Sharks are intimidating with their speed, teeth, and the way that they appear from what seems like out of nowhere, but sharks are not the ones you should be worrying about. Many animals you wouldn’t expect kill far more humans than sharks do, and this fear is due to the way that the media industry portrays sharks.
Hollywood has portrayed sharks as these blood thirsty killing machines who you shouldn’t trust, meanwhile they are the exact opposite. In fact, more sharks are killed a year by us rather than us by them. Humans kill around 273 million sharks a year while sharks only kill about 10 of us. Humans mostly kill sharks because of their fear for them however, sharks are more afraid of us.
Peter Benchley, author of the book Jaws, regrets scaring the media with the way he portrayed the sharks. Benchley says that he wishes he never wrote it, and he also mentions how wrong we are about them. The book is loosely based off real events where there was a string of killings by a great white shark in 1916 by a great white. Steven Spielberg says he also regrets how the movie shaped the public view of sharks. Although sharks were of course feared before the book and movie came out, there is no doubt that the story has a great impact on the public’s perception of sharks. The movie encouraged and led to an increase in great white trophy hunting, “A collective testosterone rush certainly swept through the east coast of the US,” says George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research in Gainesville. “Thousands of fishers set out to catch trophy sharks after seeing Jaws,” he says.
These beautiful animals will be wiped from our oceans by 2040 if we don’t do anything to stop these brutal killings. Sharks have been around for 400 million years, they have experienced dinosaurs and have continued to thrive after five global mass extinctions, and yet humans have been the biggest threat to these animals. In places such as California, Hawaii, Illinois, Delaware, Maryland, New York, Texas, and 5 more states have enacted laws that prohibit shark fin trade making it illegal to sell, trade, or even possess shark fins within the border of their state. However, in at least 10 of these states’ laws have not stopped restaurants from serving shark fin soup, the main reason for sharks’ death.
