There’s a PP presentation circulating around the net; a collection of pictures with a story about some Australian fisherman who saved the life of a female great white shark, and now “Cindy” (I am not making that up) follows him around everywhere, allowing herself to be petted and scratched on the tummy like some cute little puppy. As soon as I saw the first picture, I knew it was a hoax because I recognised the image as one that was taken in South Africa for a documentary (or article, or something like that) about sharks. As the slideshow played, though, I thought, “Nobody is seriously dumb enough to believe this….right?” I was wrong, though, because people really are. I suppose that if you’re the sort of person who believes that the Invisible Sky Wizard created sharks, it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that they have emotions like humans do, or that they could feel gratitude to humans for saving their lives, but if you’ll believe the Invisible Sky Wizard created the earth and everything on it in six days, you probably own a Q-ray bracelet and a mattress full of magnets, too. Disney doesn’t help, but at some point in time, one would think that a rational adult would figure out that a shark is a fish–a primitive fish, even. A fish is on the lower end of the evolutionary scale, below even small mammals, let alone humans. Its brain is perfectly adapted for a top aquatic predator, but that does not mean it has the type of brain capable of feeling emotion. It doesn’t; it has a brain devoted to its senses and instincts, like all fish. We do suspect that some of the more highly evolved mammals feel emotion, but certainly not fish, and even if it is true that non-human mammals do feel emotion (which we cannot prove for certain), we have no reason to believe that it’s emotion like our own. We have nothing else with which to make any kind of judgement, so that is what we use, but a laughing rat might not find the same jokes funny as we do, and if dogs can fall in love with one another, we have no idea how that does or doesn’t feel to them. It’s very interesting that humans seem to think of everything in “human terms”. We are at the top of the food chain, but we got here by being different from the lower animals, not by being the same! Anyway, if I get that presentation sent to me again, I’ll forward my own reply to the first one, which was more than anyone ever wanted to know about sharks and their behaviour. Hehe.