If you were born a shark

If you were born a shark, you would start your life with a bad name and a bad reputation. No matter which kind of shark you would be of the 500 species listed, you would carry your name’s negativity from the beginning. According to the origin of your name, whether from the German “Shurke” which means vile, angry, aggressive, or the Latin “Squalus” rough, squalid, wretched, nasty, sordid, or even the Sanskrit “Kala” black, ugly, dark, your negative name would precede you. 

 

If you were born a shark, you would not have parental care, and you would be left somewhere in the different nurseries to fend off for yourself. You would have to hope that your nursery grounds would not be destroyed by the need and greed of men and their desire to build and modify areas like coastal lines, mangroves, forests, rivers, estuaries, and bays. 

After all of that, you would still have to worry about pollution, discharges that change the water’s quality, or strange foreign objects that you could ingest, causing starvation and suffocation. You would have to extricate your way out of abandoned lines and nets, avoid fishing vessels with long lines, hooks, and drift nets. 

If you were born a shark, you would have a hard time finding all the food you need to sustain yourself because men would have taken so much.

And if you dared swimming closer to shore and inhabited areas looking for food, you would have to be careful of men trying to kill you because you have infested the water in front of their homes with your presence, although this is your place and the only one you can be. 

You would most likely run out of food and locations where to procure your nourishment, and you would have to continually look over your shoulder to escape dangers nature didn’t equip you to understand and protect yourself.

If you were born a shark, you would worry about being scooped out of the water, having your limbs severed with a knife while alive and conscious, to then be tossed back into the water to bleed to death and in a few cases to suffocate to death.

If you were born a shark, you would have to escape many natural and unnatural dangers for so many years before you could reproduce. You have a short time to connect with another shark, your opportunities would be small, and your offspring would be less in number than any other creature of the sea. 

But if you were born a shark, you would be born with different sensory systems.  You would be able to see, smell and feel from a very distant range, and you would be the result of millions of years of evolution, the beauty of diversity, the magic of your history.

If you were born a shark, you would live without regret, without anger, without maliciousness.

You would hunt, kill, and eat when you are hungry; you would not hunt and kill for the trophy, to satisfy your ego or because you are greedy or vicious. You would know how to live and interact with the other creatures of the ocean in a balance perfected through time. You would know how to take what you need and what needs to be taken and leave what’s healthy. If you were born a shark, you would not make others suffer because of your anger, greed, and jealousy; you would not reproduce nor kill indiscriminately.

If you were born a shark, you could be lucky and find a safe place, a haven where you are considered sacred and where you would be protected, understood, and respected. 

If you were born a shark, you might even find humans who love you and seek your company and presence, who would appreciate you and at times even cuddle you, thinking of you just as you are: a creature needed by this planet, by these oceans, a creature to understand, protect and cherish. A creature with the right to live.