Ethical Cage Diving With Sharks: Is It Possible?
There can be few greater thrills in life than plunging into the dark and murky depths of a cold ocean, to come eye-to-eye with one of the most powerful killers ever to stalk the waters of our planet. To swim with sharks is on many people’s bucket list.
Shark cage diving is hugely popular, particularly in countries with great white shark populations, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Mexico. It allows you to safely enter the water with these apex predators, and witness them in all their glory.
But, with all the thrill and excitement of a great white shark cage diving encounter comes an added concern for travellers conscious of their impact. Is cage diving ethical?
The Ethical Dilemma of Cage Diving With Sharks
It doesn’t sound like an unethical experience when you outline the bare-bones of shark cage diving. You put on a wetsuit, jump inside a cage that is suspended just off the surface of the water, and go down in relative protection to view the sharks swimming beneath the waves.
However, in reality, there are often more layers to this practice.
The ocean is a big place, and sharks, while seemingly massive when before your eyes, are microscopic in comparison. So, tours often perform what is known as ‘chumming’. They’ll use bait, such as fish guts or carcasses, to lure the sharks by taking advantage of their powerful sense of smell. They bring the sharks to the vessel, so you can watch them swim about.
But then how can this be considered ethical? You have lured the animal to you. You haven’t gone to it. Bringing sharks to your boat using bait may take them away from actual prey and other natural behaviours in favour of an artificial experience.
Supporters (often guides) of this practice claim that the shark is never fed, so it does not come to rely on humans for food, and that because the smell of chum is so strong, sharks also don’t start to associate human scent with the potential for food -- another concern people have, suggesting cage diving results in more aggressive behaviour towards humans.
They may have a point, but that doesn’t make this practice ethical. However you frame chumming, it still removes a shark from their natural behaviour and brings them over to a tourist's vessel purely for the sake of entertainment. Sharks are also inherently built to become aggressive around prey, being the killing machines they are. This can cause them to lash out, which is rarely a problem for humans, but can result in injury to the shark.
Again, this is not a common occurrence, but this video below highlights the risk to sharks caused by luring:
When you illicit unnatural behaviour from animals, it’s hard to consider the practice ethical and responsible. There are certainly less ethical and harmful wildlife viewing practices out there, but cage diving through the use of chumming is not something we advocate here at Xplore Our Planet.
Can Cage Diving With Sharks Be Ethical?
Yes, of course! Ethical wildlife viewing is all about passive and non-intrusive encounters that allow animals to continue their normal behaviour without human influence. Just as with a safari jeep driving up to near where animals are grazing on the Serengeti, so too can it be ethical for you to find a shark habitat and engage in passive viewing through the use of an underwater cage.
The problem we have here is accessibility. It’s very hard to find a shark in the open ocean, which means chumming creates near-guaranteed experiences while attempts to find sharks without lures can be fruitless and frustrating. Sharks are curious animals, and will inspect cages and boats that come into close proximity to them, but this practice of passive observation isn’t going to offer the same successful strike rate of throwing a fish corpse into the water and pretending like the shark is about to get a meal.
There are two tricks to ethical shark caging diving:
Patience - Being prepared to wait for a true and authentic encounter, rather than an unnatural experience.
Knowledge - If you know where to find sharks, such as times of year they congregate in certain places, and hotspots, it becomes easier than just throwing a cage into the waters and seeing what bites.
A great location to look into is Guadalupe Island in Mexico. Here chumming is illegal and by opting for a reputable tour provider, you’re likely to experience an ethical and responsible cage diving adventure.
