Claws!

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water ...



Because this is how serious Shark Week has become anymore, and because Owlkitty looks and acts exactly like our long haired black monster, I thought I'd pop this up.

You've seen the great white, but you haven't seen the great black kitty cat.


You feedz or he bitez!

a reply to: ketsuko


I got 7 cats. " You're gonna need a bigger litter box "

I'm not sure I exactly "get" this whole 'Shark Week' thing. I've watched a few of the programs...begrudgingly (because nothing else was on). Some of the programs seem to dramatize interacting with sharks, catching sharks and sharks just being, well, sharks.

I don't see any real point to the whole "Shark Week" thing, other than to sell adverts. At first I thought maybe the point of the programs was to call attention to sharks in a good way, by creating a bunch of drama and then downplaying it with reality. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. It's almost all 'created' drama, and very little reality.

I'm not some environmentalist, and what I'm about to say may hurt some feelz, but reality sucks sometimes.

As a diver, sharks are majestic and wonderful creatures. They are a necessary part of the ocean ecosystems. Can they injure or kill you? Sure they can, BUT there's 10,000 other easier ways to get injured and killed in the oceans other than sharks! Mother nature is probably at the top of the food chain, right next to idiocy. These programs seem to dwell on catching and/or tormenting sharks for the sake of drama.

As a fisherman, who has accidentally caught more than a couple sharks, I can say that catching a shark is an extremely stressful and debilitating event for the shark. Many don't survive the experience, especially large sharks. Sharks are natural born fighters, and they fight to the death (whether it's theirs, or their opponent's). That's what they're programmed to do, and that's pretty much ALL they do. So catching a shark is a life or death event for them, but for some fishermen it's just "fun". Sorry, but that's not cool.

Again, I'm no Tommy Tree-hugger here, but every time I see all the hype for "Shark Week" (on whatever 50 channels it shows on) I keep hoping these shows will highlight how important this fish is for the overall well being of our oceans.

Sorry...just kind of ranting I guess.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

When it started, Shark Week used to be just a solid block of programming about sharks, mostly interesting more scientific stuff.

But then they caught great whites breaching which is still cool, admittedly, but it started to inject the dramatizing because it was also the highest ratings. These days, they inject as much or more infotainment into it was they do anything useful and interesting.

The 9pm shows are going to the ones most likely to contain anything science/documentary related outside of the programming they've locked onto Discovery+ (the streaming service that I don't have). Some of the 8pm stuff might be OK. Almost all the 7pm block is celeb trash.

Last year they had an interesting show about how large tiger sharks congregated off shore on this island that tended to dump its dead livestock carcasses off a certain point. There had been no recorded tiger shark attacks there in anyone's memory, but there were certainly a large number of very, very large tigers in the waters. The local government was going to prevent the dumping of livestock carcasses, but the fear was that the sharks were drawn to the carcasses as a food source and the food prevented them from being hungry enough to get curious about other things, preventing attacks. So the show was about the group studying this possibility to see if the proposed policy might just be a disaster in the making for both man and shark.

There are always two or three interesting shows on white shark study and behavior. Last year it was about attempting to tag and track the increasing population up the east coast that's following the increasing seal populations as they move back into old haunts that happen to be quite close to public beaches.

But, my posting of this in honor of Shark Week was in part a nod at how the quality of the programming has degraded over the years.

a reply to: ketsuko

Omfg I love that. I love every second of it. Hahaha
Thank you for posting this.

a reply to: ketsuko

I understood that from the OP.

My statement was more editorial in nature.

That's all.