ILA FRANCE PORCHER
Ethologist, wildlife artist, and author
I had been a wildlife artist all my life when I first encountered sharks. After observing bears, racoons, cougars, and the other birds and 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. Having always made notes about intelligent wildlife behaviour as a wildlife artist, I am now turning them into book form. So far, as well as the story of my shark study, I have published The True Nature of Sharks, describing their behaviour, one about the sentient nature of the sea turtles I rehabilitated in Tahiti, and three on birds.
MY BOOKS:
BIOGRAPHY
Ila France Porcher is one of the authors working full time to establish the sentience of the living things that share our planet.
She has been observing wild animal behaviour throughout her career as a wildlife artist and focused on sharks when their actions revealed them to be very different from other animals, and more intelligent than science had assumed. So she launched an intensive study of them, systematically observing and recording their behaviour underwater, a study that lasted seven years, and involved the observation of more than six hundred individual reef sharks. Following the precepts of the field of cognitive ethology, and later with the guidance of world class marine ethologist Dr. Arthur A. Myrberg Jr., University of Miami, she laid out the basic repertoire of their behaviour, and published it in her third book, The True Nature of Sharks.
Part of her study was also 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. 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.
When the sharks she knew so well were finned for the shark fin soup racket, she wrote down their story in her first book, The Shark Sessions : My Sunset Rendezvous, now in its fourth edition.
As well as books, she continues to write about shark conservation and has published several scientific papers on the subject and a variety of articles, mostly in X-Ray International Dive magazine.