It’s largely to campaign for the removal of the nets that that Rutzen wants to change the image of sharks.

"They’re decimating the shark population,” he says. “The Sharks Board’s initial purpose was protection by eradication, and they haven’t changed. It was understandable in the 1960s; no-one knew better. But now they should take them down.

But he’s not an airhead hippy claiming sharks are harmless. He is fully aware that sharks in general — and great whites in particular — are fearsome predators. But, he insists, they don’t target humans. If they did, a person would be taken out at least once a day.

“When we get in the water, we’re the dumbest, slowest form of protein,” he says. But we don’t taste good. White sharks are extremely selective in their diet.”

They’re not mindless killers, he insists, and he sets out to prove this by hypnotising them.

All about body language

Rutzen slowly developed the idea of hypnosis while working on shark cage diving boats off the small coastal town of Gansbaai near Cape Town, where he now runs a cage diving operation. There he got to see sharks from the safety of the boat and, occasionally, from the cage.

“The body language thing started when I was safety diver for a cameraman,” he explains. “I started observing what the animal would do. Someone would do something and the animal would react to it. You start picking these things up as you go along.”

Rutzen’s ideas about communicating with sharks through body language are similar to the principles of horse whispering — the technique used to communicate with horses. But horses are domesticated animals and herbivores, while sharks are wild carnivores.

Some people think he’s crazy, and certainly it takes a great deal of courage to slide into the water with these large predators, but Rutzen approaches each dive calmly and philosophically.

“I take small calculated risks to try to gain knowledge to learn about the sharks for conservation reasons. If you try to be Rambo in this game you will be dead. They’re not mindless man-killing machines, but they do have a shorter fuse than anything else I’ve dived with. They are the apex predator and nothing stuffs them around.”

When he enters the water, he curls up, cross-legged and hugging himself, making himself small so the sharks will not feel threatened. Then he reacts to their body language. If a shark approaches in an aggressive way he will stretch out, lifting his hands above his head and making hostile moves towards the shark to chase it away.

“These animals speak to one another in body language. If you can read that language you’re halfway there. The animal can read what your intentions are. It reacts in a way as if it understands your intentions. It’s a very basic communication method. So far it works for me.”

Alternatively, if the shark is calm and curious, he will reach out to it.

“When I first reached out and touched a great white shark and it reacted to me in a positive manner I was stunned, I couldn’t believe it. The moment I touched the animal in a placid manner the animal started treating me in a placid manner. That was a life-changing insight for me. When I touched it without aggression, it reacted to me without aggression.”

A nose for shark-whispering

On shark-cage safaris, the crew would pat the sharks, stroke them and get them to open their mouths as they approached the boat. In the course of this rather ostentatious showmanship Rutzen noticed that, sometimes, the shark would go limp when he touched it on the nose.

Then Christina Zenato, who dives with Caribbean reef sharks in the Bahamas, came on holiday to Gansbaai to dive with great whites. She told him how she puts reef sharks into tonic immobility by stroking them on the nose — effectively hypnotising them.

That got him thinking that, perhaps, the same thing could be done with great whites. But to find out he would have to dive regularly with them, and they are a protected species.

Diving outside a cage can only be done in South Africa with a specific permit, usually only given for research or filming. Not being attached to a university, Rutzen couldn’t claim to be doing formal research. So he and Zenato planned a documentary in which Rutzen would attempt to hypnotise a great white shark. Once the paperwork was sorted he began to dive with the sharks.

The resulting film, 'Sharkman', was Rutzen’s second documentary about great whites. The first was 'Beyond Fear', in which he dived with no protection. Most people who dive with white sharks without a cage carry an unloaded spear gun or camera, with which they can push the sharks away.

He has since made a third film about great whites, called 'Living Legend', and is currently working on a documentary about rare and endangered oceanic white tip sharks.

Well — a man’s got to breathe!

After a spell in the Bahamas learning more about shark hypnosis, Rutzen had a short period to complete the filming before his permit expired. He spent some time off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal, diving with tiger sharks, where he managed to put three-metre shark into tonic.

Tiger sharks are more dangerous than great whites, and possibly more aggressive, so this gave him more confidence to attempt to hypnotise a great white. After a number of attempts, he managed to get a great white into a mild state of tonic for a few seconds.

But he accomplished two other important things. First, the documentary seriously challenges the notion that sharks are mindless killers so it will, hopefully, contribute to a better understanding of sharks generally.

And on a more personal level, Rutzen had an amazing interaction with a 4.5-metre great white. While he didn’t manage to get her into tonic, they bonded, achieving a level of trust that is hard to imagine. For about a minute, she towed him gently and slowly through the water while he held on to her dorsal fin.

“I’ve never ever in my life had an experience like that with such a big animal,” Rutzen says. “You realise how wonderful and powerful these animals are. You’re so in touch with the animal, you can feel every little thing. If the animal starts looking at you, you can feel how it’s banking its head and looking at you. We’ve just done the longest dorsal fin ride I’ve ever ridden. It’s surreal, it’s super-peaceful. It feels like you want to stay there.”

It was Rutzen who broke the contact because — well — a man’s got to breathe.

Courtesy of www.MediaClubSouthAfrica.com