BullShark

I appreciate the leads this thread has generated!

Yeah, I've been bumped a number of times in murky water. That's about as close as it comes without involving teeth. They certainly can be dangerous creatures but the same goes for just about any large animal really, even many herbivores. Moose are famous for being more dangerous than grizzlies for instance. Otherwise docile domestic cattle can be dangerous when panicked just because of their size and strength.

The thing about the sharks most people don't really consider is that when you enter their world you're dealing with a totally different paradigm than what you're used to in human society. The sharks have two instincts that can cause you trouble, one is the instinct to feed and the other is the instinct to defend their territory. You can't really blame any lifeform for defending its territory, even many plants do through the use of poisons and thorns. Everything that lives requires a certain amount of a certain sort of environment in order to survive. The presence and activities of outsiders can put that in jeopardy and any lifeform I can think of has its own mechanisms for defending its life. The one you really have to be careful about is putting yourself into the middle of their prey drive. Avoid murky waters, dawn and dusk, areas of shallow water with deep drop offs, shoals of food, etc.

Specifically in regards to bulls what makes them so dangerous isn't even particularly aggressive behavior or a strong prey drive, it's simply a matter of their being a large carnivore that lives in shallow water close to shore where they're more likely to come in contact with people. When you factor in the manmade environmental destruction in these areas that affects how much and where food can be found, what areas are left that are suitable to sustain their needs and other considerations you start to see that more of it is a result of systems being out of balance. I think we need to focus more on trying to keep the systems running smoothly and working with them rather than trying to smash what we find and reassemble the pieces into something else. I feel the plants, animals and forces of nature are doing right. We're the ones with the greater capacity for reason which makes us one of the greatest powers in nature. With that power comes a need to act responsibly.