Say there was a species of whale shark that was far more common and had developed through the eons of evolutionary history a hybrid form of feeding — rather than filtering plankton and krill through its huge scoop-like mouth and gullet it dragged it’s open lower jaw over the sea bottom in search of particularly favored species of fish, mollusk and crustacean. It does this by taking everything into it’s mouth and then filtering unwanted species out its giant gills — some dead, some injured, some just stunned. Following in their wakes are multitudinous marine animals feeding upon these movable feasts, as they and their various and sundry genealogical forbears have done in the same waters for centuries. Generation after generation have come to rely upon this food supply for their survival. Say our hypothetical leviathan is called the “scoop shark.”
It is easy to see how the scoop shark would be an essential apex predator — not only for what it takes from the ecosystem but for what it gives to it. Any human activity that would endanger it’s population would be the target for stringent restrictions by the marine environmental lobby — they would claim that the entirety of the ecosystem would be in danger of collapse if this food producing source were to disappear.
Now make it real by making the mouth of the scoop shark out of synthetic rope and webbing and the gullet out of steel or fiberglass towing the open jaws from the sea surface powered by an internal combustion engine — and the selective filtering system is worked by human flesh, blood and bone. And instead of intentionally acting upon the interests of one organism of its own species each human scoop shark crew risks life and limb in the survival interests of thousands. As it now should be apparent, the “scoop shark” is a metaphor for our commercial trawler fleet which the environmentalists would completely eliminate as a totally destructive force with no redeeming ecological benefits.
This is a human rights issue — environmentalists are biased against the entire human race.
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