The Department of Fisheries is on the hunt today after bizarre footage surfaced on Facebook, showing a man driving around Safety Bay, Western Australia with a dead tiger shark strapped to the front of his car. The man has yet to be identified, but authorities from the Department of Fisheries told Seven News the fisherman could be hit with fines of more than $5,000.
Fisheries regional manager Tony Cappelluti told Seven News, “All whaler sharks, including tiger sharks, with an interdorsal fin length of 700 millimeters or greater are recreationally protected, when taken from the South Coast and West Coast bioregions.”
Cappelluti continued in saying that the Fisheries would need to physically measure the shark to determine whether it was protected. Measuring the shark from the video would be insufficient in court.
“Penalties for an individual committing a first offense include a fine of up to $5,000 and an additional penalty of up to 10 times the value of the fish taken,” said Cappelluti.
On PerthNow’s Facebook page alone the video has been shared by more than 1,300 people and viewed more than 660,000 times. Photo: Julie Wright / Facebook
Following Cappelluti’s statements, the fisherman responded to Seven News on Tuesday, saying the shark was too heavy for him to lift into his boat. “If I could have put it onto the boat or anywhere else, I would have done it,” he said. “But as a last resort I put him on the bullbar. It wasn’t the fact of showing off.”
The man argued the shark was already dead when he hauled it in to avoid other sharks going after the carcass.
“If I put the shark back into the water, other sharks would come around and start a feeding frenzy and if people were nearby they could probably end up getting hurt or killed,” he said.
With the limited information available, there’s perhaps no way of knowing if the shark was alive or dead before the fisherman hauled it on the boat. Whether or not the Fisheries will take this into account in court will be interesting to find out. Question is: Whose side are you on?
