Sharkwater Documentary Beatiful and Sad
A week or so ago, Jen and I watched the Sharkwater documentary. It is about a conservationist who is concerned about the shark fin trade. Sharks are fished and hunted and killed for their fins. The fins are like pieces of gold in Asian countries where Shark Fin Soup is not only a delicacy, but a culturally significant status symbol. As a result, the shark populations around the world are being ravaged in order to fill the demand for soup, and thus, money.
The documentary was brilliant. It had plenty of underwater scenes, and all the things you would expect. It also had a storyline where the filmmaker joins up with a rogue boat that goes after poachers’ boats with battering rams, and water canons. We have the rogue boat racing a coast guard to international waters so that they could avoid prosecution. It is more than your average documentary.
I am not a PETA member or anything like that, but this film will leave you wanting to help conserve sharks. I was on board relatively early in the film, but there was one scene in particular that just enraged me to the point that I wanted to run out and do something right away. You see the poachers catch sharks, pull them on the boat, and de-fin the sharks by hacking at their still-alive bodies with knives. After they remove anything resembling cartilage on the shark, they push the still-moving, breathing, soon-to-be carcass back overboard so that a completely immobilized shark can float to the bottom of the ocean to die a paralyzing death.
Watching from an underwater camera, we see one such shark float to the bottom of the ocean to die, but his eyes are still moving. I am getting goosebumps right now as I type it and it has been a couple weeks since I saw the movie.
