Shark Dentist is about operating on a fool's idea of a shark

Former RPS sealife correspondent Nate once described the game Maneater as "an ecstatically violent simulation of being a fool's idea of a shark", which stuck with me. The Jaws Effect is a reasonably well known phenomenon coined in a paper that explores the impact the 1975 film had on Australian policy response to shark bites, although the term is now used a bit more broadly to refer to how sharks are villainised in pop culture - villainisation obviously being an absurdly human and dramatic concept to apply to a hungry or scared fish.

Jaws did actually result in an increase in shark culls, but its lasting legacy has also been argued to be more insididous. Depending on whether you're looking at stats from the UN or from conservation charities, the number of sharks killed or mutilated and harvested each year for fins and other parts ranges between about 10 and 100 million, and it's been argued this continues with relatively little pushback as compared to similar wildlife atrocities due to wide-reaching perception that ranges from apathy to vilification. A sharknado of lies, if you will.

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