Simple Choices Can Save 200,000 Sharks

I don’t usually re-post blogs from other websites, but this one by Tim Ferris (you know, the 4 Hour Work Week Guy?), is important for everyone to read. I’m a big advocate of knowing where our food comes from, be it the eggs that we fry up with toast for breakfast, the milk that we drink, or the veggies we eat by the droves. It’s much harder to make informed choices when you’re eating out at a restaurant, but nevertheless, we can’t afford to just sit back in vain ignorance.

I personally have never eaten Shark Fin Soup, but millions of people have and continue to. Same goes for factory farm raised chickens and beef, think before you buy.

More than 100 million sharks are now slaughtered annually to fuel the shark fin soup trade. The soup is non-nutritive, expensive, and doesn’t even taste particularly good (yes, I tried it in China in the 90?s). It is served mostly as a status symbol at Asian weddings, formal functions, and high-end restaurants.

How is this fine soup made?

Shark fins are cut-off the sharks in a process called “finning.” The practice is wasteful, unsustainable and ecologically unsound. Here’s how it works: sharks are caught on long-lines (miles of line floating in the oceans, affixed with hooks and bait), brought to the boat, and have their fins are hacked off. Next, since shark meat isn’t worth as much as shark fins, the mutilated but normally live animals are thrown back in to the water to sink and die.

Sharks cannot reproduce fast enough to keep up with mass-production shark finning. In the Atlantic ocean alone, shark populations in many species have decreased more than 90% percent in the last 15 years alone. It’s fucking disgusting.

I wanted to be a marine biologist for nearly 15 years, and if there is two things to remember about sharks, here they are:
- Most sharks don’t attack humans and have no interest in us whatsoever. I’ve dived with hundreds of sharks without incident.
- If you destroy apex predators (predators at the top of the food chain), the rest of the food chain topples soon thereafter.

If the oceans go to hell, so do we. To stick it to the bad guys and help the good guys, here are two five-minute options:

1. Boycott and Publicly Shame Restaurants That Serve Shark Fin Soup

Below is a list of Canadian and US restaurants that still serve shark fin soup. Boycott them, write to them, and — corporations hate bad PR — publicly shame them for inhumanely slaughtering sharks, using blogs, tweets, Facebook, e-mail, or whatever you have:

United States List of restaurant perpetrators
Canada’s list of restaurant perpetrators