S8: E13: Keith Cooper: The Stingray Whisperer
“The number one thing is to respect us as a country and a lot of people are not - people who feel privileged in their life, they own a very nice yacht, they have money, they're wealthy, they live in Florida, they live the golden life, they live a grand life. I'm not saying there's anything bad about that, I want to be that way too. But at the same time they have a responsibility to be respectful of our laws and they have to respect our marine life. They should follow [the law] and not try to hurt things that are native to our country and just do whatever they think is arbitrarily good for their own spirit and their own soul, which is damaging our livelihood. And they should learn and work with the Bahamian people. Let us teach you,” - Keith Cooper
Keith Cooper is the founder of the Bahamian based West End Ecology Tours on Grand Bahama Island. Over the past 16 years, Keith has formed a bond with many of the stingrays in the Bahamian waters, earning him the name, The Stingray Whisperer throughout the island.
I went down to Grand Bahama a couple of weeks ago to meet Keith and some of his stingray friends and to learn more about the horrible situation that many of these stingrays and lemon sharks (that live in the same waters) are in.
An enormous amount of them have been getting hooked, meaning that people are fishing them, the lines break and the sharks and rays are left with enormous metal hooks in their mouths. I learned from Keith that much of this cruelty is being caused by boaters that are coming to the Bahamas from Florida and are doing it “because it’s fun.”
I spent a couple of days with Keith and we swam with the stingrays and the lemon sharks and swam very close to them so that we could easily see the gigantic metal hooks in many of their mouths. Something that should have been absolutely magical was instead, devastating.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
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Transcript:
Keith: [00:00:15] The number one thing is to respect us as a country. A lot of people who feel privileged in their life, they own a very nice yacht, they have money, they're wealthy, they live in Florida, they’re living the golden life. They’re living a grand life. I'm not saying there's anything bad about that. I want to be that way, too. But at the same time, they have a responsibility to be respectful to our laws. They have to respect our marine life. They should follow and not try to hurt things that are native to our country and just do whatever they think is arbitrarily good for their own spirit and their own soul, which is damaging our livelihood. They should learn and work with the Bahamian people. Let us teach you.
Elizabeth: [00:01:07] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Keith Cooper. Keith is the founder of the Bahamian based West End Ecology Tours in Grand Bahama. Over the past 16 years, Keith has formed a bond with many of the stingrays in the Bahamian waters, earning him the nickname The Stingray Whisperer, throughout the island. I went down a couple of weeks ago to meet Keith and meet some of his Stingray friends. Mainly, I went down because many of these stingrays and many lemon sharks in the same waters are getting hooked, meaning they have these gigantic hooks in their mouths. Much of it has been caused by boaters that are coming to the Bahamas from Florida. I swam with them up close, really close and I saw the hooks in so many of their mouths. So it’s awesome to be here in the Bahamas just so people get an idea of why I'm here and what's happening. We'll get into it. But I want to talk about yesterday and going out on the boat with you, meeting the stingrays and swimming with them and snorkeling, which was such a gift. So thank you for that.
Keith: [00:02:55] I want to say thank you, Beth, for making the trip from New York to Grand Bahama Island and specifically into West End, where I live and where I've been living for the last nearly 20 years, to do the work that I've been doing with these incredible and amazing stingrays and lemon sharks off of Sandy Cay. So I thank you and everyone who is listening for taking an opportunity to let me share my message with you all.
Elizabeth: [00:03:21] So before we get into your message and before we really even get into the lemon sharks and stingrays. Talk a little bit about you. You were born here, right? This is your family's life on the West End and Grand Bahama, talk a little bit about that.
Keith: [00:03:34] My family has been in the Western community since the 1800s, the mid 1800s, when we all came from different parts of Europe and Africa to establish the colonies that are the Bahamas. My family was a group of fishers. They lived their whole life subsisting off of the sea. These things were taught to us as children how to go out and capture food that we could eat, not to raid it, not to over consume it, and not to just kill it because it was there. It was just basically for survival. So these lessons that I was being taught as a child somehow percolated into my mind as an adult. Eventually, without even realizing the power of persuasion as a child, what you could become as an adult truly has an influence and an impact on your life. So it's definitely gotten to me now to a point where I got into doing some work with some marine life that really has changed my whole perspective as to what my role is as a human being and as a caretaker of this great earth that we live on.
