shark fin soup?

yeah, and how about some panda skewers & a bald eagle omelet

just don't do it

while you're at it, give up the tiger bone, bear gall bladder & rhinoceros horn school of medicine



Shark Fin Soup: An Eco-Catastrophe?
by Hank Pellissier, special to SF Gate
Monday, January 20, 2003

"Shark-fin soup was just a regional delicacy in Canton, south China, until the late 1980s. The Beijing government had derided shark-fin soup as a symbol of elitism, but it ended this stance in 1987. Increased East Asian affluence quickly made shark-fin soup popular at wedding banquets, birthdays, feasts and business dinners, as a way of honoring guests. The demand has escalated astronomically in the last 15 years, and now it's a standard dish."

""Finning" refers to the practice of cutting off only the shark fins and discarding the body. Sometimes sharks are dead when they're pulled into the boats, but often, they're still alive as their four fins are cut off with a knife. When they're thrown back into the ocean the sharks either bleed to death, or they drown, because sharks can't swim without fins, and they need to go forward to get oxygen. Divers have discovered hundreds of dead finned sharks at the bottom of the ocean in huge shark graveyards."

"Fifty percent of sharks are bycatch -- they're accidentally caught by boats that are looking for tuna, swordfish or other fish. Many of the boats don't want to keep the entire shark, so they just fin them. This greatly increases the amount of sharks killed, because a fishing boat can hold an enormous amount of fins."