“I don’t see why the shark’s thoughts were relevant.”
They weren’t. And it also doesn’t matter if it was, or was not a mistake. A GW Shark is equipped to efficiently kill and dismember anything in the water. Humans are a fragile species ill-adapted to the water. A GW can ‘mouth’ you for a second or 2 to figure out what you are and you are going to probably bleed out as a result.
Another favorite GW hunting tactic is the “mobility kill” where the shark strikes hard and fast with the intent of stunning it’s prey and shearing off a fin or flipper. If that is a surfers leg... another dead surfer.
The fact that so many surfers are now surviving (due to amazing emergency medical assistance) is giving rise to speculation that “the Shark didn’t mean it.” We have no clue what “the Shark means”. It’s a really strange consequence of modern science arriving at totally unsupportable conclusions.
Scientists are supposed to be trained to NEVER attribute a human thought or emotion to an animal - I know I was. There’s no way to know what or if an animal is thinking, so it’s nothing but pure anthropomorphic bias to try to imagine its thought process. In the case of sharks, the establishment wants to avoid a vendetta mentality that would result in the eradication of the species. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know.