Elizabeth: [00:04:41] You said to me yesterday, which I thought was really great, that the line was about one adulthood, two childhoods.
Keith: [00:04:49] Yes, the great Bob Marley sang a song that says Once a man, Twice a child.
Elizabeth: [00:04:52] Yes.
Keith: [00:04:53] And everything is but for a while, which is so true. We are born as youths and born as babies. We grow up to learn our certain behaviors as children and as young adults and then we become mature people. We have conscious decisions that we can make, choices that we can make. Then as we age and learn all of the things that we experience in life, and once we get to a certain age, we start to deteriorate again, we start to go back to where we came from. That is we start to see that our lives are going to be shorter now and we're not going to be around forever. So the things that we do as we mature and as we age, it's all important because we want to leave a message and a positive one and a legacy for others coming behind us.
Elizabeth: [00:05:34] Let's talk about how this started, like how the stingrays kind of came to you. They literally somehow asked you for help.
Keith: [00:05:43] Oh, yes. Well, one day I was out fishing. At the time I was cleaning off the beat off of my boat. It was just a 20 foot boat. We were in the water on the boat, rather, cleaning off the bait, throwing it in the water. Then all of a sudden, the boat was surrounded by about 20 stingrays consuming the fish and the squid and the bait that was on the bottom. I was totally amazed by this reaction of the animals coming up to the boat. I didn't realize at the time that they were smelling the fish that was in the water. I didn't realize that they had the capacity to do that. So they all came around the boat, they ate everything, and then they left. I said, Well, you know, there's a few of them I could see out there sleeping in the sand, but I wasn't prepared to go in the water with them. This was around the time Steve Irwin had gotten killed from the stingrays in Australia. That made me even more nervous to go in the water with them, because my curiosity got the best of me and I said, let me come back out here with my snorkel gear and let me get in the water and see what's going to happen. Now, believe you me, when I got in the water by myself, I saw a stingray sleeping on the bottom. I swam over to it and I said, Lord, don't let this stingray kill me because I did not know what they were going to do. I approached the stingray by snorkeling down towards it and on my fins and my mask and started going to snorkel down to it. Then suddenly the stingray, which had been covered in sand, because this is how they camouflage in the wild, swam away without doing anything to me. At that moment in time, that's when the love affair began, because I realized they didn't kill me, they didn't hurt me, they weren't trying to hurt me and that's when my curiosity said, Do some research, man. Go and find out everything you can about stingray births, stingray behavior, stingray, anything. When I came back and started to Google it, there was nothing that I could use. So I took five years of my life, literally sleeping with the stingrays, going out there frequently as much as I could to watch them and observe them and literally sleep and swim with them. That's how I began to observe their behavior and when there were some of them who gave me the idea that they were more friendly would come up to me and literally say hello. I'm like, this is really bizarre because the rest of them weren't doing it, but only a few would do it. I was like, this is truly fascinating stuff. So this began a situation where I started to look at it as an opportunity to bring an educational ecology program to the Bahamas and to this community to educate visitors about our marine life.
Elizabeth: [00:08:19] I think this happens a lot when people start focusing on individuals within a species that you start realizing, wait, they all have different personalities, right? Like the fact that some of them were very friendly and outgoing, a lot of them are shy. Did you start to distinguish who was who a little bit at that point?
