Bite, Eat, and Attack: Shark Double Standards

Laura Banks’s headline “When sharks eat people it’s time to cull” immediately made me think “When journalists intentionally lie, it’s time to fire them.”  The damage articles such as the crap published by the Daily Mail UK, the Daily Telegraph, etc. is immeasurable both in terms of damage done to humans and to marine life and we will never move forward with real “beach safety” strategies when we are approaching these strategies with heads full of lies.

Sharks do bite (and occasionally kill) people...just less than anything else on the planet.  And even more rarely do they consume the person they bit.  In most cases in history where sharks have consumed human flesh they did so when the human was already dead.  This means the shark was in scavenging mode, cleaning the ocean.   

Those of us who have observed white sharks in person have been humbled by the size, power, speed, and agility of these animals.  Others of us have even seen the white shark in process of killing a pinniped (seal, sea lion, elephant seal, etc.) which wakes us up to what the difference between an investigative bite and the desire to consume looks like.