Update On Dog/Shark Fishing Story

Yes, the practice does happen. But it appears to not be as abundant as the original article seems to claim. Some people are claiming that animal rights groups may be behind inflating the story when their real objective is to stop shark fishing in general, as apparently many take them for their fins.

Here's the scoop from Snopes.

Comments

[lawbster]

thank you! i was surprised you'd fallen for that Dan. must be too many late nights.

[Steel]

I was a commercial fisherman for a decade.

From San Diego to Adak AK.

Often we'd fish for shrimp.

Shrimp 'lay down' at night and fishermen have the whole night to find something to do.

One thing we did was fish for sharks.

The first bait we'd toss was the garbage.

Once we had one onboard, we'd cut it up and use THAT for bait.

THEN the sharks would come ... oh yeah.

Funny thing about sharks ...

They are so old in evolutionary terms that they have 2 'brains'.

One in their head and one in their tail.

True story here ...

I pulled an 8 foot blue shark up at 9PM.

Beat him to death with a baseball bat.

Cut his spinal cord.

Layed his belly open and let the guts fall out.

Put him back on a hook.

When the sun came up the next morning ... he was still trying to swim.

I couldn't beleive that so I pulled him back onboard.

Did I mention that I'd cut his 'jaws' out the night before?

When I got him back onboard he was flopping.

He was flopping hard enough to break another crew member's ARM.

Heh,

Sharks. Ya gotta love 'em.

[Sharon GR]

Gotta love Snopes. Always the first place to go if you hear something a little too unbelievable.

You can spend far, far too long surfing their pages, too.

[Captain Joe]

Snopes is still a lefty site

[MarlboroGal]

Um...love sharks, Steel? Admire them for surving zillions of years maybe but love them? Nope. Not me! ;)

Oh hell, I'll admit that I have a phobia of sharks. That goes back to when I was 18 y/o and at the beach all alone one early summer day. The back river of the beach was basically deserted, and I had gone there so I wouldn't run into anyone. That day, I almost got nailed by a shark while going out into the ocean to cool off. I looked down and saw a shark swimming towards my legs. Sure, it was a baby, but even baby tiger sharks have TEETH. Oh yeah, I walked on water that day to get out of his way. Now I just swim in pools. ;)

About 7 years ago, I took my 4 young boys (at the time) and one of their friends fishing in our boat out near the intercoastal all by myself. The DH had to work that day. All we caught that day were baby sharks, at least 30 of them. As fast as we would throw the line out, we got a bite. You can bet your sweet @$$ that I didn't take the sharks off the hook though. I just cut the line. The boys had a blast, but I was a nervous damn wreck at the thought of anyone falling into that water with all those baby sharks. I just kept thinking to myself, "I wonder where their mother is?"