I just don't get people who love sharks. They are truly hideous killers
No matter how many times I look at them, it's always the same: the sense of shock and disgust that something so truly hideous, so purely monstrous, could stalk the earth, and even worse, could begin with alarming frequency to stalk the waters around my childhood home of northern Massachusetts.
No longer just the menace of beaches Down Under, the great whites are actually coming for us all. The marine research group Ocearch has even predicted their arrival on English beaches. 'We believe they should be moving up past Brest [in Brittany, France] and Cornwall,' said Chris Fischer, one of their researchers. Heaven forbid!
But the man of steel and naturalist Lewis Pugh takes a different view, along with plenty of marine conservationists who see sharks, even the great white, as primarily victims, to be preserved at all costs, no matter the human lives and limbs they claim per year.
On Thursday, in critical homage to the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which instilled the universal terror of great whites, Pugh embarked on one of his marathon swims around Martha's Vineyard off the New England coast. This is where Jaws was filmed and in these waters, thanks to the nightmarish creatures' drift northward in search of seals, they are now regularly spotted. His 62-mile circumnavigation will take 12 days, and on each day he will be speaking to audiences about the importance of sharks.
'It was a film about sharks attacking humans and, for 50 years, we have been attacking sharks,' Pugh said. 'It's madness. We need to respect them.'
What's madness to me is the idea that I might encounter one of these figures from hell in waters I used to enjoy without a second thought. What's madness to me is that more swimmers will lose their lives this year when a great white mistakes them (so we are told) for a seal.
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