Orcas Are Shaking Down Alaskan Fisherman Like Mobsters
NP- The orcas will wait all day for a fisher to accumulate a catch of halibut, and then deftly rob them blind. They will relentlessly stalk individual fishing boats, sometimes forcing them back into port.Most chilling of all, this is new: After decades of relatively peaceful coexistence with cod and halibut fishers off the coast of Alaska, the region’s orcas appear to be turning on them in greater numbers.“We’ve been chased out of the Bering Sea,” said Paul Clampitt, Washington State-based co-owner of the F/V Augustine.Like many boats, the Augustine has tried electronic noisemakers to ward off the animals, but the orcas simply got used to them. “It became a dinner bell,” said Clampitt. John McHenry, owner of the F/V Seymour, described orca pods near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands as being like a “motorcycle gang.” “You’d see two of them show up, and that’s the end of the trip. Pretty soon all 40 of them would be around you,” he said.
I’m not sure if its on the record or not but let me dispel the rumors right now like my friend DannyBoyCane. I am so overwhelmingly team animal over humans its not even funny. There’s no doubt that humans have made some interesting shit like microwaves, Jetskis, and 2 Girls 1 Cup, but how many humans do you really enjoy being around? If you took my immediate family and like 6 of my friends out of the equation, I would take an animal over every single person on Earth. With that being said, that’s not really the point here. Since we’re led to believe that animals aren’t capable of reading Barstool yet, this is a PSA that we need to watch our asses here.
The day that animals realize the power they have here on earth we might really be in trouble. We’ve been giving them a raw, raw deal for a long ass time now. Plowing fields to make food they don’t even get to eat, whipping the shit out of them to run in a circle while we stand around like assholes in 3 foot wide hats, or keeping them in a cage in an office in Manhattan while people piss themselves next to them (sorry Steve Scurrier). It would be a fair expectation that there would be some retribution in order if they ever figure it out.
How would they do that? Well I’m not an evolution researcher (spoiler alert) but by my math, if the same process that shaped us to eventually be able to figure out how to use the internet and organize slutwalks is the same process that’s working on the animal kingdom, won’t they one day make some strides towards the same end game? Imagine the problems we’d be facing if spiders unionized and threatened to come crawling out every night when we were trying to sleep? We would be absolutely powerless. Anyone whose had extermination adventures before knows that you can do as many bug bombs and foggers as you want but if there are multi-legged inhabitants that want to get in your house, they normally do. We would have to do some serious negotiating and something tells me we wouldn’t be sitting on the right side of the deal-making table. Bottom line is, Orcas bullying Alaskan fisherman, who are already some of the toughest humans we have to offer, should be a huge wake-up call for homosapiens everywhere.