Save the whale shark. And say a prayer

That is great! If only it worked in Singapore. Too bad most Singaporeans only worship money lol.

Save the whale shark. And say a prayer
Wild Notebook: the ingenious methods of the Wildlife Trust for India
April 18, 2009, Simon Barnes, The Times Online

We tend to think of wildlife conservation as a particularly British thing: something that we must somehow seek to impose on the barbaric foreigners. We must make them see the light, must we not? But this is not the way it works at all.

I was constantly blown away by the Indian partner (of Wildlife Trust for India): an organisation light on its feet, punching above its weight and constantly solving Indian problems in a wholly Indian way.

Take the whale shark campaign. Fishermen were catching these, the biggest fish on the planet, simply for their livers, which were used for waterproofing boats. And while there was a very solid education campaign, and the Government was successfully lobbied to establish legal protection, the decisive moment came with the involvement of the holy man Morari Bapu.

Morari Bapu considered the matter and then declared that the whale shark was a god. The fish was nothing less than the first avatar of Vishnu. The slaying of the whale shark, Morari Bapu declared, was not fishing but deicide.

The killing was stopped at a stroke, and the great gods of the sea cruise off the coast of India, filter-feeding as they go, unmolested by the devout.