Surfer calls for shark cull after brush with death
A surfer who had a close encounter with a great white shark off South Australia’s West Coast is calling for a cull.
Andrew McLeod had paddled out to his mates at the reef off Elliston when he felt something hit him from beneath yesterday morning.
“Just felt a massive force, like a car crash and I got thrown off my board,” he said.
“It is an absolute fluke that I didn’t get killed because if it had taken any of my flesh, I think it would have come back for more,” he said.
The 35-year-old pharmacist and his two friends frantically paddled the 2km back to shore.
He estimated the great white to be about 4.5 metres long.
It even left two bite marks on his board.
He said it is only a matter of time before a shark strikes again.
“It is ridiculous that they’re classified as endangered and they should be harvested like every other resource,” Mr McLeod said.
Fellow surfer Sam Boord agrees.
“Something needs to be done, there’s an imbalance,” Mr Boord said.
“We don’t hesitate to take every other fish out of the ocean, but we leave the biggest ones.”
But others say a cull policy like Western Australia’s is not the solution.
“It’s their waters, their oceans so let it be, it’s part of nature,” former Elliston resident Bob May said.
The South Australian Government has ruled out implementing a cull policy, saying it has no logic.
But the trio is not letting the incident keep them away from the water, pulling out the boards and heading off for a surf the next morning.
