Cage Diving: Teaching Sharks to Eat People?

Cage diving; a popular activity and ever increasing topic of controversy.  Does this activity teach sharks to correlate people to food and thus increase the chances of being bitten?  

Skyler Thomas compares his interviews with Chris Fallows in 2007 and 2014 to see what, if anything has changed regarding this topic.  Fallows, of Apex Shark Expeditions in False Bay, South Africa, has been running cage tours for 20 years and uses his experience to defend some of the accusations against him and his industry.  As a tour provider he has an obvious motivation to argue for cage-diving, however, that does not make any of his arguments less true.

What’s your stance?

A few points to keep in mind while watching:

1. Are sharks intelligent, conniving animals capable of creating the association between bait and people in the cage, or are they mindless killing machines?  Or do they lie somewhere in between?
2. Does the cage-dive industry use red meat? What about surfboards and body boards as decoys?
3. Why are we tolerant of fishermen using bait that is often eaten by sharks, but not cage-dive operators?  For that matter, why are we tolerant of fishermen chumming, especially near-shore, while cage-dive operators chum significantly further from shore?
4. Do all cage-dive operators use chum?
5. Is there a positive food reward for the sharks?
6. What have studies shown on the matter?
7. Why have more shark bites on humans taken place during the cage-diving off season if the chumming is responsible for bites?

Next time we’ll look at whether or not cage-diving actually helps save sharks.