Sharks are tired of the paparazzi

 

Friday is the start of yet another Shark Week on a certain cable TV channel. You'd think that sharks would be happy that they get so much publicity - 25 years of this, in fact. But the shark in this video is clearly tired of being in the spotlight: it stole one of the filmmaker's cameras.

Maybe you can't blame them. The media attention hasn't done sharks much good - and it hasn't done us much good either. They may be camera thieves, but their bloodthirsty reputation is much exaggerated. As we saw last week, a human is much more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark. People think that sharks are ruthless killing machines, when in truth we're far more dangerous to them than they are to us, since humans kill millions of sharks every year.

The filmmakers did get the camera back and finish their documentary. I haven't seen it, so I can only hope that it's not another of those shows that makes us waste time being afraid of the wrong animals.