Protest Poster

            Sharks are hands down my favorite animal of all time. Shark week is on par with the Christmas season for me, and I take the Christmas season very seriously. When I first thought of what I might do for this project though, I immediately thought of dolphins because of the documentary The Cove, but since were trying to deal more with issues that we feel are underrepresented, I had to go with sharks. Out of all marine life that is hunted, I feel like sharks are pretty low on the totem poll because they aren’t represented as very friendly creatures historically, in comparison to whales and dolphins that are also slaughtered but have bigger movements to save them because they are “nicer”.

            My poster was obviously inspired by the film Jaws, which was a real jumping off point for the medias negative depiction of sharks. This has led to other films where the antagonist is a shark (or sharks) like Shark Night, Red Water, and Deep Blue Sea. These all perpetuate the stereotype that sharks are out to get humans, when in reality there are as few at 50-70 shark attacks each year, with only 5-15 of them being fatal (according to National Geographic). The story of the shark is like what Chimamanda said in her Ted talk, where she urged that people just kept hearing different versions of the same story. I feel that since people have been taught that sharks are after humans, it makes then less inclined to care about their well being.

            The real issue here though, is that millions of sharks are killed every year (anywhere from 63 to 273 million according to livescience.com), mainly to make soup from their fins. They are caught, have their fins sliced off, and tossed back into the ocean to die, or in other cases brought back to land to be tossed in a mass shark graveyard in the middle of the dessert, since finning sharks like this is illegal (sorry, I couldn’t find the actual source for this, I watched it on shark week earlier this year, it took place in Mexico). For the past few years, protective measures have been put into place, but since this takes place in the ocean its harder to police, evidenced by the still declining shark population which has dropped drastically just in the last decade because of the popularity of shark fin soup, causing a 90-99% decline in population of the seven most targeted shark species including hammerhead, bull, and tiger sharks (sharksavers.org).

            By switching the roles of the antagonist and protagonist in the Jaws poster, I was hoping to bring awareness to the fact that we are detrimentally more harmful to sharks than they are to us. I believe that the issue gets somewhat shoved under the rug because of sharks long standing representation as predatory on humans, when in reality shark attacks are few and far between and is mostly confusion on their part. In posting this on my social media site (my mothers actually, I don’t have a Facebook), I found that people indeed really don’t care about sharks. There were only comments like, “I wonder how crazy the ocean would be if that many weren’t killed every year,” and “that guy looks like Mrs. Doubtfire,” so that was kind of disappointing. Hopefully people at least saw it and looked up why it is happening. Save the Sharks!