Philip Hoare

We should learn to love sharks, not demonise them

They are the oceans’ greatest guardians, says William McKeever, yet we slaughter 100 million every year

Powered by its muscular tail and twisting pectoral fins, the great white shark dives better than almost any other marine species. Getty Images 
issue 25 July 2020

Such a sublime, terrible beauty, the shark. Glidingly filled with our awe, as if those glassy eyes marked us out as a bite-sized snack from the start. Evolutionarily pre-lapsarian — they’ve been around for 450 million years — sharks are wreathed in a symbolic cruelty, theirs and ours. In one of the most vivid scenes in Moby-Dick, the whalers slice into sharks attempting to prey upon their prized whale catch; yet even as the fishes’ entrails spill out, the dying animals are so ferocious that they eat their own innards.

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