I think they're especially stupid for taking only the fins. All the flesh is edible, and rather tasty. I've had shark steak. Anytime you see "scallops" more than an inch across, it's actually shark. If the fishermen need the money so damn badly, they should exploit the whole thing instead of just a couple of pieces.

I second that. Shark steaks are delicious, and it's horribly wasteful and stupid to just hack off their fins and throw them over. And how many people could a single shark (or even a married one) feed for a day? (That was a rhetorical question, but anyone can answer it if they like.) All the starving people in the world and these giant fish get lethally mutilated and tossed so it's easier to make a buck of some rich people. Sick. Kinda like Hummer H2s.

Somewhere in India kids are in shaking their heads in disbelief over how those bleeding Americans are killing off all the buffalo, I mean cows.

How is killing off a species any different than killing one individual? It can't be all that different, at least to the individual that's killed, right?

What if that individual was separated from its mother at birth, kept in a cage, fed its relatives and hormones to fatten it up--never seeing daylight or roaming free--a short, horrible life, just to be slaughtered? How do you justify that?

What if a species is killed off by indirect human activity, rather than explicit slaughter? Like, what if a swamp is drained and a particular species of worm is extinctified? Or, as someone else pointed out, what if our clueless activity raises the temperature of the planet enough to wreak havoc on the habitats various species need to survive?

For the record, I am an omnivore. I don't condone people wasting sharks lives' and wiping out species, but when you point one finger elsewhere you get four that point back at you, right? (Well, three, at least.)

Anybody here read any Peter Singer?

If the damned chinese would only watch this.


Friggin' dicks. This shit has gone on for too long. I am adopting a shark and if I find out that it has been hunted I am going over to China Arnold Schwarzenegger [circa Commando] style and kicking the shit out of those fishermen.

That only happened last year, despite China having more than four times the U.S. population - which is something that says more about the U.S. than it does about China.

I have got to say all the stuff at the beginning totally killed this article for me.

What part of "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" do you and a few other posters in this thread not understand?

Look, China today is transitioning from being largely agrarian to being industrial and capitalist. Western countries did that too, and while they did they were guilty of most of the same abuses: raping the environment, hunting animals to extinction, seriously underregulating business and manufacturing, exploiting poor labor, failing to protect workers with labor laws, etc. And along the way they colonized most of the rest of the world and practiced slavery, two things that China has done an awful lot less of.

None of this excuses the catastrophes that are taking place in China, but it does make it a wee bit hypocritical for a bunch of American and European posters to shout "FUCK CHINA!" on this board, given that their own countries went through exactly the same historical phase, with exactly the same kinds of problems - and did much less about it at the time than the present Chinese government is trying to do.

Humanity is the Troll.
The world is our Forum.

Short version: Pot, this is kettle. Kettle, this is pot.

Narrow Version:
- Wholesale overseas exporting of production for every manufactured good to avoid the modest protections of American law works pretty well, too.
- American quality control is laughable, or did you miss the several reports in the last couple years of pharmaceuticals going on the market with dangerous side effects fully known to the producing company?
- Brutal human rights abuses. Bogus war on terror that's killed what, 100 Iraqi civilians for every American killed in 9/11? Support for Sadam Hussein, Pinochet, similarly fine men in the past, as long as they meet our strategic needs? History of medical experimentation on blacks, the mentally ill? Which country are we talking about?
- As someone else mentioned, the US doesn't necessarily allow abortions, which is the opposite abuse of a woman's right to choose. We also have a thriving, not spoken of history of "medical" female circumcision up until the 1960s.
- See: exporting jobs elsewhere point to nations with no workplace safety rules
- Appalling environmental record... I am shocked that anyone would list this as a point to distinguish someone else from the US. Enough said.
- It's not poaching when the U.S. does it, because we do everything right. It's just destroying the habitats that these creatures live in, which only happens to make them dead as a side effect. Although, when you look at what Red Lobster et al are doing to fish stocks...
- Intellectual property... you're really going to bring that up as an offense commensurate with the above? When American pharmaceutical companies continually reissue non-substantive changes to their products to maintain their patents indefinitely?
- See quality control.

Broad Version:
I was trying to make the point that complaining about Chinese excesses is largely pointless, and an exercise in "the world is terrible, and those people over there should change to make it better." Sacrifice something yourself: if you're already doing so, and the world isn't better, do more.

So let's look at some American cultural norms that need to be examined:
Cars: I brought up SUVs and non-work necessary pickups before - if your car is bigger than you need just because you like big cars, congrats, you're the American shark fin soup eater.
Meat: Moving towards vegetarianism is a good one too - it takes 12-16 lbs of vegetables to create one lb of meat, and that's a whole lot less agribusiness, fossil fuels used in production, slash and burn South American agriculture, fetid pools of pig shit, antibiotics entering the drinking water, cows farting and shitting methane (was third largest source of greenhouse gas a while ago, not sure about now) etc. I'm not saying "don't eat meat", because for some people that's not healthily sustainable, but if it went from once or twice a day to once or twice a week the world would be a different, much healthier place.
Beer: Likewise, sadly, for alcohol, lest all the public transport-taklng vegetarians think they can't contribute anything. Alcohol is an entirely luxury item which wastes large amounts of biomass for a comparatively small caloric output. "But it's really yummy" isn't a persuasive argument from the perspective of the environment.

In short: what China is doing to sharks sucks for the world, no argument, and they do lots of other nasty crap. The U.S, however, also does lots of nasty crap, and whichever one is worse is a matter of degree, not kind. Furthermore, chances are good that a lot of what YOU (whoever you are) are doing also sucks for the world. Complaining about China is fun, because it makes you feel like there's something wrong with the world you aren't a part of. Fine. But have the guts to look at the things that you do which are bad for the world, and then ask yourself whether you're more like to change China or yourself.

fucking savages.

Don't pussyfoot around. Tell us what you really think of the Chinese.

Uh, last time I checked I'm not throwing non-violent political dissidents in jail, subjecting them to beatings and denying them medication simply because they talk shit about the government on the internet.

What's hilarious to me is that if I responded to a Bush-bashing post by saying "You shouldn't criticize Bush, because governments like China do the same things, if not worse", I'd be ridiculed. But when a country as authoritarian and fucked up as China gets critiqued, somehow the actions of the American government or aspects of American culture negate those criticisms?

Now, who wants a delicious bun filled with pork-flavored cardboard?