The Independent:
Turn off the spine-tingling music and forget everything you thought you knew about this solitary, “mindless killing machine”. Sharks have individual personalities. They socialise, choose best friends and create social networks of unusual complexity. They can be trained by humans to complete simple tasks, much more quickly than rabbits or cats, for instance, and retain the knowledge for much longer.
Sharks also teach each other new tricks: how to find food, identify predators and charm mates. Like sea turtles, some travel huge distances to return to their own birthplace, again and again, to give birth themselves. Most don’t need to swim continuously to survive. And rather than being near-blind and reliant on smell, which is the general perception, they in fact have advanced sight. They feel pain. And the boldest sharks face a greater risk of dying before adulthood.
Why does any of this matter? Well, we’re killing about 100 million sharks every year, 11,000 an hour.
Like many of us, I have been fascinated by sharks since first seeing the movie “Jaws” as a kid. But, far from giving me nightmares, it instilled a lifelong fascination with these amazing animals.
I am surprised that, while they were at it, they did not mention that sharks do in fact get cancer.
The more we learn about the natural world, the more we discover that humans aren’t nearly as toweringly exceptional as we’ve been told we are.
or that we’re the only life forms with thoughts and feelings. our divine right ain’t so divine…
We were told this by other humans. So a big grain of salt needs to be taken with that. /s
As to the “feelings” comment that Kyron made, who really knows for sure. I like to believe its true too, but it may be anthropomorphism. I think sometimes we overreach looking for sentience in other animals.
That being said, there certainly are many unexplained circumstances in which other animals certainly seem to express and display what seems to be emotion and sentience. Regardless of all that, one thing is for sure, whether we are or are not toweringly exceptional, we do have to lead. In order to lead, people need to be more educated about the other animals around us. Articles like this help to foster an understanding of just how fragile our ecosystem is.
I am inspired and heartened when I read comments such as yours and kyrons. It helps give me faith in humanity.
We can’t ever know the actual thoughts of other humans, so how can we truly know whether sharks or chimps or lizards have any that we’d credit as sentience?
Put another way, what’s the difference between a herd of migrating animals protecting their oldest and most infirm to our Social Security? Where’s the profit in either?
Every successful organism learns how to survive. Whether that means puffing out your quills or exhibiting support to your offspring, it’s all about getting positive results.
We’ve observed a ton of behavior—and genuine communication—among individuals and groups in other species that suggests something more than instinctive acts are taking place. Our only distinction appears to be that we praise ourselves a lot and try to minimize significant cross-species similarities so we can pretend we’re uniquely divine while we shit all over the planet.
Certainly, compared to other creatures on this planet, we are able to study, communicate and interpret to a much higher degree than others.
That is not our only distinction either. For all those shitting on the planet there are many many others helping to clean it up and educate others as to why it’s not a good idea to shit on our planet. It’s not all rosy but it certainly isn’t as depraved as you seem to be suggesting.