An increase in shark attacks should be blamed on the great whites, not on humans ignoring the warnings to stay clear of dangerous waters.
But liberal animal-rights activists are loath to hold the killer fish themselves accountable, according to a journalist who studied recent jumps in shark attacks.
Fred Pawle says he’s convinced that government protections of the great whites have done as designed – increased the shark populations.
Pawle applied his thesis to understand the Australian experience with animal protections but it’s also germane to the Gulf of Maine.
Shark protection in the gulf began with federal regulations, including the 1997 prohibition on harvesting white sharks in Atlantic federal waters, leading to a population recovery.
Meanwhile, marine biologists claim that rising water temperatures and booming seal populations, protected by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, have brought more great whites to the gulf.
As of last summer, there were 15 confirmed sightings of white sharks in 2025 off Maine’s coast.
Five years ago, Julie Dimperio Holowach, 63, of New York City, died after getting bitten by a great white off Bailey Island in Maine’s first-ever documented deadly shark attack.
The shark bit Holowach while she was swimming with her daughter, who was unhurt.In the years since marine officials have cited a growing incidence of shark sightings along the New England coast.
Pawle argues that marine researchers intentionally downplay the increase in sharks because if they admit that their protection efforts have worked they’ll lose their funding.
“The lucrative grants financing their research into shark biology and behavior would dry up overnight,” he writes in an article titled “Shark attack truth: Why experts won’t admit population boom.”
Shark protectionists, he says, like to claim that the reason people are more aware of sharks these days is because they all have smartphones and are taking pictures of sharks rather than admitting it’s actually due to an increase in the shark population.
Since the government began protecting sharks in the 1990s, “a small clique of experts have been enjoying secure careers ever since,” Pawle says.
“The other group that dismisses the increasing prevalence of sharks and attacks at our beaches does so not out of self-interest but out of something far darker,” he writes.
“This group of people is huge, especially in prosperous, liberal societies. You can identify them by their main defining characteristic: an instinctive hatred of their fellow humans – drilled into them by our sick education system.
He says elementary-school kids are now taught that “there is no form of human activity that doesn’t somehow destroy the environment.
“By the time they reach their early teens, this indoctrination combines with the natural idealism of early adulthood to program them for life.”
Before long, he says, “they are blithely finding ways to rationalize the gruesome death of a fellow human in the jaws of a stupid, unpredictable shark.
“‘It’s their home, the victim knew the risks,’ they say ad nauseam and en masse after every attack. Siding with nature is instinctive to them, even at the cost of human lives.”
Shark protectionists “pretend they care by proposing more research and offer to throw more and more money at fake mitigation strategies, but it’s really their own careers they are concerned about,” according to Pawle.
The size and abundance of sharks is out of control, he insists.
But the protectionists won’t admit it because “to do so would be to admit they are wrong,” he argues.
