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.