Discovery's Shame

When I was on Shark Week in 2004, I gave this message to their film crew and presenter, Mike DeGruy. But it was suppressed because it contradicted the dangerously stupid and bloody-toothed image of sharks that they wanted to convey.  So it is now in a short video, along with the news that what is known about wild shark behavior has now been published. Sharks are not the cold and senseless monsters described by fisheries science and the media. They are ordinary animals, thinking about their lives, each one with a perspective that matters to him. The True Nature of Sharks is a full scale exploration of wild shark behavior. Drawn from fifteen years of observing sharks underwater as animals and individuals, it reveals a new dimension of understanding of their lives. This timely book will make the mysterious world of sharks come alive for you, and show you how the flexible and complex actions of the sharks reveals their conscious intelligence.

My personal campaign to raise shark awareness began when the entire community of hundreds of sharks that I was studying, as animals and individuals, were finned for shark fin soup, and when I tried to get help in protecting them, I came up against the Shark Week mentality, the mentality that declares that sharks should be slaughtered to extinction. Yet sharks had turned out to be the most interesting and intelligent animals I had ever studied, so different from the way they are shown on Shark Week and other media extravaganzas, that it was hard to believe that they were the same animals I knew so well—sharks are simply not the dangerously stupid automatons that popular media will have us believe—they are not low, cold, and murderous monsters. They are ordinary animals, thinking about the events in their lives and responding intelligently. By their actions, sharks reveal that they are self-aware, form companionships, make swift decisions depending ...