NEWS: Why the Fuck is China Still Pulling this Shark Fin Soup Bullshit?

CULTURE: Why the Fuck is China Still Pulling this Shark Fin Soup Bullshit?

It's hard to write about China without writing a fucking treatise. There are just so many critical avenues down which one can go: female infanticide, sex-selective abortions, baby girls relegated to orphanages, or "Dying Rooms" as they've become known. There's the issue of Tibet, problems of free speech, repression of religious and spiritual groups.

Last year, the Chinese succeeded in driving the rare, white, 20 million-year-old baiji dolphin to extinction in the Yangtze River. Now they seem poised to inflict the same fate on sharks. According to the conservation group WildAid, sharks could face extinction within a generation from overfishing of their fins.

Hammerhead, Great White and Basking sharks were some of the species at risk.

The hunting of shark fins is wasteful and barbaric. Sharks are caught, their fins are cut off while they are alive, and then they are thrown back into the water where, because they can't swim without their fins, they sink and die a slow, painful, drowning death.

Yum! Totally worth it!

Don't even get me started on tigers in China, where they farm them for body parts, and where poaching and habitat destruction has decimated about 95% of the population.

See what I mean? Kind of hard to write about one Chinese issue without launching into a full-fledged treatise. How the hell did they get the 2008 Olympics?

Zhai jian, pretty animals. See you again...in my dreams.

China scares the fuck out of me, not only for the reasons mentioned at the beginning of the article, but also all the bad food products coming out of their country as of late, as well as their wonderful work in Sudan and their massive military build-up...not to mention their power in the U.N. and the Olympics coming up (which should be boycotted)

It's about time a nation stood up the shark menace of the deep.

Sharks = aquatic terrorists

The same reason the rest of the planet puts up with their long laundry list of bad behavior. China makes WalMart and the rest of their ilk BILLIONS. It's about human greed plain and simple.

Ugh... That's awful...

It should be legalised only if you can get the fin with your bare hands, without the use of scuba gear or weapons.

Seems fair.

*hug*

"because they can't swim without their fins, they sink and die a slow, painful, drowning death."

it'd be bad enough to die that way as a human, but drowning as a fish...fuck.

China was supposed to clean up its act on various issues as part of the agreement for them to host the Olympics.
They seem to have done sweet fuck all except piss up the world some more.
There's a Free Tibet petition for the UK to call them to task on this agreement but does anybody know if there's a worldwide one?

Doesn't help the sharks tho

poor sharks.

We have some bad boys on this planet that need to go sit in the corner for a minute and think about what they've done.

Poor sharks -- and dolphins, tigers, bears, dogs, cats.... Pretty long list in that country.

i think we're dangerously close to being our own plague of locusts.

boycott the olympics. it sucks for the athletes who train for years for it, but sometimes it is needed.

Exactly! I'm sure if people dig hard enough they'll discover the 'evil-doer' sharks are concealing Weapons of Mass Destruction

We're there. We are the next mass extinction; happening now, on a planet near you.

it's insane to think that species that have been around for literally hundreds of millions of years (or a couple of thousand for you creationists) might be gone forever before I am.

I don't think sharks can drown ... I know they can sink, but they can't die from drowning. They can certainly die from having their fins cut off, but that's more a death from immobility than a death from drowning.

(sorry for being nitpicky...)

Hey, if Rupert Murdoch likes them, why not give them a CHANCE, okay?

Jeez, you can make ONE mistake but you can't get away with tens upon hundreds? Where's the justice in the world?!

Sadness.

d20 has it right. We'll end up killing everything and die wondering why we have no food, no atmosphere, and poison all around us.

Actually, some shark species like the Great White can. They require continous movement to force water through their gills, which allows them to obtain oxygen.

Trap them in a net or put them in a cage and they die.

I'd quote sources but I assume you can use Google (and are smart enough to ignore wikipedia)

sorry but you're wrong.
Sharks breathe by filtering oxygen from the water with their gills. If they can't move enough water does not pass through the gills and so, no oxygen/no breathe.

edit: I'm slow

and I double post too