Shark fin soup

A post inspired by a picture I ran across on Deviant Art yesterday:

yuumei

You won't catch me doing this very often, but I'm going to get on a bit of a soap box for a second here. I saw a documentary about shark finning a while back and was honestly shocked by it.

Understand that I have no problem with killing animals. In fact, I even have a blog tag named "baby seals taste yummy" with 6 posts and counting. Killing and eating animals is how we as a species have survived for so long. These days there are alternatives, and if you choose to be a vegetarian then that's fine .. your call. But if you choose to eat meat, let it not be shark fin soup.

The fins are the only valuable part of the shark, so the sharks are caught, the fins are cut off, and the sharks are dropped back into the water. Having no fins, the sharks die a slow death from either starvation or bleeding to death. I don't know which and it doesn't really matter. The wastefulness of this is incomprehensible. If you kill an animal for food, you ought to eat the whole damned thing. All that protein that they're dropping back into the water could feed millions of people. Yes millions. Estimates are that 100 million sharks are killed every year so people can have this very specific soup, which leads into the next big problem: conservation. Some species of sharks are in danger of extinction as a result of finning.

I'll eat factory farmed chicken. I'll occasionally eat veal, which I understand involves raising a calf in conditions only slightly better than that of a bonzai kitten. I am sure I would eat baby seal too, if someone were to put it on a plate in front of me. But I can't support eating shark fin soup.

Thanks for listening. Getting off the soap box now.

fyi .. I just realized that I mentioned this issue once before, in the early days of this blog. fyi #2: there's also a picture of a hot chick standing on an ice flow at that link. Just thought you should know.

This is a public service announcement ...

... with FISH!

When you think fresh, tasty fish in Manitoba, what do you think of? When you go fishing in the Whiteshell for something to cook up over the fire with a stick of butter, freshly squeezed lemon, and a sprinkle of pepper, what are you trying to catch? Jack fish? Didn't think so. Pickerel? Ya, that's more like it!

Well I've got news for you, buddy. That wasn't a pickerel that they served you at Fude the other day. The fish that everybody calls pickerel in these parts isn't pickerel at all, but walleye. At one time, I thought pickerel was just another name for walleye. In fact, I was so sure of it that I put money on it. I lost my money. A pickerel is a completely different fish.

So if a pickerel isn't a walleye, what is it? A pickerel is a member of family Esocidae, the family that includes the muskellunge (a.k.a. musky) and the dreaded jack fish (a.k.a. northern pike, or you might say, northern pickerel). Yes: a pickerel is a version of that ugly bony fish that you always throw back in the lake -- after taking a picture of it because it's the biggest thing that you've pulled out of the water since that incident with your drunk friend at the pool party. There are different types of pickerel -- the chain pickerel pictured below seems to be the most common -- but it's rare to catch any of them in Manitoba.

Here is a walleye (a member of the perch family):

Here is a pickerel:


Why do we call walleye pickerel? I don't know. We're not the only ones who do it, though. I saw "pickerel" on the menu of a restaurant in Saskatoon. Also, apparently in some circles walleye is called "pike" which is almost worse than calling it pickerel. However, I saw "walleye" on a menu just south of the border, so I think it's mostly a local quirk.

So there you have it. Now get your license and go out and catch yourself something to eat this weekend.