Keith: [00:08:40] That's where I began to put common sense into play, because, you know, you're dealing with what could potentially be a very dangerous animal if you don't know how to handle it properly. So these things were rampant through my mind as I was beginning to get closer to them. So one of the things I started to look at was the colorations of their tops, of their backs, basically. I was looking at the dark, the dark in the lighter colors of the stingrays. Then on those stingrays backs were markings or birthmarks. So I started to make some mental notes of these characteristics. So I started out with my very first named Stingray, who was Big Brownie. Big Brownie was named after a gentleman who was very tall, who had been out on the key, who were one of my experimental groups of people who were taking out just to see how the Stingers respond to them. So that was my very first named stingray. Now, subsequently, she died because of the hurricanes and because of her age, I believe she was very old. One time I met her after Hurricane Matthew in 2016. She came back after I went to check on them to see how they were doing, but none of them were around. They were all out in the shallow water, probably sleeping or looking for food. But suddenly I said, okay, I'm going to leave now. I saw in the distance a dark spot coming closer to shore and I walked to it. It was her. I said, Wow, she actually came to say hello. I had a couple of pieces of fish. I gave her one of them. She took it, swam away, and I never saw her again.
Elizabeth: [00:10:15] That was it?
Keith: [00:10:16] That was it.
Elizabeth: [00:10:17] That's so sad. I have to say, yesterday my favorite was Hugger. This is a stingray who literally sees you and just kind of attacks you. Like just hugging your whole body over and over and over again.
Keith: [00:10:31] She's one of the newer rays she's been around for four or five years now. She is amazing. When she first met me up close, she came into my lap. I'm kneeling down to the sand, the water is up to my chest and she approaches me and starts gently flapping her wings, looks up at me, literally, has her body partially out of the water, her nose area. She's looking at me like, hey, I want to talk to you. She's talking to me, but she's not using words, she's using her body language. So I had to read her body language. All she was saying to me was, Do you have anything to eat? I said, What? What am I going through here? This is amazing. So she wouldn't leave. She kept flapping wings. You saw it yesterday. She wouldn't leave until I gave her a fish. So I said, Let me test this and see if this theory is right. Sure enough, she took the fish and swam away. She came back later asking for another one.
Elizabeth: [00:11:27] Like a dog.
Keith: [00:11:27] Like a dog, I said, this is peculiar. So people who go on the tours and guess who come from all over the world to visit me to learn about stingray behavior and lemon shark behavior, they're like, How did you get them to do this? I said, Well, I didn't get them to do anything. I said, The one thing that I've learned over the years is I stayed calm working with them. I never reacted. I never was afraid, even though I was in the beginning. Eventually I realized they weren't trying to hurt me. This was my message from them. They were telling me, Hey, Keith, you're a great guy, you're cool. We're going to let you into our world, right? We're going to show you what we're all about. That began a love affair that just couldn't stop.
Elizabeth: [00:12:08] I mean, stingrays really aren't very violent or aggressive unless they're in fear or you step on them.
Keith: [00:12:15] You have to provoke an animal like a stingray or even a shark for that matter. But stingrays are not the kind of animals that aggressively go towards a human or anything for any reason to hurt it.
Elizabeth: [00:12:27] So why did they hurt Steve Irwin?
Keith: [00:12:29] Because Steve Irwin may have done some things that were not common to wanting to get to know an animal he had familiarity with. When you go into an animal's world, into their kingdom or habitat, and you are being aggressive towards it in any way or you're looking and pretending to be almost like a predator. We humans, when we get in the water, we like to chase after things because we think that getting closer is the way to go. It's not. You let the animal do its thing and they'll come to you. But he didn't do that and I believe without having all of the facts in front of me, without having all of the personal stories, he may have gone after the stingrays. These were not the same stingrays I'm working with, these are Australian stingrays. I’m working with Atlantic Southern stingrays. So he probably chased it like he would a shark. These stingrays, whatever species it was, turned on him and said, wait a minute, you're not one of us. You're coming at us in a very aggressive manner. Everyone knows how gregarious Steve Irwin was with the crocodiles and the animals he worked with in the Australian Zoo. So his life was based on land animals. I would give him all the credit in the world for understanding the land animals of Australia, but once you go into the marine environment that's an entirely different sphere, that's a totally different world. You got to know what you're doing before you put yourself or other people's lives at risk and he didn't do that. When I tell the story to my guests, I say, you know, I don't know the exact story of what his death is, but an animal like a stingray just would not attack a human unless it was provoked by the human. When you step on a stingray accidentally walking on the beach, you provoke it. The animal didn't know you're a human. The animal's just going to turn around and whip his tail and harm whoever's the nearest subject. When they're in the water, sleeping on the bottom of the ocean floor, resting, their eyes are basically covered, picking out of the sand and a shark or a hammerhead or whatever animal is looking to devour one of them for a meal will come in and the stingrays will alert, their sensors are going to pick up, their ampullae will register that there's some harm coming. The energy from that shark is aggressive. They know it. They can feel it. So they're heightened now. Their awareness is heightened. So they wake up and they try to swim away from the animal, from the shark who's trying to attack it. Well, if the shark happens to catch it, well, that's the end of the life of that stingray, because they're not super fast swimmers. They can dart well, but aren’t fast, long swimmers. They just have to stop at some point. So I've seen all of this over the 16 years I have been working with these animals. I've seen all kinds of interactions and behavior from the animal, so I can almost predict what a stingray is going to do while the guests are in the water before the guests even know what the stingray is going to do itself.
