Shark Finning
Shark fin soup - for what?
Over 8,000 tons of shark fins are processed each year. The fins only amount to 4% of a shark's
bodyweight so this means that some 200,000 tons of shark are thrown back into the sea and discarded.
The fins are highly prized. The fishermen catch the sharks and slice off the fins, unmindful whether
the shark is alive or not. The bodies, most of them still alive, are tossed back into the sea to bleed
to death or to be attacked by other sharks or fish.
Shark Safaris is fundamentally opposed to this barbaric and wasteful practise and support any initiative to
bring it to an end.
The fins are dried, stacked, and sold, mostly illegally. The buyers extract the collagen fibres, clean them,
and process them into "shark fin soup." This soup has no flavour and absolutely no nutritional value.
It is a dish served only for prestige purposes, selling for anywhere from US$50.00 to US$400.00 per bowl.
The demand for shark fin soup has developed since 1985 and coincides with the rapid growth of the Chinese
economy. The demand from China is for staggering amounts of shark fins. As a result, the oceans are
literally being scoured clean of sharks. Poachers are invading national marine parks like the Galapagos
Islands in Ecuador and Cocos Island in Costa Rica to catch sharks.
Forget the fictional fear spawned by Steven Spielberg's film Jaws. The oceans are no longer safe for sharks.
And the horror is that we don't just kill them, we hack off their limbs and toss their mutilated bodies
back into the sea to die an agonizing and horrific death.
The Shark Trust and many other organisations around the world have been educating the public for several
years about the devastating effect that the Asian culture's use of shark fin soup is having on shark
populations with the objective of stopping this useless, and cruel so-called "tradition."