Quote:
Originally Posted by HPLovecraft
Really? I honestly don't know much about this, but since shark finning is almost completely unregulated and usually done out on the middle of the sea, couldn't it just as easily be even more widespread than activists portray?
|
Activists will almost always go with the larger number because it grabs bigger headlines and thereby bring more attention to the issue they're trying to awareness of.
Gordon Ramsay also made that claim about how shark finning is completely unregulated, but I thought his own footage proved the opposite because it showed that there are laws/rules against finning that are being effectively enforced.
More and more countries continue to pass legislation that prohibit fining, and yet fining is completely unregulated? In Taiwan and Costa Rica, we only saw one finned shark with the rest of the fins coming to shore with rest of the sharks.
If shark activist want to argue that sharks will only be saved by banning shark fin soup, but shark populations, with notable exceptions like the hammerhead and great white, in the US have increased since the ban against fining in 1994 even without any ban on shark fin soup.
The EU, the largest exporter of fins to Asia, has also banned shark fining. But, sharks in North Atlantic waters in the EU region continued to decline mostly because of overfishing for sharks for their meat and by-catch, things which a shark fin soup ban doesn't address.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ear...k-finning.html
Quote:
Originally Posted by HPLovecraft
A quick Google search directs me to stopsharkfinning.com, which reports tens of millions of sharks killed annually, which seems to fall in line with the NatGeo article that states 38M. That number itself could be smaller, too, but couldn't it also be bigger? Where do you get the info that it's actually less than normally portrayed?
|
I will give credit to stopsharkfinning for not using the 100M figure as other shark activists do, but I have a problem when it also states that those tens of millions get killed because of fining. In other words, they're saying that every fin was from a live shark that got brutally fiinned at sea, and then discarding the still live shark into the water. But, the Ramsay footage showed all those sharks that were not finned so you can't claim that every fin comes from a finned shark.
Part of the problem is that the shark activists have mis-used the accepted definition of fining to include all these non-finned sharks in order to inflate the number of sharks they can claim were finned.