Elizabeth: [00:15:14] Right. Has that stingray ever become aggressive with you?
Keith: [00:15:17] The only times I've gotten an aggressive approach is when they have the capacity to pinch you and nip on your skin, nip your fingers and pinch your skin really hard because their teeth are not in the front of their mouth like a shark. They have cartilage for their skeletal structure. Over the years, I've had a couple of rogue stingrays who I've perfectly given the name Rogue because they would come in, bite me, pinch me, one of them sometimes even break my skin because they pinch so hard. They're looking at me like, okay, I'm here for food, man. I'm not here for no love. I'm not here for your affection. I just want to eat something. That's telling me another thing about their behavior, that some of them have such distinctive personalities that why don't all of them bite me, right? Are these are the young stingrays who were just trying to I guess they were trying to tell me, look, you're feeding these other guys, these other stingrays. By the way, they're all female stingers that I work with. They're coming in and they're saying, look, I want something too. When you observe this in the wild, people probably think that I'm making it up. But you saw it for yourself. I mean, it's like they come to me, they know what they want. I give them what they want. They leave, they come back. Some stay, some go.
Elizabeth: [00:16:33] Some like to hang out.
Keith: [00:16:34] Some like to hang out like dogs hang out with people, too, you know?
Elizabeth: [00:16:37] What about the lemon sharks? I know that you have really personal relationships with a lot of the stingrays, but are the lemon sharks more there or do you know them too well?
Keith: [00:16:46] This area where we are when we conduct the tours in very shallow water and it is a natural habitat zone for the lemon sharks, rays, sea turtles, nurse sharks, other predators may come in from time to time seeking food sources up in there, as well as conch and other marine life and other small fish all live in this area. So when the lemon sharks come in, these are the juvenile species. These are smaller ones who basically are learning how to become pelagic predator type sharks. They're not accustomed to aggressively going after food, yet they're learning how to, first of all, smell the food through their Ampullae of Lorenzini to determine where the food sources are. Much like how you saw yesterday when we were out in the water, I did the hard wire DNA test to prove to people that sharks and stingrays only consume fish, not humans.
Elizabeth: [00:17:39] I learned this test, by the way, by swimming right, with all the lemon sharks. He said, no, they're not going to eat you watch. It's a little intimidating.
Keith: [00:17:48] You know something.
Elizabeth: [00:17:50] A little scary at the beginning.
Keith: [00:17:50] I must interject. You're not the first person that has felt that way.
Elizabeth: [00:17:54] I didn't really think they were going to eat me, but, I mean, they could have taken a chomp.
Keith: [00:17:57] Well, the reason why they won't eat you or bite you is because, first of all, you're not a fish. You're not part of their meal diet. Second, you're not carrying any fish. You're not spearing any fish, which is where a lot of accidents occur when sharks bite humans, is when they're spearfishing or surfing where they look like a food source. You're not doing anything stupid. You're just there, you're just there looking at them. This is really what the tour is and the whole experience is about, is for you to observe what I observe and to share that observation with you is really the essence and the spirit of everything that I do.
Elizabeth: [00:18:33] You've had this world, this incredibly magical, beautiful world with these stingrays and what these sharks. Then in the past five or six years, the world has become a little bit dark, right? Or a lot darker. So how did that start?
