six years, there have been twenty one attacks, nine fatal.
From The Daily Mirror,
Adrien Dubosc, 30, died off the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean just two months after one of his best friends died in almost identical circumstances.
Mr Dubosc was a member of Shark Watch Patrol, an organisation dedicated to cutting down on shark deaths on Reunion, which is plagued by man-eating bull and tiger sharks.
Despite this, he loved the fish, and regularly posted Facebook pictures of ones he had seen, together with biological details about them.
Just after 11am on Saturday morning Mr Dubosc entered the sea at Pointe au Sal in Saint-Leu with his bodyboard, off a beach where watersports are officially banned.
A police spokesman said: ‘The young man was in the water with two friends, when a shark attacked him, biting his right thigh, and his groin area.
‘The victim was pulled out of the water, and emergency workers arrived very quickly. Despite cardiac massage, he died within half an hour of the attack.’
The beach was packed at the time, and members of Mr Dubosc’s family were among those who watched the horror unfold.
Frederic Carre, a local sub-prefect, said members of a medical-psychological emergency unit attended the scene, and were treating many of the witnesses.
On February 21st Mr Dubosc’s close friend Alexandre Naussac, 26 and another trained shark spotter, died on a nearby beach that had also been officially closed to watersports.
The attack happened in Saint-Andre, and saw Mr Naussac being bitten in the femoral artery.
The thigh wound caused blood to pour out of Mr Naussance, as those he had been bodyboarding with also desperately tried to save him.
This morning, Thiery Canestri, whose thirteen-year-old son Eli was killed two years ago, posted a collage of recent deaths with the line, “Combien encore?”
How many more? It’s a good question.
It’s pretty clear that most of the world and the people in it could really give a shit about surfers getting eaten by sharks!
Reunion Island: Where you go to surf to reunite with your maker!
I’m surprised that the authoritarians who run Australia haven’t killed off all the sharks already. What a backwards little island that place is.
Road, the average Australian doesn’t give a shit about surf or surfing.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Has anyone read a strong and fully researched piece on what’s been done and not done in Reunion to mitigate attacks? Like the full bottle, historical records, shark population estimates, fishing activities, drumlines, meshing, enclosure nets, etc etc and their effects or otherwise on shark attacks? And also the human population’s growth and coastal behaviour changes? Anything in the French media?
Well, I believe the motherboard piece did a decent attempt at getting a good overview of the issues, but nothing to the degree you’ve described. It would be interesting to read, to be sure, but I think intensive investigative journalism, seems to be beside the point at this stage, and were I paddling out off Reunion with a buddy, I wouldn’t be asking him if he had read the latest piece by so and so, but did he think that splash was backwash or something more lethal.
Despite whatever mitigating factors are involved, it seems pretty clear what the problem is and what the solution is. The question is does the Reunion population have the will (and the attendant legislative means) to force the necessary changes.
It is a crime of the soul to watch a beautiful wave go unridden because people are stopped from protecting themselves. It is crime of society for people to be fed to the sharks for some woolly-quasi-science-cum-green religion.
Totalitarians like you are always interested (final) solutions.
Go for a swim with your sacred animals. Be part of the solution.
That’s the ultimate test really isn’t it… send the CEO over, plop him in the line-up with one attached to his ankle.
Human’s are animals. Conservationists preach “letting nature taking its course”. Human’s were naturally evolved with large brains and intelligence beyond other animals. We don’t fault nor hold responsible Lions, killer whales and great whites for being alphas and killing weaker animals. Nor do we fault animals who kill other predators threatening their offspring and family members. I find it odd that for conservationists there are ABSOLUTES with not killing A SINGLE shark, but they don’t advocate for reduction of other animals that threaten populations of other (sometimes endangered) animals by just doing what they are naturally inclined to do. Who made them the judge and jury to which animals are protected and which aren’t? eg… Mongoose and snakes eat bird nests of protected birds. Why are mongoose and snake “culls” turned a blind eye to by conservationists to protect the bird? Isn’t that nature? Wild pigs destroy endangered plants. Why is it ok for humans to hunt pigs? Would conservationists be ok with a plant species being erased from the earth to allow feral pigs to overpopulate?
It’s because conservationists survive on eggplant and dingle berries and their brains are fucked with parasitic leaches.
“Conservation”, used to be about ensuring the birds weren’t killed, that the deer didn’t overrun the woods, now much of it has been transformed into a stick to beat humanity, a justification for controlling human action, and, in the extreme, as a means of alienating us from ourselves by denying us the most basic instincts: confronting a threat to our life.
The human “cull” that these bastards promote is an effective use of fear and guilt to drive the point home that you are not in control, they are. How dare you defend yourself? This is why, should Shark Shield be successful, they won’t be satisfied, and they will start to complain that it is causing whales to beach, krill to commit suicide, etc. This is why the fuckers complain about a few turtles caught in a net. Their ultimate end is power over you, and, currently, they have achieved it.
Just kill about 70% of them I reckon.
It’s probably not even 0.0075% to make a massive difference to our line-ups.
Ain’t that true. In all the vastness of the oceans, we need only a half-mile from the shore, and yet, to ask for even that, is construed as a big middle finger to mother nature.
Cull.
Sharks are cunts… Also explains why they are always so angry https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
French must be tasty? A French girl got bitten on the leg bodyboarding in New Zealand’s South Island a couple of days ago
I love French girls.
You’re not implying this has something to do with Reunion ALSO being French, are you??
I’d say a lot more , and how many men have been eaten to make them man eaters?
One less boogie boarder. Ironic about the shark watch membership. WWKD?
My greatest fear is of dying ironically. This is the chief reason I will never buy a shark shield.
In the words of Kelly Slater, “I’ve had it with these mothafuckin’ sharks, on this mothafuckin’ island!”
Me too.
Yeah yeah there’s hardcore and Alpha and dedicated and all that, but with 20+ attacks 9 fatalities including your best friend and you’re on a fricken shark watch, it’s well past the time to stop fucking surfing there.
Stop. Surfing. There.
Surfings not worth radically increasing your risk of dying horrifically for.
Not on your own or in front of your family.
And surfing a 3 foot salmon hole beachie in Esperance/Albany etc is fucking out of the question too.
It would have to be some Namibia 3 foot barrels to make it worth a crack.
Move away, or take up fishing or something. Take a year off. Don’t just blindly keep paddling out
Or . . . its time to set up a vigilante crew and do some night culling. If you get caught, call it “grief management”
Doubt they would get a conviction in Reunion.
If it is a marine park then maybe enough fish to obviously support large population of sharks – so that says to me got to be a hugely diverse array of life.
If they not going to kill em then that area has got to be the hotspot for testing every fucking single piece of repellent tech there is