I’ve missed all those television documentaries about harmless sharks. It
seems to me that every time the nature channels want to up their ratings,
they run a shark week. The narration may be about conservation, but the music
is always a thumping ominous Jaws score and the footage tight shots of
gape-jawed great whites hurling themselves at boat transoms, shark cages and
hunks of bait. How better to handle sweeps week? It’s like football and
boxing rolled into one.

If you often see sharks swimming along the beach and people are swimming
every day, isn’t it likely that the sharks do not pose a serious risk?

I can’t believe that shark attacks are routinely kept out of the papers. The
media loves mayhem. In the Keys, if a barracuda so much as takes someone’s
toe, it’s a headline. The story I remember from last year was about a nurse
shark that clamped itself to some kid’s chest and wouldn’t let go. They had
to cut the shark off in the emergency room. From what I understand, the kid
was molesting the animal. Nurse sharks aren’t aggressive, but everyone has
their snapping point.

I don’t suppose it’s entirely fair to blame the boy. He may have been
misinformed. This spring I was on a dive boat out of Key West (Southpoint
Divers, if I remember right) and one of the dive masters said “The nurse
sharks around here are real friendly. If you see one, give it a pat.“ Stupid,
stupid, stupid.

I’m have never been to the South Pacific, alas. The sharks there sound
feistier. But along the East Coast and in the Bahamas and Caribbean sharks
tend to leave you alone.

In New Haven, we have a health food store called “Edge of the Woods”. It’s a
nice shop, if a bit hippie-dippy. The bulletin boards are plastered with
animal rights notices and the merchandise is strictly vegetarian, with one
exception. They sell shark cartilage, lots and lots of shark cartilage.

I asked about this once, and the woman behind the counter told me that sharks
were bad. Why, I wanted to know. She lived on Long Island Sound, by the
water, she said. So she knew sharks were dangerous.

I spent my childhood on the Sound without ever even hearing about a shark
attack, so I asked her to explain further. She described an incident in which
she’d been swimming and had seen a shark. Did it attack her? Well, no. The
upshot was her fear became proof of the danger posed by the shark. Talk about
guilty until proven innocent.

Too many people see animals through some sort of fairytale/ Disney filter, as
good guys or bad guys. Fuzzy fur seal babies are innocent. Predators,
especially non-mammalian predators, become villains. This is not irrelevant
to Conch-Lers. If the public ain’t sympathetic to sharks, you can’t expect
them to be concerned with mere slimey little mollusca and their habitats.