Keith: [00:18:48] Oh, Lord. Well, you know, over the years, boaters come from Florida to the West End area because there's a resort hotel here, and they come to our waters as guests, visitors in search of our marine life and searching for all of our fish, our conch, our lobsters. Right now, as we're doing this taping with a lobster season, it just started on August 1st. A lot of boaters tend to come over here with their families on vacation, which is very good, but they break the laws of the Bahamas a lot of times thinking that there is no retaliation for them to do these kinds of things. I have made observations over the last seven, eight years of boaters coming out to Sandy Cay with their children, bringing in very large 35 to 40 foot sport fishing boats and engaging the animals up close, harassing them by putting the children and adults on the beach with their hooks and lines, and they start to hook the animals needlessly for no reason. They just want to have fun, as they say.
Elizabeth: [00:19:54] When you say they start to hook the animals, for people who don't know exactly, will you explain?
Keith: [00:19:57] Hooking is when you're out in the water or you're on a piece of land and you have a rod and a reel with a hook on it.
Elizabeth: [00:20:04] And they're big hooks.
Keith: [00:20:05] They’re big hooks. You throw this hook out with bait into the ocean where you're trying to hook a shark for fun or a stingray might bite the hook. What happens is those lines will break because the animals are very strong. There are pure muscles, these sharks and stingrays. So when they break the line, the hooks now are engaged deep into the mouth of the cartilage, usually of the shark's body that stays there for literally years, because these hooks that are in these sharks mouth, do not just come out.
Elizabeth: [00:20:41] Yesterday, the sharks were swimming with all three had hooks and many of the stingrays had hooks stuck to their mouths. You could see blood that was just disgusting, beyond sad.
Keith: [00:20:52] Well, you know, the ignorance of some people is that they see it as just a fish. It's just another fish. They don't really see it as an animal that has a role in the ecosystem. They don't understand that what they're doing is harming the animals ability to hunt naturally. When you take away anyone's right to hunt, especially if you're a marine animal like a shark or a ray, that severely impacts the ecosystem because these animals serve a purpose. They clean up the bottom of the ocean, they take away all of the dead fish. They scour and forage constantly looking for these kinds of foods, plus the other crustaceans that they may eat. Now, sharks are more into eating other fish like barracuda that may eat another fish, or a barracuda may be eaten by a shark, and they'll come in and they'll devour up the scraps. That's what these sharks are so important to me and why they're so important to know for people coming in that you can't just go and start hooking these animals just because you think it's a great idea or it's a cool thing to do. Then you walk away with an animal who's now suffering for the rest of its life, potentially, with a long metal letter wire, long strands of braided fishing line with these enormous hooks hooked into their mouths and into the cartilage of their skeletal structure. You can't just pull them out, especially the sharks. You have to wear a chain mail suits and corral the lemon sharks, in order to be able to do that, you need to net them, flip them over, and then manually pull them out with your hand.
Elizabeth: [00:22:25] But it's totally illegal what they're doing.
Keith: [00:22:27] Absolutely.
Elizabeth: [00:22:28] But there's no one enforcing it.
Keith: [00:22:29] No, because the government of the Bahamas is not a rich nation. It's rich in other resources. But it's not rich in manpower because we're a very small country. We have about 350,000 people that's spread over 100,000 square miles. Most of them are concentrated in Nassau, which is the capital, and that's on another island. On this island, we just don't have enough police force, marine fisheries. We just don't have it because there's so many people out on the water these days. It's more than you can actually convince to hire, to bring in, to train them, to be patrols. So the best thing that I can do now is to try to educate people about their behavior, get them to understand what they're doing is wrong.
Elizabeth: [00:23:07] Well, I think they probably know it's wrong because they're not doing this in Florida, are they?
Keith: [00:23:10] No in Florida you cannot do these kinds of things. In fact, they come here to the Bahamas to do the things that the Florida laws do not allow them to do there.
Elizabeth: [00:23:17] Because there they'll actually get in trouble for it.
