Recently I read an article by Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, who had encountered a great white in the Bahamas (!) while diving for a shipwreck. These were his thoughts after the encounter:
“Back on the boat, when my pulse had dropped below 250 and my skin color had lost its necrotic gray, I began to wonder if the accepted facts about sharks were not facts at all, and I've been reappraising ever since. The process is ongoing and endless, and if I've been able to draw a single, solid conclusion, it is this: The more we know about sharks, the more we realize how much there still is to be learned.
Today there is a Peter Benchley Shark Conservation Award, and shark conservation is actually on the UN agenda, even if, as in a recent UN meeting, a US-backed proposal for shark conservation was defeated by Russia, China and Japan.
Yesterday I watched “The Cove” (a must-see film), which features Ric O’Barry, capturer and trainer of Flipper, and I thought that in a way these two men, Penchley and O’Barry, share a similar fate.
I say this because Penchley, author of Jaws, is probably responsible for our modern-day trauma of shark attacks. He is of course not responsible for the shark-fin industry which is the prime cause for shark populations’ decline. But he has helped to create a monster, a myth. Nobody cares about sharks, they aren’t cute or big-eyed. And that’s why sharks aren’t protected until now.
In turn, Ric O’Barry, as one of the first and once most sought after dolphin trainers in the world, started the anthropomorphic mania for dolphins. Obviously this mania went in the reverse direction than that for sharks but it was similar in size. He was among the first humans to interact with dolphins at that level, to teach them tricks, a pioneer you could say. But a remorseful one at that.
So these two men who are chiefly responsible for putting these animals onto TV and cinema screens, and if you like, are to be blamed for ingraining these animals so deeply in our western society's psyche - the inventors of Jaws and Flipper – are remorseful of what they have done.
Of course, our fear of sharks is latent and much older than Jaws, as is our admiration of dolphins much older than Flipper. Maybe our feelings about these animals go way back, back to the sailor accounts of being shipwrecked at sea and either attacked by sharks or saved by dolphins.
But we also know now that the many gruesome tales of large sea-monsters attacking ships are folklore. And we have erased all these monsters from our fear of swimming in the ocean. And yet the shark remains.
But that's not the point I want to pursue anyways. This blog entry is really about these two men.
O’Barry’s life took a radical turn when one of the female bottlenose dolphins that played Flipper (her real name was Cathy) died in his arms, in captivity. As O’Barry says in the movie, “The Cove”, "I spent ten years building that industry up, and I spent the last 35 years trying to tear it down."
There is somehow a very very deep tragic irony to both these men’s lives. It is almost like O’Barry is working tirelessly for redemption now. Both of these men have tried to rectify the image they have helped create, the shark as a ferocious beast and the dolphin as a joyous, ever-happy animal.
Penchley writes: “When I wrote "Jaws" more than 20 years ago, we lived in a different age. Richard Nixon was President, there was no cable television, no such thing as a VCR, Steven Spielberg was an unknown wunderkind in his twenties, and our knowledge of sharks (science's and the general public's) was still in its infancy. My research for the book was thorough and good, for the time. I read papers, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the experts. I realize now, though, that I was very much a prisoner of traditional conceptions. And misconceptions.”
To see O’Barry in action, go see the film “The Cove”. It is a fascinating though ghastly documentary about the secret slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, that O’Barry along with friends has worked to uncover and now caught, for the first time, on camera.
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