When Sharks (Don't) Attack: Wild Animal Agency in Historical Narratives

Abstract

Compared to the endangered animals described in Peter Matthiessen's Wildlife in America, the shark that attacked and consumed Robert Pamperin in June 1959 off La Jolla, California, suggests that a creature's silence did not always mean vulnerability or passivity within human histories. To help understand why this shark targeted Pamperin and the more general question of why these animals sometimes attack humans, scientists created the Shark Attack File (SAF) to document as many historical and contemporary shark attacks as possible into legible data sets. To protect people from sharks, the SAF functioned as a model to help translate and predict sharks' behaviors but ultimately privileged environmental conditions and human vulnerability over the possibility of animal agency. Since 1959, many scholars in animal studies have tried to complicate earlier declensionist narratives that portrayed wild animals as passive entities into agents-in-the-world.