News that thieves had stolen a shark from a Texas aquarium by disguising it as a baby in a pram prompted many questions, chief among them: “Who calls a shark Miss Helen?” But the second – “Why?” – had already been answered in the Wall Street Journal days earlier, one assumes by happenstance, in a piece declaring: “Home shark tanks are in”.
“For some reason, sharks have become the new must-have accessory for luxury homes,” the WSJ said, quoting people with more money than sense, and the aquarists happy to relieve them of it. One tank manufacturing company – based where else but Las Vegas? – said it built about 20 shark tanks in private homes every year.
They’re not big numbers, but it’s not many who can afford them. A large tank of about 60,000 litres (16,000 US gallons) can cost up to $1m. As for what to put in it, YourFishStore.com offers an entry-level small cat shark for $150, all the way up to a blacktip reef shark for up to $3,000, with the caveat that “sharks are not covered under Arrival Alive Policy”.
But those on a budget may be able to get in on the trend for just the price of aquarium entry.
Three people reportedly staked out the touch-gently pool at the San Antonio Aquarium for over an hour on Saturday, waiting for an opportune moment to lift the 40cm (16in) horn shark out of the tank and into the pram. Miss Helen was rescued by police and returned to the aquarium on Monday night, and one man was charged with theft.
The heist is sure to be made into a film. With Helen, the thief had been seeking to fill a horn-shark-shaped hole in his heart, according to the local police chief, Joseph Salvaggio: “He had one in the past … that passed away.” The man’s house looked “almost like a mockup” of the aquarium. “He knew very much what he was doing and kept that animal alive.”
But what might motivate someone to want a shark in their home, let alone go to criminal lengths to procure one?
From movies such as 2016’s The Shallows to this summer’s The Meg, not to mention Discovery Channel’s apparently never-ending Shark Week, these animals loom ever larger in our collective consciousness. So many people put sharks at the apex of their fears, rather than something statistically more likely to harm them – such as cows, or sofas. No other animal arouses our fear and fascination in the same way. It is perhaps easier to kid yourself you’d stand a chance against other so-called man-eaters, such as lions or bears, on land; sharks seem both unknowable and unbeatable.
I was aged 10 the first time I saw one while snorkelling, old enough to have given up holding my dad’s hand, and to know the sofa stat – but I remember gripping Dad, my palm somehow sweating underwater, as the shark faded into view on the outskirts of the reef.
It was a whitetip reef shark – as they go, basically a labrador – but it didn’t matter: sharks are scary. Their pupils are vertical, like a cat’s, and they lunge like dogs, but with added menace. All you can do is go for the eyes and hope for the best.
Both hunting sharks and keeping them as pets can be rationalised as an attempt to neutralise or assume their fearsome qualities. Excepting one Real Housewives reality TV star – who said of her sand shark and her horn shark, Horney: “They’re my babies!” – every shark owner interviewed by the WSJ gave some justification about power. “The shark is the most feared animal in the waters – to have one as a pet kind of puts you above it,” said one aquarist. A Los Angeles real estate developer with a shark pond in his garden said their perceived danger was fundamental to their allure: “Now you control them. It’s payback.”
Predators hold significant metaphoric power, enshrined over centuries in myth, religion and literature and long coveted by humans – especially the rich. (Historically, it’s poor people who have been eaten.) In the late Roman period, animals were pitted against gladiators to reinvigorate flagging interest in the Colosseum games. In the 19th century, big-game hunting was a crucial component of the imperial expansion into India, Africa and Asia, to accumulate not only resources, but symbolic dominance. And today, rich plonkers lead fish to live short, sad lives in their mansions.
The elite’s reported fondness for pet sharks does not demonstrate their mastery over nature so much as a grotesque lack of respect for it. In his 2003 book Monster of God, exploring the relationship between man and “the man-eating predator in the jungles of history and the mind”, David Quammen argues that the threat of animals such as lions and crocodiles had a powerful and not easily articulated metaphorical value for human self-understanding. Something above us on the food chain served as a chastening reminder that we were nothing more than meat, too. However, we have wrenched the advantage through underhand tactics such as habitat destruction and plastic pollution, and large carnivores are disappearing. Quammen predicted that most alpha predators would be extinct by 2150, with potentially devastating consequences for the ecosystems they keep in delicate balance.
I have often wondered whether mankind would have more respect for nature had a few dinosaurs endured to pluck us off at random, as happened to the assistant of Bryce Dallas Howard’s character in Jurassic World. Sharks assume that role to a tiny extent, causing on average eight deaths a year from 2011 to 2015 – and their declining numbers are testament to the fact that even that minuscule casualty does not go unpunished, whether through culls or indirectly through warming seas and overfishing.
With the threat of predators no longer an imminent concern, some of us think nothing of displaying them in their homes. It’s testament to a total and disastrous loss of perspective and our supreme hubris towards nature. In this most cartoonish of cases, it manifests itself as a small shark swaddled in a blanket and pushed in a pram. But we don’t need to keep sharks as pets to prove that we’re in control of the environment: just look at the damage we’ve done to it.
- Elle Hunt is a commissioning and communities editor with Guardian Cities
