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

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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. More than 90 percent of shark fin is consumed in China and demand is growing rapidly as the economy develops leading to more sharks being caught, many illegally in areas that are supposed to be protected, according to the group WildAid. Hammerhead, Great White and Basking sharks were some of the species at risk. "These animals have been here for 400 million years and they may disappear in one generation, not to provide people with basic food, but for a solely luxury item," executive director Peter Knights told a news conference.

The group said shark fin is becoming cheaper and eaten by a growing number of people in China -- perhaps by around 100 million people a year.

"Precisely the role China plays is one of unsustainable demand. The demand for shark fin soup as it now stands, and as it's set to increase, cannot be sustained by wild shark populations," said Steve Trent, WildAid president. 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.

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