I have to admit: cage diving with great whites in South Africa is about as cool a dive experience as I've ever had. In that tiny cage, in the big ocean, with those magnificent, smooth machines slowly cruising past me is a memory I'll carry forever. However, a little piece of me cringes each time I see footage of a cage diving operation chumming the water so people can see a shark up close. Amazingly, though, it seems that a new breed of adventurer is not satisfied with merely looking through a steel cage at the sharks. What do they want to do? They want to go "shark riding."

You've seen "shark riding" if you saw Jean-Michel Cousteau in Sharks at Risk, in which he and Andre Hartman hang onto the dorsal fin of a great white in order to demonstrate that sharks are not mindless killers. (If they were killers, certainly they would have attacked and killed Jean-Michel, right?)

While it's important to get close to sharks -- to demonstrate that they're not, in fact, brainless killers -- some scientists are concerned that too much human interaction with sharks could change them. According to Robert Hueter, director of Mote's Center for Shark Research, interacting too much with sharks could leave the animals "affected in the sense that their behavior is going to be changed." In other words, perhaps sharks will begin to associate humans with food -- or with the responsibility of having to give free rides. And what happens if a shark decides that he's had it up to here with giving tourists free rides and reacts in a "sharky" way? Who's fault will it be? In reality, it'll be the fault of the community that was interacting with (antagonizing?) the shark, but they won't be blamed. Rather, the shark will once again be labeled as mindless killer.

So what's the right thing to do? Should humans be allowed to go shark riding? Should countries world-wide ban the experience? Has Cousteau -- in an attempt to show that sharks are gentle --inadvertently skewed people's perception of them, and even convinced us that they're too gentle?

[Via Newsvine]