Keith: [00:23:19] Trust me. In Florida, they have the manpower to patrol, even though there's a lot more people there. But they have enough boats in every county that they have their own Marine division. Plus you have the state of Florida's Fish and Wildlife Water Commission boats. Then you have the US Coast Guard. You understand what I'm saying? If they do and they get caught, then they're in trouble. But a lot of them, like you, for example, in the Florida Keys, you cannot eat conch, you cannot dive up conch, you cannot collect conch, at any time. If you get caught with one conch on your boat, that's big trouble because it's a protected species, just like our sharks. Our sharks in the Bahamas are protected species.
Elizabeth: [00:23:58] But no one cares.
Keith: [00:23:58] But no one cares.
Elizabeth: [00:23:59] So how do we change this?
Keith: [00:24:01] Hopefully through this podcast, we'll hopefully get people to understand that the role that I play here is truly one of the conservationists and one who wants to protect the marine life out here. If we can get the help we need to get more people aware and to make more research facilities available to educate the boaters when they come in, there's a lot of different solutions. You can't really get into all of them now. But the most important thing is to create an environment where people are aware that there is an institution or there is a location that has a really good program so that boaters come in, they're shown or told or at least made aware that these are the things you cannot do in our waters. I think that's a good first step. But enforcement certainly is going to be the best step. I think down the road here, I've been hearing rumors and the government of the Bahamas, and we have a fantastic leader of the government right now who's very much into Marine protection. So I think West End could potentially maybe in another five, I don't know, ten years, hopefully sooner bring a marine fishery boat to this area.
Elizabeth: [00:25:08] But the thing with five and ten years and I hear this so much in so many different worlds where animals are being just massacred, do we have five or ten years?
Keith: [00:25:18] No, the earth has changed dramatically in terms of our waters, temperatures, and the rising sea levels. This is what the government of the Bahamas is very concerned about. We are a low lying, small island developing state. That's what we call SIDS. Sooner or later, we're not going to have a coastal zone. We're not going to even have islands. We're going to be covered in water. If we don't mitigate some of these issues, both from a coastal as well as a fisheries perspective, there isn't going to be a boating community coming here anymore because they're going to kill off whatever we have. The Bahamian fishers are doing their job to harvest as much seafood as they can because there's no quotas there for them. But there are quotas for foreign boaters. But a lot of foreign boaters will bring Bahamians on the boat and hopefully try to get them to circumvent the law, whatever. But if they get caught and I've seen it happen here over the years, I've seen boaters get caught right in the marina here with illegal catch and too much of it beyond the quota that they're allowed to bring.
Elizabeth: [00:26:20] And what happens?
Keith: [00:26:21] The police come in, they do a report, they file a report, they get information. Usually the Coast Guard gets involved in the United States because once they go back to the United States, the Coast Guard needs to be aware that they came to the Bahamas, they did something illegal. So the Coast Guard is our friend when it comes to our international partnership through the Marine divisions, the fisheries of the Bahamas government, our State Department here, as well as the State Department United States, they all work together to try to mitigate some of these egregious acts, as well as other things like human trafficking and drugs and all that stuff, which has been the mainstay of our relationship with the United States for many years. But now that our resources, our natural resources are under assault, the government is paying more attention to that because they now have said to boats, look, you only allow so many lobsters per boat, ten, you only allowed so many types of fish per boat. People just break the law. They just figure they can do whatever they want.
Elizabeth: [00:27:16] But for you to remain in this positive place, you can't lose your seabeds, right?
Keith: [00:27:22] You can't. So what the prime minister is basically saying is, let's protect our sea beds, let's maintain our lobster population. His name is Phillip Brave Davis. He is very, very keen on the impact of global warming now. He realizes through his reports and his studies and his research that has been shared with him just how serious it is for the country and how it's going to affect us down the road. So he's being very visionary right now to establish this relationship with these folks around the world who want to see the Bahamas gain more of its natural resources in terms of our autonomy, our ability to control it, our ability to manage it and to keep it going for future generations. Because this is where his head is right now. It's the next generation or two.
Elizabeth: [00:28:10] He's amazing.
