Sunday, November 30, 2008

Shark Hating Voyeuristic Parasite?!

Kevin Harris. You either agree what he has to say, or hate what he has to say. Either way you are obligated to have an opinion-because that's how he's set himself up.

One of our favourite shark blogs penned by the folks over at Beqa Adventure Divers all but detonated on Kevin Harris this morning. It's interesting reading.

For the record we're on the fence with Kevin. He skates a fine line between 70's conventional wisdom about sharks that often fail to take into account recent data trends and shark research. The difference, for example, between chumming for pelagic shark species vs reef sharks and a host of other salient points when lumping together "opines" on everything from shark attacks to site closures.

On the plus side Kevin has gone where no one has gone before taking a deeper look into industry shark attacks and poking about in places where our industry does not typically want anyone poking about. This is the blogger equivalent of the 400,000 soldiers who marched straight line into machine gun nests during the battle of Ypres in 1916...when you come out into this industry with opinions there's no where to hide.

One thing is for sure Mr.Harris is not the mindless WOW playing shut in behind the Cyber Diver Network whose anti-shark diving crusade is nothing short of pathological. We would humbly submit to you in the realm of "Shark Hating Voyeuristic Parasites" this fellow gets the award post dated to 2000.

Mr.Harris, his website and opinions, are more nuanced than that. As we said back in September:

"An industry is only an industry when people discuss views, organize, and debate topics affecting that them. Kevin Harris provides the starting point for many of those debates for the commercial shark diving industry".

He also has managed to raise the ire of many along the way, which we suppose, was part of the game plan from day one.

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