Debbie Salamone, 44, had her achilles tendon bit off by a shark in a 2004 attack while she stood in waist-deep water. Salamone, along with a group of eight other individuals, who were ironically all attacked by sharks, went to the UN to rally for shark rights. They call themselves the Pew Environment Group, and they work to save endangered sharks all around the world.

Debbie Salamone, Al Brenneka, Robyne Knutson, Mike Coots, Charles Anderson, Achmat Hussein, Paul de Gelder, Krishna Thompson and Matt Rand, the director of the Shark Conservation Campaign, are the members of the group, and each lost a limb, or more, to sharks. Some of their goals are to have Congress put a restriction on the number of sharks that can be caught in different areas each year, and a restriction on the international trade of shark products. They promote the Shark Conservation Act of 2009, and try to convince island nations to build shark sanctuaries. Another goal of the Pew Environment Group is to ban Asian “finning”, a process in which “finners” pull sharks out of the water, cut their fins off, and leave them to bleed to death. Shark fins are then put into a soup and sold at markets. The group is working to prohibit finning of threatened, or near-threatened, sharks.
One of their main goals, however, is to convince people across the world to be less fearful of sharks. George Burgess, who works at the Florida Museum of Natural History, says that "You are more likely to be killed by lightning than a shark, if only the sharks were so lucky. Up to 73 million sharks are killed around the world annually. In contrast, only a handful of people die every year from the 50-70 attacks worldwide.”

30% of sharks are threatened with extinction. This includes great whites, smooth hammerheads, whitetips and threshers. Unfortunately, the Pew Environment Group is one of the few groups that work to save these sharks. The group members all agree that after they were attacked they all wanted revenge. Somehow, they ended up meeting other people that had been through the same thing, and they realized that they were in the sharks’ territory and it was their own fault. After learning more about endangered sharks, they started to advocate for sharks’ rights.