'Jaws' author widow protests shark hunting

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OAK BLUFFS, Mass., April 2 (UPI) -- The widow of "Jaws" novelist Peter Benchley is working with the Humane Society of the United States to stop an Oak Bluffs, Mass., shark hunting tournament.

Wendy Benchley -- whose late husband wrote the 1974 best-seller, which was adapted into the blockbuster movie of the same name -- spoke on behalf the Humane Society to the Oak Bluffs Board of Selectmen to protest the planned Monster Shark Tournament, scheduled for July 17-19, the Boston Globe reported Wednesday.

"Shark fishing tournaments continue this image of the shark as some monster, and this is 35 years" after "Jaws," she told the Globe from her Princeton, N.J., home.

"To have a tournament is a throwback to when the ocean was brimming with life," she said. "It's a bit like people who used to go to Africa and hunt lions. We don't do that anymore."

Steven James, president of tournament sponsor Boston Big Game Fishing Club, said Benchley's involvement in the campaign against the event is "one of the most comical tactics I've ever heard of."

"She's inherited the fortune of the person most responsible for tainting the public perception of what sharks are about," he said. "You couldn't find anybody more ill prepared to discuss this topic."