Andy was kind enough to let me run riot on his blog, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to write about
shark finning. I found out about shark finning a couple of years ago, and to be honest I found it difficult to believe that mankind could be so barbaric and wasteful. Maybe it was a little naive to expect anything different - after all, hundreds of thousands of bison were slaughtered in the US, just for target practice, elephants and rhinos have been hunted for their ivory, and come to that, we have slaughtered innocent people in death camps. But there was something so vile about the practise of shark finning - which is the slicing off of the sharks' fins and the dumping of the animal (often still alive) back into the ocean, as if it were some kind of living trash - that is just so disgusting that I felt compelled to create a website about it and do my best to spread the word about it so that people can inform themselves before they decide to eat shark fin soup.
The numbers of sharks involved are staggering, a common estimate is 70 million sharks killed per year. Most of these are killed just for their fins, so that they can be used in shark fin soup. Shark fins fetch hundreds of dollars per kilo, but the rest of the animal is of low commercial value and is difficult and expensive to store on a fishing boat. Fins can be sun-dried on deck or frozen. A cargo of shark fins can fetch thousands and thousands of dollars. So why is shark fin soup so popular? It is a traditional Chinese dish that only a small number of Chinese used to be able to afford - however, with the increase in prosperity it has become extremely popular among the Chinese middle class and is served at business banquets, weddings and any formal occassion.
So what is being done about it? There are organizations such as Wild Aid and Sea Shepherd doing their best to increase awareness, with one or two high profile Chinese personalities getting involved to persuade people not to eat the dish. However it is not only a Chinese and Asian problem. Shark fin soup can be found in restaurants across the world, you may even have tried it yourself. I have been trying to increase awareness of the problem through my website and social network prescence and have successfully campaigned against business-to-business organizations like EC21 and TradeKey to remove shark fins from their sites. The problem needs to be dealt with from my different angles - reducing demand, increasing awareness, boycotting companies and restaurants, improving legislation, and so on. Species of some sharks have fallen by well over 90% in some cases in just 20 or 30 years - sharks take several years to reach maturity, so they cannot survive with the current level of slaughter. Time is running out for sharks. Please check out my site
stop shark finning and join us on facebook.
I guess I should mention a T-shirt (as this is a T-shirt blog!) - you can get yourself a
Stop Shark Finning T-shirt in white or in
black. Spread the word!!
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