'Fluffy Bunny' syndrome

I can't remember where I first heard that, but it does cover it; Peter Capstick called it 'Disney syndrome' as I recall. 'It' being the "the nice animals won't hurt you if you're nice to them", "the bear will happily graze and not hurt you/the other animals unless provoked" type attitude.

Little earlier this evening was watching a Nature episode on PBS about the Monteray Bay aquarium having kept a small Great White shark for some months. Of itself, a neat thing, and a lot of people got to see it. But the narration and the attitude was annoying. They kept hitting on "will it stay calm or will it start hunting/killing other fish in the tank?". Finally, after it had attacked two other sharks, killing the second, and was 'actively hunting/stalking' other animals in the tank, they decided they couldn't risk it and released it at sea.

Question for you; if you had the apex predator of the sea in a tank, why would you be surprised when it started hunting? Why would you not expect it to? If these biologists actually thought that having it in a tank and feeding it would keep the base instincts from ever coming out, they're not as smart as they're made out to be.

It's like what happens when a bear whacks somebody, and especially if it eats them. Animal lovers come out of the woodwork telling how it must be the fault of the digested, they must have done something to provoke it, etc. Well, bullshit. Bears are big, powerful, omnivorous predators that will eat pretty much anything they can find or kill; sometimes that turns out to be some human. Doesn't make the bear evil, it's just being a bear. Same with cougars, when they don't have any fear of humans some are going to notice that these two-legs are easier to catch than deer. A book that came out a couple of years ago, The Beast in the Garden, covered it nicely. It's about the buildup to the first modern maneating by a cougar in CO. When the cats started coming into town, and eating pets, things got split between the "Shouldn't we make them scared of us so they'll leave us alone?" people and the "The cougars were here first! You don't like it, then leave!" people. These Aquarium people were apparently hoping the hunting instinct wouldn't come out in the shark; to quote Jayne from Firefly, "Nice move, dumbass".

Side note: after California banned hunting of cougars, the game department wound up killing more 'nuisance' cougars than were killed by hunters. The screaming when this was pointed out and some asked why not allow hunting again? told everything; the screamers didn't care how many they game department had to kill, they just didn't want anybody hunting them.

Other side note: in the year they had this shark(roughly 8 month old female), it grew by something like 17" and 100 pounds. Impressive, I'd say.