The bizarre response of the Western Australian government to recent fatal shark attacks has attracted widespread international condemnation as irrational, unscientific, contrary to Commonwealth covenants in regard to protected species, and entirely futile in preventing fatalities due to adverse interactions between people and sharks. But regardless, the politicians see mileage in doing something rather than nothing.
The problem for sharks is that they have big teeth and no fur, and a capacity to swallow us whole. Added to that is that they have no spin doctors or statisticians to sell the real risk over the hysteria. They have very few people in their corner who cannot be easily dismissed as fringe do-gooders, who like their landward cousins the tree-huggers, are seen as politically irrelevant.
Why then were sharks made protected species in the first place? It was to protect them from the apex predator against which they are powerless, homo sapiens, and arose from the observation that their reproductive rate was not sufficient to offset our impact on them. Perhaps if they were not protected species we would not imagine that suddenly their numbers have reached a point where we are no longer safe at the beach.
Another mistake by the shark is that they do not take enough of us. If they killed more humans more often the stats would be more accurate, their patterns of behaviour more evident and it might be more obvious that compared to predation by motor cars, guns, knives, incompetent surgeons, pushers and publicans, the impact of sharks on our population is infinitesimal.
And how is it that certain divers who have taken the trouble to understand sharks can interact with them confidently and without fear, while surfers choose to continue behaving like prey animals in shark habitat. If there is an opportunity for something to be learnt here it will not be achieved by baited drum lines.
The problem with predators is that they choose whether you see them or not. If they are curious they will come into view and test the interaction. If they are hungry and you tick the boxes as a potential meal, they may dispense with the small talk and come from below at speed, and you will feel them before you see them. At least, that is what a seal told me.
Is that the shark’s fault?