Caribbean reef sharks
Caribbean reef sharks enjoying their natural habitat (Picture: Getty)

One of the media’s favourite summer scaremongering campaigns is underway.

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There have been stories about a man who was hospitalised after a shark ‘attack’ in Cornwall, headlines about a ‘monster’ 23-stone shark caught off the Welsh coast, and news that The Only Way Is Essex’s Pete Wicks was bitten in a ‘horror attack’ while filming Celebrity Island With Bear Grylls.

This will be escalated in the months ahead, as sections of the media continue to unsettle the public and demonise these marvellous fish, who are among the oldest species on Earth.

There will be talk of ‘shark-infested waters’, as if the sea is our home, rather than theirs. As people jet off on their holidays, some of the media will lead them to believe that demonic sharks are circling every resorts’ coastline, waiting to wage war on us angelic humans.


The facts tell a different story. We kill more than 100 million sharks each year, but sharks kill only a handful of us – just five people globally in the whole of 2017.

You are more likely to die after slipping in your bath than you are in a shark attack.

Of the 480 different species of shark, only three ever carry out unprovoked attacks on humans, and only then very rarely. They are perhaps the planet’s most maligned and misunderstood creatures.

How did we get it so wrong? Blame Jaws if you like. This 1970s Spielberg movie, with its iconic poster and scary soundtrack, is such a success because it plays deftly on our fear of the predatory ‘other’.

Such fear is rarely based on anything real, and our fear of sharks is objectively misplaced.

The dreaded Great White Shark kills fewer humans per year than cows do (Picture: Getty)

Yet sharks have plenty to fear from us. We kill them for their teeth, jaws, fins and meat.

The popularity of shark fin soup in countries such as China has led to fishers slicing off the fins of sharks and throwing them back into the ocean, where they slowly bleed to death or die from suffocation, although this practice is now illegal in many countries and territories.

Sharks are essential for the health and well-being of oceanic eco-systems, yet several of their species are expected to become extinct over the next two decades.

So we are wrecking our own environment as a result of a false ‘threat’. What an absurd and villainous species we are.

Our relationship with wider sea life also shames humanity. As a vegan, one of the most common (and baffling) questions I’m often asked is: ‘Oh… but you eat fish, right?’

Of course I don’t. Many fish that are stolen from the sea die from slow suffocation. Others are killed by being smashed over the head. Many are still alive when their throats and bellies are slit open with a gutting knife.

And yes, they do feel pain, as scientists at Edinburgh University and the University of Liverpool have confirmed.

Indeed, professor Donald Broom, scientific advisor to the British government, said: ‘The scientific literature is quite clear. Anatomically, physiologically and biologically, the pain system in fish is virtually the same as in birds and mammals.’


Just as the spin doctors of the food industry hide all this from the consumer, the media hysteria about sharks distracts us from another truth – that with every shark we kill we are hastening an ecological disaster that will ultimately swallow us all whole. That is the real monster.

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