[trilinearmipmap]

First of all there is no room on these boards for personal attacks. If you wish to make a personal attack against me, PM me, I will meet up with you face to face, we can discuss it in person.

The statistics on shark attacks are skewed by a huge reporting bias towards first world (mostly U.S.) shark attacks. Most of the reported shark attacks each year occur in the U.S. despite the fact that the U.S. only has about 5% of the world's population. There are billions of people living in African and Asian countries which have long coastlines and large local shark populations, yet despite this reported shark attacks in these countries are rare. This points to an error in the collection and reporting of shark attack data. If a five year old blond kid gets bitten by a shark in Florida it makes the news. If a brown person in India gets attacked by a shark no one notices.

The other factor in under-reporting of shark attacks is pressure from local government and tourist authorities. If a shark kills someone in a tourist area it can mean tens of millions of dollars in losses due to bad publicity. You can bet that if a swimmer is killed by a shark in a country with a tourist-dependent economy, the death will be reported as a drowning or heart attack.

Multiply the number of (U.S.) reported shark attacks by 20 (the inverse of the U.S. proportion of world population) and you will get hundreds to thousands of shark attacks, and perhaps scores to a hundred shark deaths, worldwide every year.

The question is, do animals have a right to live despite the certainty that each year some number of people will be killed by them. This is a judgment call that needs to be informed by reason, ignoring false statistics, environmentalist propaganda, and ad hominem arguments.