Animal Near Extinction - Shark

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Every year, over one hundred million sharks are caught and finned alive. Then they are thrown back in the water where they die miserably. Today most of the shark populations worldwide are threatened by extinction.

Especially in China, Hong Kong and Singapore shark-fin soup is regarded as a delicacy and status symbol. Shark protection is a vitally important cause if we wish to maintain a healthy balance in the world's oceans. Thanks to shark diver Stefanie Brendl, the anti shark finning law, passed in Hawaii 2010, has already inspired similar legislation in other US States, as well as Malaysia, Hong Kong, Guam and several other Pacific Island Nations.

Shark finning is a horrendous, cruel and wasteful practice that is squandering a resource. Sharks are caught on hooks. They are then pulled out of the water, their fins are hacked off and the bodies thrown overboard. Alive! The shark then sinks to the bottom and basically suffocates or gets attacked by other animals and eaten. Sharks do not grow back their fins. Finning is a death sentence. Up to a hundred million sharks a year are killed for finning! Think of this number consisting of large sharks, giant animals. That resource is completely wasted. Big fleets are sweeping through an area and take out whole populations of sharks. They often take a whole generation, and if they take out a generation of breeding animals, that group of sharks will not recover for decades. They do not reproduce, like tunas, by the millions, they have a litter of maybe six to ten pups every year and a half. It is an ecological disaster on a huge scale, but people are not aware of it because it is going on underneath the ocean and furthermore, people don’t seem to care all that much. Shark finning is pursued all over the world where there are sharks, even in the most pristine areas.

Shark finning has the sole purpose of producing fins for shark fin soup, which is not really a food item that creates nutritional sustenance for anybody. Shark fin soup of course is a status symbol, eaten mostly in Asian countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan. Originally it was a feast for royalty only. Now that mainland China and the affluent middle class has grown so much, more people can afford it and suddenly it has become this status symbol that everybody wants to serve.

Now in China they believe that you are rude if you have people invited and don't serve shark fin soup. The same counts for weddings. Some traditions have to stop and the Chinese culture can very well exist without shark fin soup. They had the tradition of binding women's feet so that they stayed small and pointy, and they don't do that anymore.

For Protection of Sharks

 In 1991 South Africa was the first country in the world to declare Great White sharks a legally protected species.Intending to ban the practice of shark finning while at sea, the United States Congress passed the Shark Finning Prohibition Act in 2000. Two years later the Act saw its first legal challenge in United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins. In 2008 a Federal Appeals Court ruled that a loophole in the law allowed non-fishing vessels to purchase shark fins from fishing vessels while on the high seas. Seeking to close the loophole, the Shark Conservation Act was passed by Congress in December 2010, and it was signed into law in January 2011.In 2009, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Endangered Species named 64 species, one-third of all oceanic shark species, as being at risk of extinction due to fishing and shark finning.In 2010, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) rejected proposals from the United States and Palau that would have required countries to strictly regulate trade in several species of scalloped hammerhead, oceanic whitetip and spiny dogfish sharks. The majority, but not the required two-thirds of voting delegates, approved the proposal. China, by far the world’s largest shark market, and Japan, which battles all attempts to extend the convention to marine species, led the opposition.In 2010, Greenpeace International added the school shark, shortfin mako shark, mackerel shark, tiger shark and spiny dogfish to its seafood red list, a list of common supermarket fish that are often sourced from unsustainable fisheries. Advocacy group Shark Trust campaigns to limit shark fishing. Advocacy group Seafood Watch directs American consumers to not eat sharks.