Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit
But, before you completely ban something, shouldn't you know the actual facts about the topic when its going to destroy a culinary tradition and hurt businesses. Shouldn't you know the actual number or best estimate of sharks getting killed or the number of those that are getting finned? I say so because if you know that information, then you can craft legislation that would address shark finning without completely banning shark fin soup. And, if you actually care about sharks, then you need to know such facts before you can craft legislation that would save sharks. Half of the sharks killed are killed as by-catch, which a shark fin ban doesn't address. Its no wonder Chinese people feel they're being singled out when such legislation won't address serious issues like by-catch. Such bans are a easy, feel-good way for legislators to build up their enviornmental cred by banning something only a minority group eats while ignoring bigger enviornmental problems that the majority of the voters are responsible for. Finning is wasteful, but so is by-catch where the fishermen dump all these dead fish because it wasn't the fish they were targeting for.
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I agree that by-catch is something that definitely needs to be addressed, too, but, seemingly, so does targeting sharks solely for their fins. There is no rule saying one needs to be addressed before the other and hopefully they're both addressed. Based on the little I do know about shark finning, though, it doesn't appear one of these issues is serious while the other isn't, and that reads like more of a rhetorical attempt to minimize the importance of it than anything else. That, and this post feels like an appeal to hypocrisy fallacy. "This is bad, but so is this other thing (even more so), and the majority of people aren't doing anything about that, so the ban and hatred of this bad thing by those people isn't credible."