ABOUT ME
I am working full time to establish the sentience of animals in the literature while simultaneously writing against their abuses. I had been a wildlife artist all my life when I first encountered sharks. After observing bears, racoons, cougars, and the other large mammals of North America, I was not expecting to see much of interest in such an ancient line of animals, but was intrigued to find strong signs that they were using cognition in their daily lives, and were more alert and quick thinking than people. Faced with an unanticipated richness of community into which the sharks had accepted me, I hung out with them for years, writing down everything that they did, everything that happened, following the precepts of cognitive ethology. It was they who convinced me that animals have unknown capacities, understanding, and intelligence, that has been overlooked for too long, in this world that exploits them. And when they were finned, I wrote down their story.
Biography
Ila France Porcher is a self-taught, published ethologist. She grew up in British Columbia, Canada, and at an early age became fascinated by watching and drawing wild animals. As a result, she naturally became a wildlife artist, and in time began documenting the behaviour of the animals she painted, being especially intrigued by actions suggesting intelligence and cognition.
In Tahiti she found sharks to be the first wild animals who came to her instead of fleeing. They were so intriguing that she launched an intensive study of them, systematically observing and recording their behaviour, following the precepts of the field of cognitive ethology. Part of her study was subsequently published in the peer-reviewed journal Marine Biology, and some of her observations are considered to be the first documented cases of cognition in sharks. They were presented at a conference on animal cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Germany by world class marine ethologist Dr. Arthur A. Myrberg Jr., University of Miami. She is credited with the discovery of a way to study these much maligned predators that does not involve killing them, and was dubbed “the Jane Goodall of Sharks,” for her documentation of their intelligent behaviour, while giving a presentation about them at the University of Miami.
As a pioneer in the battle to save sharks from extinction, she was a driving force behind the Year of the Shark project in 2009, which used the power of the Internet to generate many new projects for shark protection globally, including bringing the facts behind the shark fin soup racket to its consumers. The Year of the Shark in 2019 has followed. The Year of the Shark initiative has resulted in a powerful grass roots movement for shark awareness and protection that is still expanding.
She is the Shark Behaviour Specialist Advisor for the Sharks Educational Institute, based in the Canary Islands.