Originally published at: Tourist attacked in Hawaii by mama seal who was looking for her pup (video) | Boing Boing
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More accurately, harrassing a seal and finding out. Characterizing this as a “seal attack” is disingenuous.
There’s a reason Hawaii has a law that one must stay at least 150 feet away from a monk seal with a pup. It is a class C felony to harrass a monk seal.
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The animals are starting to get pissed off.
Loose seal!
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Check the local Hawaiian news coverage. The beach was closed. All the other swimmers got out of the water but one swimmer did not. The seal was making warning vocalizations well before defending her pup.
Just found one of the articles that asserts, “Marine life officials said the woman was previously warned of the dangers of being in the area.”
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Emphasis mine. The distance that people are required to keep away from seals with pups is 150 feet or ~50 meters. Note that this is not required of the seals. It is required of the people. It is an active responsibility, not a passive one. If you are in an area where there are monk seals, you are supposed to actively avoid them, not wander about randomly and, hey, oops, there’s a seal.
That’s not how harassment of wildlife works. Moving into the territory of a territorial animal is harassment. It doesn’t require blowing raspberries at them or calling them names.
This is a constant problem with tourists in Hawaii, and it’s why warning signs are posted at every beach.
I think you’ll find that the reason local authorities haven’t pressed charges is because she was mauled. That’s probably punishment enough. NOAA still hasn’t ruled out federal charges.
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I feel for the woman due to her injuries and I’m glad she wasn’t hurt worse. As pointed out in the articles, she was not malicious, just insufficiently cautious. That’s a characteristic of tourists pretty much everywhere, but the consequences of naive incaution vary with the inherent dangers of the environment.
As anyone can plainly see in the video, the beach was indeed closed. There are pylons and plastic fences surrounding the beach. That does not signal, “hey, jump in and have a swim!”
The eyewitnesses say she was swimming about 150 feet from the beach. The seals were not on the beach; they were in the water. Again, not seeing that the seals were in the water doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and it is the human’s responsibility to avoid the seals, not the other way around.
To quote the Executive Director of the Hawaiian Monk Seal Preservation Ohana, “And for someone to think they should go ahead and have a swim, just because they don’t see the mom and pup on the beach is very irresponsible. Rocky was protecting her pup; she did not attack this woman, this woman provoked it by being in her space.”
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The signs on the beach and cordons are a dead giveaway she had no business there.
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I really don’t understand what the argument here is. We can sympathize with both the seal and the woman while recognizing that the woman was at fault (whether intentionally or not).
The lesson here is that things like this happen when humans encroach on the natural habitats of wild animals, and hopefully this incident will motivate people to stay away from seals. Anything else is just noise.
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But you don’t know that. It may be that no seal or seal pup was physically injured, but the interaction may have changed the behavior of one or both in such a way as to risk their long-term survival. That’s why experts on pinniped behavior want to minimize or eliminate such interactions with endangered Hawaiian monk seals. They do know that intense interactions with humans change the seal’s behavior, and that’s why there are severe penalties for initiating interactions with seals.
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