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 to 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.