I was watching the Shark Documentary channel, also known as the Discovery Channel. The best thing about the discovery channel is that half the documentaries are like 15 years old, and propose theories that are disproved in a documentary you see on the same topic on the same channel later that same afternoon. So I was watching the Discovery Channel and guess what I saw, a shark documentary. Was it new? Nope. Was it good? Maybe...
It was one of the ones that I actually remember footage of, from seeing future documentaries where they reused the footage. Mostly the footage was of about 55 dog sized sharks attacking 5 divers. The weird thing is, the host just keeps punching them all in the nose, (the sharks not the divers), and the sharks just keep sneaking around trying to figure out how to eat them (the divers).
He really likes sharks, the host that is. He thinks they are the neatest things and that they have a bad rap they don't deserve.
So on this awesome show about sharks, he says that sharks only attack around 100 people a year, and less than a third of the attacks are fatal. That's not exactly a good argument for the harmlessness of sharks.
A 30% kill return on attacks is pretty good in my books. That's a good kill ratio. If you think about how many people are attacked by kittens every year, and how many of those prove fatal, sharks are pretty lethal.
He went on to argue that on the whole, your average person is highly unlikely to be attacked by a shark. Well sure, your average shark doesn't hang out on land down the street at Starbucks. But if you're underwater around a shark, your odds of getting attacked increase very significantly, and as we all know, 2/3 of those attacks aren't even fatal, well great!
You must remember seeing footage of a Great White shark attacking those kooky little diving cages, and the diver is inside the cage just chuckling and filming away. Why are the sharks so keen to attack a stupid metal cage? What makes that metal cage so interesting that they just keep biting it? Here's a hint, it wants to eat what's inside the cage. That's right, the human. And if there was no cage there, it would eat that guy like a fat person eats food.
Sharks are super cool for one reason, they eat anything, and that's all they care about. Sharks don't do anything else, they hunt and kill things that will approximately fit in their mouths. Plus, they don't just eat animals, they eat whatever is around. They've disected sharks and found like hubcaps and CD's in their stomachs. Hilarous! they're like me but sleeker and tough, and grey.
Hooray for sharks, they are the silent deadly "all you can eat" patrons of the inky deeps. Keep those oceans dangerous, keep eating surfers and Australians my cartiledge skeletoned friends, and I'll keep watching shows about you.