Shark Attack

So it’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, which is apparently a much bigger deal than I realized. Every other status update on Facebook this week has expressed some sort of excitement over shark week. To be honest, I probably will be one of the few people who won’t be watching, since I’m busy packing for my moving day (and by “packing” I mean “eating all of the food in my refrigerator”).

Although there are other reasons I’ve never really watched shark week. For one thing, I have a strict policy against watching educational television channels, so for the most part the Discovery Channel is off limits. Plus, as a person who grew up on an island in the middle of an ocean infested with them, I am not fascinated by sharks. I am scared s**tless by them. Oh sure, for people who live in a landlocked state it’s fun to watch a shark rip apart fish, since the odds of any Coloradoan encountering a shark in their lifetime is about as low as the odds of Mel Gibson ever getting invited to a Bar Mitzvah.

But when I watch these shows, all I can think is “hey, that beach looks awfully familiar…” When I see open ocean, I want to think of dolphins and whales and other animals that don’t have many teeth. I don’t want go kayaking on the bay and constantly have to picture this. If you have ever seen a shark in person, you stop thinking “wow what magnificent and amazing creatures.” You start thinking “somebody shoot that thing with a goddam bazooka before it gets any closer.”

I remember a year or two ago we were fishing on a boat when we hooked up a fish. After fighting it for a few seconds, I all of a sudden noticed that the line got a lot lighter. Finally, I reeled up the fish and realized why: I had only half a fish on my line. That’s when we all peered into the water and saw a shark just cruising around our boat. Now this was only a six-foot long reef shark, but still we all immediately ran to the center of the boat and began debating who we would throw off the boat first to distract the shark while the rest of us motored away.

So the last thing I need is to watch a show telling me how deadly sharks are. I definitely don’t need a show telling me sharks can do this. Like I have always said, people always bring up that whole “bees kill more people than sharks,” but that is only because sharks can’t fly, but apparently they are learning. There are few animals in the world that would be scarier if they suddenly gained the ability to fly (ticks would be one). Then of course the show tells you interesting little facts, like apparently great white sharks are attracted by the color yellow, which, as an Asian, worries me just a bit.

Of course I do sort of feel sorry for the sharks on the show. I mean, they stick a diver in the water who proceeds to poke the shark in the stomach with a prod for five minutes and then sound surprised when the sharks attack. But at least they get free dead fish out of it. I bet sharks actually look forward to Shark Week almost as much as we do. It’s like a free all you can eat buffet plus you get to be on TV and try and bite biologists with funny English accents. I’m just concerned where these TV shows are being hosted, because I don’t want sharks getting used to free food off the coast of Kona.

Although when you think about it, it’s sort of ironic that I am afraid of sharks, since I have eaten way more sharks than sharks have eaten of me. In California I had a shark dish (a bit dry but pretty good) and in Japan I have eaten shark fin soup several times (it’s tasty, but a little disappointing when you find out you can’t see the actual fin in the soup). The Japanese like killing things in the ocean, so of course they fish for sharks. But when they catch a shark, they simply cut off the fins and dump the shark back alive to sink to the bottom of the ocean. PETA might think this is sad, but hey, eels somehow swim without fins and you don’t see them complaining. These things are supposedly the best killing machines in the world, so they need to get in shape. I think all of this TV exposure is going to their heads.