Shark fin soup...

[Groundhog246]

This has been a sore point with me for a while. It's not just the market for Shark Fin Soup. It's pills of "Shark Fin" or "Shark Cartilage" sold in health food stores to cure various ailments. It's been ignored for so long because the general public's idea of sharks is JAWS. I know people who still won't swim in the ocean. You're a lot more likely to get shot in a random shooting, or bitten by a rabid animal or a snake, than bit by a shark, but you'll never convince them.
Piranha are another maligned fish. They do not attack animals in large schools and strip them to the bone in seconds. In many areas of Africa people swim, wade and wash in rivers and stream full of piranha. They are somewhat of a scavenger and will eat a dead animal, but their primary diet is (much like sharks) other fish.
It's the power of visual media (movies/television) on the public psyche. If they see it on a screen, then it must be so, Hollywood would never exagerate. Of course, that's a lot of the reason so many (insurance companies included?) think Scuba is dangerous.

 

[cat]

A horrific number of sharks are killed each year to supply shark cartilage to people who think it helps prevent cancer (under the "sharks don't get cancer therefore eating shark structural material will prevent me from getting cancer" school of illogic). Given the "value" of the cartilage, I wonder why the de-finned sharks are dumped overboard all that often - they likely get stripped of tissue and ground up for "medicine", at least in some areas.

Shark-fin soup is still available up here, unfortunately. And incidentally, from what I've read on the subject, sharks do sometimes get cancer (including cancer of cartliaginous tissues).
Irishdiver: I don't know about the morality of eating shark steak but if it's not a threatened species, then I suppose it would be morally equivalent of eating any other wild fish (kill and animal and eat as much as possible versus kill an animal and eat only a tiny bit). Dogfish sharks (small ones) are still dissected as part of the lab for many university comparative anatomy courses. JMHO cat

 

[Groundhog246]

cat once bubbled...
Given the "value" of the cartilage, I wonder why the de-finned sharks are dumped overboard all that often - they likely get stripped of tissue and ground up for "medicine", at least in some areas.

Fins are cartilage. I'm not sure that's what's in the shark cartilage pills, potions, etc. I had a discussion once with a health food store owner about the immorality of shark cartilage, since the rest of the fish is wasted. In her opinion, "the only good shark was a dead shark". They're just horrible monsters and if their death can do the tiniest bit of good, then go ahead and kill them.
What if we cut a cows tongue out as a delicacy and left it to die in the field as it can no longer eat? Or do such actions only apply to wild animals. The really odd thing, is even the animal rights groups don't care. I don't think there's an animal out there more disliked by the general public, than a shark.

 

[Rick Murchison]

Scubaroo once bubbled...
So importation of shark fins is still permitted? Otherwise it would not be possible to buy them in San Francisco (and probably elsewhere) so readily. I'm going to have to take a stroll through the Chinatown district in tourist mode with my digital camera and see if there are still boxes of shark fins for sale like in the link I posted.

A quick search of Google revealed at least two shark fin distributers in San Francisco.

There is still a US shark fishery, and the fins from those sharks are sold, and at a high price. But the practice of finning is banned. The seller of fins in the states must have the shark to match, and must abide by strict limits on total and species specific take.
By the way, the article on the San Francisco shark fin market was from December 1999, before the shark finning ban took effect.
Rick

 

[Scubaroo]

Irishdiver once bubbled...
Hi all. I'm still having problems with the figures.

The BBC says that an estimated 100 million sharks are killed in this way each year. You, Scoobaroo, say that the fins sell for $100 per pound....maths was never my strong point, but doesn't that come out at $10 BILLION (ten thousand million), presuming each shark yields one pound of fin? Is it possible for this global industry to be such a huge money spinner and for the entire world not to have heard about it on a regular basis?

Check the photo in the first link I posted - you can clearly see that the price on the box is $129 per pound. This is in San Francisco, which is probably the second most expensive city to reside in the United States after New York. So of course the prices are going to be high here. No doubt throughout much of Asia the prices are much lower.

If I get a chance this weekend (I'm in the middle of packing up house to shift apartments) I'll wander down to Chinatown which is only a few blocks down the hill, and see if I can spot any for sale, and get the current prices.

If those were the prices pre-ban, I suspect that they may have risen since then, as fins would then have to be imported, unless the domestic bycatch is enough to support the market.

 

[cat]

Groundhog246 once bubbled...
Fins are cartilage. I'm not sure that's what's in the shark cartilage pills, potions, etc.

The cartilage used in the pills, etc is mostly spinal and head cartilage, probably because the fins fetch too much for soup purposes to be ground up this way.

What if we cut a cows tongue out as a delicacy and left it to die in the field as it can no longer eat? Or do such actions only apply to wild animals. The really odd thing, is even the animal rights groups don't care. I don't think there's an animal out there more disliked by the general public, than a shark.

Well, that's what used to happen to buffalo (bison) - they'd shoot them, take the tongues as a delicacy and leave the rest to rot. As for the unpopularity of sharks - you can fairly lay most of this at Spielberg's feet - "Jaws" effected a remarkable change in the attitudes of the general public towards sharks (never saw it, myself).
It's funny how that works - there are people out there who think that bears are cute, cuddly and pettable thanks to certain movies and the myth that lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs into water is possibly one of the most enduring in the history of zoology.

 

[Rick Murchison]

Here's a reasonably recent (October) article on the worldwide problem. There is a little good news and a lot of bad news.
Rick