NEXT to snakes and crocs, Australians imagine sharks to be the country’s most dangerous creature. Tim Winton, an author, calls sharks “our secular substitute for the Devil”. Seven swimmers in three years have died from shark attacks in Mr Winton’s home state of Western Australia. The state’s government, led by Colin Barnett, is now taking revenge.

In late November a skilled surfer died from a shark attack. A week later a shark killed a 19-year-old in New South Wales. The tragedies fed public anxieties of a Jaws-like rampage. Mr Barnett ordered no-go zones for sharks to be set up offshore, marked by lines of baited hooks. Any shark caught on them more three metres long was to be shot. The first shark snared in this strategy was shot on January 26th. Mr Barnett says he has to “protect the people of Western Australia”.

But previously hostile popular attitudes towards sharks are shifting. Plenty of Western Australians, along with environmentalists and shark experts, deplore the new policy. In early January, at the height of the summer holiday season, more than 4,000 protesters swamped Cottesloe Beach in Perth, with signs reading “Save Our Sharks”, “Science Not Slaughter” and “Cullin Barnett”.

Of Australia’s 180 or so shark species, only a few are dangerous to humans: chiefly, bull sharks, tiger sharks and great whites, which are protected under federal law. Their numbers have suffered from the trade in shark fins for soup in Asia, which Australia and others have banned. Nonetheless, the federal government has given its conservative counterpart in Western Australia an exemption from protecting great whites under its “catch-and-kill” policy.

Despite the recent attacks, deaths from sharks are rare—an average of just one person a year for the past half-century around Australia’s vast coastline, says the Australian Shark Attack File, a research outfit at Taronga Zoo in Sydney. By contrast, an average of 120 people drown each year off beaches and in harbours and rivers. There has been no fatal shark attack at Bondi beach in Sydney, Australia’s most popular strand, since 1929.

But, like other busy New South Wales beaches, Bondi has underwater nets fixed offshore. Queensland, too, uses nets as well as submerged hooks to keep sharks and humans apart. Perhaps this saves lives—though not the sharks’. Neither state has a policy of shooting trapped sharks. Yet the nets and hooks are usually fatal. Of the 686 sharks snared last year in Queensland, only 32 were released alive; the rest drowned or were “humanely killed” by patrols. Christopher Neff of the University of Sydney says Western Australia’s policy is a political response that will do little for public safety: “shooting sharks will not stop others coming in.”