Keith: [00:28:11] He really is amazing, man. I mean, he made me feel like I was worthy of being a Bahamian again because he was giving us hope that, you know, you guys need to understand you are living in one of the richest natural resources regions on the planet. Everyone wants to come to the Bahamas. Everyone wants to know what the Bahamas is doing. When the Bahamas starts something new, other nations in the Caribbean and usually in other places around the world start to copy or mimic what we're doing because we're always trying to lead rather than follow and that's what's so exciting about the future.
Elizabeth: [00:28:40] So everyone who is wanting to come here, though. The one thing that really needs to change is they need to come here and respect it.
Keith: [00:28:47] The number one thing is to respect us as a country.
Elizabeth: [00:28:52] And that's not happening right now.
Keith: [00:28:53] That's not happening. A lot of people who feel privileged in their life, they own a very nice yacht, they have money, they're wealthy, they live in Florida. They are living the golden life. They’re living a grand life. I'm not saying there's anything bad about that. I want to be that way, too. But at the same time, they have a responsibility to be respectful to our laws. They have to respect our marine life. They should follow and not try to hurt things that are native to our country and just do whatever they think is arbitrarily good for their own spirit and their own soul, which is damaging our livelihood. They should just, you know, just learn and work with the Bahamian people. Let us teach you, which is what I've been trying to do. But we have such elements of society that they don't want to learn, they don't care. They just want to be arrogant and they just want to be, you know, whoever they are. Those people I don't have much time for.
Elizabeth: [00:29:47] Well, seeing it up close and in person, these gigantic hooks in these animals, mouths stuck there for life and that they're in pain, it's devastating.
Keith: [00:29:58] How can we not feel the shark's pain when the shark is living in such agony? We don't even know the depth of it. But that animal cannot be normal. It cannot do what it's designed to do, which is to do its job in the ecosystem, to clean up the environment and clean up the bottom of the ocean. It cannot hunt predators to survive. Sharks provide a very healthy reason why we need them on this earth. They are there for a reason. Why do you think they lasted well beyond the Jurassic period and they're still here. So what does that tell you? If you're an open minded, intelligent human being for any creature on this planet that lived that long as a species and has become a subset of species all around the world, can we learn from that? Can we understand that there's a reason why they exist and we shouldn't kill them all? I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't do the things we need to do to survive, but you can't just go around killing, harming just because you can and you feel good about it.
Elizabeth: [00:30:59] And going to other countries where you think other rules don't apply to me there.
Keith: [00:31:02] Exactly. I can't even begin to tell you the conversations and the rebuttals I've gotten from American voters who think that I don't have a right to speak my mind in my own country.
Elizabeth: [00:31:14] It's embarrassing and it’s horrifying.
Keith: [00:31:16] It is embarrassing. I mean, the best part about it is I lived in the United States. I understand American ways and customs, and I understand the uniqueness of the people who live there. But the Bahamas is a very unique country in every sense of the word. People just don't understand when they come here. They think it's just a bunch of islands and a bunch of people living on them and they don't know anything. That's how they see us right now. That's sad but that's really how they see us. You guys don't know what you got. For some instances, that's true because I almost don't recognize just how gorgeous what we have out there is and how we really all need to protect it. All of us, bohemians and non bohemians.
Elizabeth: [00:31:52] I agree. Keith, it's incredible what you're doing for the Bahamas, for these rays, for these sharks and for the world is awesome. So thank you.
Keith: [00:32:03] Thank you, too. I just want to say one more thing, in terms of our tourism industry. We are a country that is based on tourism. That's our number one industry. Without it, we're dead. I'm going to be honest with you. So let's kill everything while we can. Let's destroy everything when we can. Now we have no tourists coming because there's nothing for them to come to. This is why I do what I do to stop this kind of foolish behavior, to educate people who are committing these crimes, and to get people to understand that we need help. That's the real message. I want to get out to the audience. I was like, Hey, come help us. We need help here.
Elizabeth: [00:32:37] Thank you, Keith. To learn more about Keith and to learn about West End Ecology Tours, go to our website Species Unite. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website Species Unite and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Garry Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna O'Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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