Agony Ant vs. Sharks
This month on the frightfully fractious, alarmingly alliterative animal complaints column, we siphon shark science from stories.
Dear Anthia,
When a shark bites a person, it’s called a vicious attack. When a person bites a shark, it’s called dinner, fin soup, or fish and chips. Who can I blame for that misbranding? And when did these fin-tastic creatures become public enemy number 1? Don’t coconuts kill more people?
LOL- Toothy Tim McToothface
Hello Toothy,
What a question! A true double standard hit upon by you, my double-barrelled friend. In the most sane and simple terms, humans bully sharks: a state of affairs you undoubtedly are used to with a name like yours. That said, bullies rarely pick on victims that can bite their head off (I can’t imagine why) so for that very reason, we must dig a little deeper to pick our original culprit and their cause from the line-up of shark bullies through time. Here’s my two cents on the matter, my evidence for the jury…
We humans are simple creatures; 99% of animals we haven’t heard of and don’t give a monkey’s arse about. These are the likes of the ugly worm lizard and the slimy boring sponge, rarely given enough attention for us to pass judgement on them. Or indeed spend much time naming, as you can tell.
The 1% of creatures remaining hog the spotlight, falling into three classes: cute, charismatic, and creepy. Guess where sharks land? An excess of sharp, pointy teeth sees them flop the cuteness score, a rather repetitive underwater prowl knocks charismatic from the running, but the unblinking dead-eyed stare scores sharks top marks on the creepy scale. Creepy and deadly are not a good combo.
Snakes, spiders, scorpions, sharks- all are creepy, all are deadly, all are hated by humans. Unlike the Australian man whose genitalia were bitten twice in six months by venomous spiders, this is NOT a coincidence. So whilst flowerpots, lawnmowers and coconuts each kill more people than sharks, none of these three are creepy enough (or alive enough) to get bullied. And aside from death by lawnmower which could be messy, being eaten by a shark is a rather less attractive way to go. It tends to make headlines, whereas deaths by flowerpot do not.
That’s the philosophy side of things. Unhelpfully, it doesn’t offer up any obvious candidates to blame save from the press and human nature. One of those is quite hard to criticise in a newspaper column thanks to its censors editors. The other is equally hard to criticise without offending vain, narcissistic, emotionally insecure, stupid, ugly readers.
What about Steve Spielberg, creator of the epic Jaws which terrified a generation and sparked four sequel films with slightly higher budget shark models? Surely he deserves a place on the blame boat? Perhaps. But the tale Spielberg told was a true one of a shark dubbed the Matawan Man-Eater which managed to maul 3 separate people in the space of 30 minutes and plagued the American East Coat for several weeks in 1916. The great director merely dramatized the story of the first shark celebrity and created a classic.
You might as well blame Ian Fleming who wrote James Bond into existence fighting maniacs with pools full of hungry bull sharks. Or blame modern filmmakers for inventing zombie sharks and reviving extinct mammoth shark species blown up to ten times their actual size. Blame the spear-fishers who go after the creatures with whopping great harpoons and then complain when their prey turns the tables. The critic cruise is filled with guilty culprits- in short, we’re going to need a bigger boat.
I’m blaming the English language itself. Because whilst we don’t know where exactly the word ‘shark’ came from, none of the options are good. It might have been taken from the Dutch word schurk meaning villain, or further back from the Greek word karcharos meaning sharp tooth. It might have come from the Saxon word scearan meaning cut to pieces. But either way, if you started calling your pet dog Meathook or Ripper, would you still expect visitors to pat him?
Believe it or not, sharks have less teeth than slugs. However slug teeth are somewhat smaller. And with a 420 million year ancestry, sharks predate slugs and all but the very earliest of trees. Long-toothed indeed. This perhaps hits closest to the mark in terms of why humans bully sharks: because they the most successful predators evolution has produced, and we feel threatened by them. Even a blindfolded shark with a blocked nose and a bad head cold could hunt you down from the far side of a public pool. That ability has earned them a fear-tinted respect from people throughout history.
Throughout history, across many cultures, people have held that eating animals gives you some of their power and vitality. Asian tradition continues this, and Chinese cuisine specifically. 100 million sharks are killed each year for shark fin soup because the wealthy see it as a status symbol and many still believe it holds medicinal properties. In the end, after surviving four mass extinctions, success has come back to haunt the 500-odd shark species. We fear them so we eat them, and once in a while, they bite back.
Recently, the Australian government has stated that its media will no longer be using the term ‘shark attack.’ Such incidents will be referred to henceforth as negative encounters, despite the number of ‘negative encounters’ with sharks continuing to rise. Changing sea temperatures and booming coastal populations are bringing sharks and people into contact more and more, putting strain on the already shaky public image of these sharp-toothed critters. Will this new shark-friendly branding take hold and spread? It’s too early to tell. But one thing is sure- I’m going to be far more wary of deadly flowerpots in future.
Elliot Connor
