“Most shark researchers are thinking, not in the wrong way, but in an incomplete way,” he said.
One of Dr. Clua’s co-authors, John Linnell, of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, studies human conflicts with predators on land and recognizes that he is not a “shark person”. Ground predators sometimes chase and attack humans until they are killed, he said.
Recent history is replete with examples, some almost mythical. Two male lions nicknamed “the ghost” and “the darkness” were accused of killing dozens of people in southwest Kenya in 1898. These lions were tracked and shot by hunters. A decade later, a Bengal tigress known as “Tiger Champawat” allegedly killed 436 people in Nepal and India. A hunter killed her too.
Craig Packer, founder of the Lion Center at the University of Minnesota, said these stories are true, though certainly embellished by colonial authors for readers in Britain. Dr. Packer studied male-eating lions in Tanzania and compared the phenomenon to an “outbreak” that can spread through a flock or be taught by the mother to the young.
“Once in a while, one of them finds out that we are a free lunch,” he said.
The impression of bites will not be as simple as sending hunters to the field to kill a tiger with a taste for human flesh, Linnell acknowledges. But he said that “anything is better than the current non-selective response to mass murder”. If humans reacted to bears the same way they reacted to sharks, Dr. Linnell said it would be similar to “go into the forest and randomly shoot the first 1,000 animals you see”.
However, people react when shark attacks occur, Dr. Shiffman recalled that such incidents are rare. According to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File, there were 64 unprovoked attacks on humans in the past year and 41 provoked attacks, meaning that a person “initiates interaction with a shark in some way”.
Five of the attacks were fatal. More people die from falling trees in the United States each year.
Although shark attacks are uncommon, so do shark slaughter, although a prominent surfer recently requested one from Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, which is home to bull sharks. Instead, several countries deploy nets against sharks, similar to fences, in addition to surfing on popular beaches. Dangerous sharks get caught in nets, but also harmless ones, along with dolphins, sea turtles and other forms of marine life.
In place of these methods, many beach officials have adopted more humane methods of preventing extermination. Drones, airships and tags connect to apps that alert lifeguards and swimmers to avoid beaches when sharks are nearby. And after two fatal attacks took place in New England in recent years, Cape Cod residents received tourniquet training.