User Comments

1. 

   5/15/09

   intarso

   no and no.
   
   While in theory I have no problem with people eating shark fin soup (people have eaten it since the Ming dynasty), I think there should be strict fishing limits.
   
   It was once a delicacy reserved only for the very wealthy and important...now that there are tons of wealthy people though, you run into the problem of having too many rich folks and not enough sharks.
   
   Shark meat is worth very little, so to harvest the fins they just chop them off of the shark and toss the live shark back into the ocean. When you have only a few thousand people who can afford to eat the soup and buy shark fins for other purposes, it's not a big problem, even if it is pretty barbaric. When you've got millions of people who can afford shark fins, you start to see a real decline in the shark populations that isn't just hippie fiction. You can only kill 50 million sharks a year for so long.

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   1. 

      5/15/09

      GFG

      SO what if sharks go extinct...
      the dinosours went extinct and I dont see people bitching about it.. hahaha
2. 

   5/15/09

   intarso

   Obviously you're just trying to piss people off, so I won't go into it too much, but for starters, you wouldn't be able to enjoy shark fin soup if there were no more sharks... Conscientious conservation is necessary of any fish species that is harvested en masse. If you fish more sharks each year than are able to reproduce, you're going to end up with a catch that is going to get smaller and smaller until there are eventually no more sharks to catch.
   
   There are clearly more reasons than this for not letting sharks go extinct, but I don't think you are really as daft as you make yourself seem with your feigned ignorance. Since you have a blog all about fishing I'm sure you know all about why people shouldn't overfish & why sharks are useful to have in the ocean.

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