Shark Week 2009 - Day of the Shark 2

Shark Porn-(noun) Creative activity (writing or pictures or films) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate an intense fear of all species of sharks.

Shark Porn comes in many guises. For the most part Shark Porn is a direct result of shark programming by design. Instead of looking at sharks and shark behaviour for good story ideas, "designed programming" looks at the lowest common denominator "the attack" and builds stories from there.

The current debate/outrage is being directed at those who enable Shark Porn, many of which are industry insiders who boldly claim to love sharks and yet enable shark programming that ultimately harms them and our industry.

The other side of Shark Porn is more direct. Industry members who enable shark disasters operationally. This years Shark Week will feature one such video.

The operator behind that video has been telling anyone who will listen that this video was an accident, "a one time event".

Unfortunately all of these claims are after event fabrications and he knows, as does the entire industry, that this video is just one of series of cage breaches at the same site by the same operator.

We have had enough. We have had enough of operators who cry wolf when things go wrong to operational errors that are the result of sloppy operations. We have had enough of operators who blame the videographer, or photographer for capturing their disasters and profiting from it. We have had enough of those few industry members who claim the moral high ground for sharks and yet deliver mayhem and disaster upon an entire industry.

Save The Sharks! - Save The Operators!

If you are a current supporter of these few industry folks take a long, cold look in the mirror. There is no such thing as "an accident" in a baited shark situation and the myth of cage breaches as an acceptable part of our industry is just that, a myth.

We either take full responsibility for our own actions or we do not. It's called industry leadership and our industry has an appalling lack of leadership right now. Make money, enjoy fame, sweep mistakes under the rug...if you can.

If we want to see changes to Shark Week programming and Shark Porn we need to call out the pornographers and say "No More, Dammit No More!"

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you want to see why the shark diving industry is under assault in Hawaii, the Bahamas, the Farallones, and Isla Guadalupe - set your TiVo's to the following program. Because every single anti-shark diving opponent in an estimated 30 million viewers this year will be watching this disaster and using these images to close down our industry.

This is Shark Porn

Day of the Shark 2 Monday, August 3 at 10 p.m. ET/PT

See what happens in this harrowing hour, when a great white breaks through a 300-pound aluminum shark cage and traps the divers inside. Another shark tackles a former Navy Seal in shallow waters off the coast of St. Petersburg, Florida. And a bull shark invades a spear-fishing trip in the Bahamas. When you’re a visitor in the vast and complex ocean, any day could be the “Day of the Shark".