Some stories are timeless. Mark Steyn wrote this in September 2003. This is from today's Guardian. Next people will be advocating our hunting smallpox or polio to extinction.
12Jul04 — 3
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Either you’ve lost me, or I profoundly disagree with you. Steyn is as superficial as ever, and misguided as he often is. I dislike appeals to common sense, but, really, swimming where predators the size of people carriers (or whatever great whites are) is silly. And biodiversity is a good thing. That isn’t some trivial Prince Charles type anti-science superstition to be laughed off by you or Anthony Black-Triangle. That’s pretty much scientific orthodoxy as articulated by people like Edward O Wilson. However I may come across in my blog, in RL I try to centrist and consensual, but here I’m at the opposite pole to Mr Steyn, who, if I understand him, believes in the Biblical directive of God giving Man dominion over the animals etc, while I believe that we are just another species, and one as vulnerable to extinction as the Timber Wolf.
What I do know, however, is that if we kill off all species X, and subsequently discover that species X is essential for our well-being, we can’t get it back.
Dave,
I’d never laugh off a great white shark!
To be honest, this is plagued by practical difficulties, the most obvious being:
1. Where the hell are the sharks?
2. When they find the sharks, how do they know they are the right ones?
3. Do they need a bigger boat?
4. If they catch the sharks, do they define them as prisoners of war or unlawful combatants?
5. If they kill Bruce by mistake, Pixar will sue them for the lost proceeds from Finding Nemo II.
Re 5) – I’d say Bruce was more along the lines of a Lennard Pearce-in-Only-Fools-And-Horses than a Leonard Rossiter-in-Reggie-Perrin. So you should be safe.