The Shark Fin Trade Is Still Legal in the U.S. – Let’s Stop This!

Perhaps it is due to the widespread societal effects from Spielberg’s JAWS, or maybe it’s just humans’ simple fear of the unknown, but sharks get an unjustified bad rap.  Shark attacks are far less common than one would think for such an apex predator. In the U.S. there is only an average of 19 shark attacks per year, and one shark-attack fatality every two years, and the worldwide rate is five deaths per year. Compare this to the 37 deaths resulting from lightning each year in the U.S., or the 17,000 deaths resulting from falls each year, and we can see sharks are not really our enemy or an imminent threat to our safety. People have a 1 in 63 chance of dying from the flu in their lifetime, and a 1 in 3,700,000 chance of dying from a shark attack, but this has not stopped people from justifying the mass killing of shark species around the world.

A primary driver for the massive killing of sharks is the highly-controversial shark fin soup, a pricey dish considered a delicacy by some, particularly in some Asian countries. With shark fin soup fetching up to $100 per bowl, it is a profitable industry for shark hunters, who are killing a staggering 73 million sharks a year, just for their fins.

Although it is illegal to hunt sharks in American waters, the shark fin trade in the U.S. still exists. A petition on Care2 has been written to get the U.S. to ban the trade of shark fins. The petition explains how shark hunters mercilessly and inhumanely slice off the fins and then toss the animals back into the ocean to bleed to death. This is leading to the extinction of shark species worldwide, and something major must be done now to stop this extinction.

Please take a moment to sign the petition in Support of our world’s sharks and get the U.S. to ban the shark fin trade.

And please remember to share this with your network to further increase Support for sharks!

Image Source: Pixabay