Human-Wildlife Conflict

Human-Shark Conflict - Source: WeKnowMemes

Human-Shark Conflict – Source: WeKnowMemes

In the issue presented in this blog, there could be a presence of human-wildlife conflict. Humans could be seen carrying a “concern for safety” value towards sharks as they perceived that sharks would bring threats to them instead of safety. This perception could have come from the various movies that they have watched over the years regarding shark attacks, an example would be “Jaws”. In addition, there are other biases that could be present in oneself, such as the availability bias. This bias would allow one to perceive situations using information which are most available to them, hence if they happened to have heard of and internalised a few shark related incidents on the news, they would most probably be able to retrieve that information and attribute the attacking to the behaviour of sharks. Hence, humans have lesser concern for sharks with the image that they are ferocious animals. However, in most circumstances perception does not match with the severity. The amount of incidents where people died of lightning strikes are far more than the amount of shark attacks that have occurred in the world.