A lifetime of chronic pain follows with one or more limbs maimed or amputated – and that’s only if you survive.

So, allow me to propose to the dozen or so people who don’t know it yet but who will (if the current trend continues) be severely mauled by a shark in Australia.

TROPICAL

The consolation is that no less than four of Australia’s leading experts on “shark mitigation strategies” flew all the way to tropical Reunion Island in March.

They joined their peers from around the world to discuss what one of them described as the “wicked problem” of finding a balance between protecting sharks and people.

It might seem presumptuous to imagine that a person being crushed between the razor-sharp teeth of a stupid animal might find within herself the compassion to understand that the shark deserves to live more than she does.

The conference was a continuation of the field of research that has become a small and thriving industry in the 25-plus years since the most lethal sharks – great whites – acquired protected status around the world.

In that time, great whites and similar species such as bull and tiger sharks have been elevated from feared monsters to endangered predators and now to venerated symbol of nature herself.

The “beautiful and majestic emperors and empresses of the deep” as author William McKeever described them in a book in 2019 – just one of the many such turgid volumes expressing melodramatic awe at these ancient, brainless predators.

The scientists at the Reunion Island conference were not so inclined to hyperbole. I mean, they are scientists after all.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t also feel reverence for the creatures, at least to the point where they rate them as equal to humans.

South African boffin Geremy Cliff referred to mitigation policies being driven by “the growing public empathy towards sharks”.

Australia’s own Vic Peddemors, arguably the doyen of the shark-protection industry, said that “developing new strategies in dealing with human-shark interactions” requires seeing the problem from both sides.

“Whether it be in protecting humans from sharks or sharks from humans.”

That humans are occasionally so evil that sharks need to be protected from them is an idea that Peddemors has long held.

In a TEDx presentation in Canberra in 2012 titled Sharks or Humans… Who Should be Afraid? Peddemors joked that the spike in fatal attacks in Western Australia that year constituted a “bumper season”.

He said this “anomaly” would soon end and “next year it would be back down to the normal levels that we would expect”.

That year there were two fatalities in WA. In the 13 years since then, there have been 11 known fatal attacks in WA and at least four disappearances that were almost certainly shark-related.

The most recent of which was the disappearance of a snorkeler off a beach at Denmark, on the State’s south coast, two weeks ago.

The total known toll in Australia in the 13 years since Peddemors cracked his lame joke is 37 fatalities.

For the 13 years before then, it was 21. And during the 13 years previous to that, when great whites were not protected, it was 12.

So Peddemors’ “bumper season” has become permanent, at least for now. This is a typical example of the paradox of the “experts” to whom we increasingly turn to solve issues regarding public policy.

The more intense the crisis, the more politicians lean on “experts” to find a solution. But why would they do that, when the solution itself would terminate their role?

BOASTED

In their biographical notes in the program for the conference, not one of the Australia experts boasted about having reduced the number of attacks, or “bites” as they prefer to call them.

That’s because they can’t. Instead, they mostly described the many extravagant strategies they manage (at public expense), which treat sharks as valuable as people, all the while ignoring the undeniable truth that there are more sharks in our waters than ever.

The unprecedented size and abundance of sharks swimming around popular beaches and trailing behind fishing boats is dismissed by researchers as “anecdotal”.

Like the sadistic Party member O’Brien torturing Winston until he agrees that “two plus two equals five” in George Orwell’s 1984, our heartless government-appointed experts are enabling the barbaric death of our fellow citizens while telling us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears. Welcome to dystopia.

“I’ve been at sea for 56 years and I’ve never seen so many white pointers,” Port Lincoln fishing veteran Graham Tapley told me as he was flying his plane above the Great Australian Bight spotting schools of salmon last week.