In Australia, public opposition is growing toward programs that seek to kill sharks, even after fatal bites on humans. PHOTOGRAPH BY PREMIUM/UIG/GETTY

In the South African coastal city where I grew up, shark incidents were fairly common out on the reef where the surfers congregated. As a boy, my father lost a friend to a shark at our local beach. He remembers how the kid who pulled his friend out the water was sent to school the next morning and expected to get on with things.

Now I live in Sydney, where I do the occasional open-water swim in a bid to confront my mild phobia of sharks. I still spend ninety-nine per cent of each swim thinking about them, which may explain my surprisingly fast race times. It doesn’t help knowing that the number of shark bites in Australia—and worldwide—has more than doubled since 1990. But that increase is not, in fact, cause for alarm. It simply reflects human population growth and higher numbers of oceangoers. Even in Australia, which has the highest number of fatal shark bites in the world, the risk of death from a shark bite is extremely low: a yearly average of 1.1 fatalities over the past twenty years. Meanwhile, we’ve been systematically killing off sharks, in spite of evidence that, as “apex predators,” they’re crucial to maintaining biodiversity. The populations of large predatory fish such as swordfish and sharks have been reduced by ninety per cent over the past century.

The notion of the “rogue shark” with a taste for human flesh that needs to be hunted down and eliminated has long been shown to be a myth. Yet the knee-jerk response of some governments to shark-bite incidents is still to hunt, trap, and kill sharks indiscriminately. Most shark scientists agree that this aggressive approach is not based on sound science, but is more often about politicians wanting to avoid being blamed for shark incidents by a public they perceive to be vengeful and panicky.

Recently, a series of fatal shark bites in Western Australian waters led to an unusual exemption for the state government from federal environmental laws protecting white sharks. In late 2013, the government was permitted to attempt a large-scale cull. The state’s Premier, Colin Barnett (dubbed “Captain Hook” by environmental activists), posed triumphantly for photographs beside a giant hook, designed to be used off state beaches. Any white, tiger, and bull sharks larger than three metres caught on one of seventy-two new drumlines—unmanned, baited hooks suspended from buoys—would be killed.

The public outcry was immediate. Thousands attended anti-drumline rallies across the country, and as far afield as London and Rome. More than three hundred marine scientists signed a public letter to the state government stating that there is “no evidence to suggest that the lethal drumline program … will improve ocean safety,” and that the government had ignored outcomes from a similar program in Hawaii that “showed no improved safety outcomes despite a lethal long-line program lasting 16 years that captured nearly 300 tiger sharks a year.” Sharon Burden, whose son died from a fatal white-shark bite, in 2011, was a leading member of the anti-cull campaign.

Sea Shepherd Australia took out a boat nicknamed Bruce to film private contractors and Fisheries Department staff as they checked the drumlines and killed target species. The footage is distressing to watch. The hook “usually went into the shark’s mouth and outside their head at the side of the mouth, then over and back into their head again,” Shayne Thomson, an ex-Fisheries Department employee turned conservationist and filmmaker, explained. “These sharks had horrific injuries. Even the ones that were released would not have survived. It was not humane.” He and other concerned observers saw many of the larger tiger sharks being shot several times, and shark species being wrongly identified or sized.

During the three-month drumline trial, a hundred and seventy-two sharks were caught (a hundred and sixty-three were tiger sharks, which have not been responsible for a fatal shark bite in the region since 1925), and sixty-seven were shot or died on the line. Of the marine animals caught on the drumlines, seventy-one per cent were classified “non-target,” such as stingrays or harmless shark species, or undersized sharks. In October, 2014, the government abandoned its drumline policy after suffering a major political embarrassment: the state’s Environmental Protection Authority recommended that the program be discontinued due to uncertainty about its “impact on the environment,” and on white-shark populations in particular. There is still, however, a controversial catch-and-kill order in place for any sharks deemed to be a “serious threat.”

“The drumline policy was designed to provide public catharsis through retribution, not public safety,” Christopher Neff, a public-policy shark expert who teaches at the University of Sydney, said. Neff grew up in New England and was a “shark kid” from an early age—he kept a huge cut-out of a white shark in his bedroom, and on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard was thrilled to ride in a cab that had been used in the movie “Jaws.” His research has shown that governments tend to respond to shark incidents by addressing public perception of the risk through “a bunch of symbolic policy responses that do nothing to address the underlying level of risk but are helpful politically.” In the past, communities have sometimes lashed out at elected representatives in the aftermath of a shark bite. After a string of now infamous shark bites in New Jersey in 1916 (which inspired the book and then movie versions of “Jaws“), for example, voters in nearby districts tended to vote against the party in power.

However, Neff believes that governments have been misreading the contemporary public’s mood and attitudes toward sharks for a while. Several surveys have shown that the vast majority of Australians no longer supports radical, lethal action after a shark bite, even a fatal one, and many don’t want shark-control programs at all. Neff said that this is true for many beachside communities around the world that share their local beaches with sharks.

Neff’s research has also highlighted the need for more accurate language to describe shark incidents. For example, he found that, in the past thirty years, thirty-eight per cent of shark “attacks” in New South Wales, where Sydney is located, resulted in no injury to a human. In 2013, Neff co-wrote an influential paper recommending a new set of categories for describing shark incidents: sightings, encounters, bites, and fatal bites. The American Elasmobranch Society (the world’s largest shark and ray science society) recently petitioned the Associated Press and Reuters to include these terms in their style guides, and I have tried to use their categories—though I was disappointed by how often I was tempted to use the more chillingly evocative term “shark attack.”

Public opposition to established shark-culling programs on the east coast of Australia is also growing, in part because of campaigns run by environmental groups like Sea Shepherd, No Shark Cull, and Support Our Sharks. Queensland, for example, has a “mixed-use” program of more than three hundred and fifty drumlines and twenty-nine shark nets, and New South Wales’s Shark Meshing Program uses fifty-one shark nets.

In 1937, when the first shark nets were installed off Sydney beaches, on Australia's east coast, sea-bathing was still a relatively new pastime—prior to 1903, daylight ocean bathing had been banned as improper. At the time the nets were introduced, the state’s beaches were experiencing, on average, one fatal shark bite every year. The government felt that it needed to be seen as proactive, and nets were one of the least hawkish measures proposed; suggestions made during a 1935 public-submissions process included mounting machine guns on headlands and setting explosives. From the outset, the purpose of the nets was to catch and kill sharks.