Last week an unfortunate person died when a shark bit into him while he was in the water with some fellow water loving comrades. Naturally the news media headed each report of this unusual incident with two words: shark attack.
With all due respect and condolences to the family of the victim, while my eyes were drawn to the news items in the papers, the term “attack” did annoy me a bit because it isn’t a totally accurate portrayal of what likely happened.
Sharks are primitive creatures that basically, as mentioned in the movie Jaws, swim around looking for food and the chance to reproduce, with an emphasis on the swimming and eating parts. Sharks are not known to discriminate as they encounter objects in the water, nor are they known to target humans specifically as prey as carnivores like the great cats might, so they will try anything that may serve as food if it is in its path. This is why sharks will try out boat hulls, surfboards or any dumped junk that may be in its field of vision. If it digests, fine: if not, the shark will probably die with it in its digestive tract (you do remember the necropsy in Jaws in which a license plate was pulled from the gullet of a suspect shark).
It is possible–and I dare say likely–that the shark involved in this incident took a different turn and got off its usual path while cruising off the California coast and happened upon some activity that it wound up investigating. Afterward, it swam off and was not picked up again by helicopters or other ocean searching techniques when the patrols went out in search of the shark.
Instead of calling these incidents shark attacks, I would like to kindly ask the media to start labeling them as deadly shark encounters. The word shark automatically draws public interest, of course, but the word attack implies that the animal sought out and committed conscious slaughter when that cannot be logically or scientifically proven. Instead, get public attention with the word deadly and call the incident an encounter, which implies an unusual meeting event. Who needs bunches of blood thirsty fishing newbies out on a Frankenstein style pillage of the waters looking for a creature that obviously has not stayed around to establish any sort of reputation as a man-eater and become a threat to the shore? It is a shame that somebody suffered such a horrific accident, and by airing this pet peeve of mine I do not wish to be misconstrued as somebody with no sympathy for mankind. I just have issues about mistaken labels being applied to any creature undeserving of it.
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