It was first created by an emperor in the Sung Dynasty AD , which is known as the golden era in Chinese history. Shark Fin soup is a part of the eight treasures of Chinese culture, along with camel humps, bear paws, and monkey brain. This is almost impossible for people who emigrated out of their home country to build a future for their children.
Shark Fins are harvested by slicing the fin of the shark while the shark is still alive and throwing the animal back into the water. Often times the shark is still alive and suffers greatly before it finally dies or is eaten by predators. The International Humane Society has even launched a pledge , to help protect sharks. Who does shark finning really benefit if it adds no actual flavour to the soup? Everyone except the Shark. By harvesting only the fins the fisherman has effectively saved space on the boat and increased his profit.
Shark finning and the sale of shark fins has been banned in twelve states in the US since Because the shark fin trade tends to go underground, it has been compared to the illicit drug trade. In addition, according to several law enforcement agents, fines and jail sentences for violating the shark fin ban are generally light and have little deterrent effect.
Knights says a U. Almost immediately, he and his team received a tip about a supplier, and they confiscated more than 2, pounds of shark fin from a warehouse near San Francisco Bay. The accused, Michael Kwong, a shark fin wholesaler and vocal opponent of the shark fin ban who said his family had been in the business for four generations, pleaded no contest to violating the shark fin ban.
He suspects restaurants and market owners are now storing their shark fin supplies off premises—perhaps in their homes, which would be off-limits to law enforcement without a search warrant. Spiny and smooth dogfish sharks, for example, are exempt in New York State. To ascertain whether a crime has been committed, authorities must establish whether the DNA in a seized sample of soup is actually that of a shark.
The specimens Ashley Spicer tests and analyzes as a part of her work in the Wildlife Forensics Lab at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife vary from suspected shark fin soup in plastic to-go containers to frozen fins in vacuum-sealed packaging. Only two of those cases were specifically shark fin; the others were a shark attack case and a poaching case. In all, the two shark fin cases she handled in involved about 20 different shark fins.
DNA testing proved successful in a recent case in Plano, Texas, one of the states where shark fin is banned. And there it was: shark fin soup. The supermarket next door was offering it too, she said. Sure enough, when the wardens went to the supermarket, Tao Marketplace, to investigate, they found nearly 40 shark carcasses, the tail fins removed, on display in the fresh fish aisle and in storage.
Wearing rubber gloves so as not to contaminate the evidence, they sealed the fins from both places in separate containers and overnighted them to a lab in North Carolina for DNA testing. The case against the supermarket is still pending, but the restaurant owner was found guilty of selling shark fin and paid a fine: one dollar.
The court also ordered Zhou to make a donation to the Animal Welfare Institute, which totaled less than a thousand dollars, Stephens says. Fines are usually less than a thousand dollars.
In October , when Robert Hueter was getting his start at the Mote Marine Laboratory, he heard from a colleague that a group of fishermen off the Florida Panhandle had been caught harpooning bottlenose dolphins , whose meat and blood they used to bait sharks. Killing bottlenose dolphins was and still is illegal under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of When the fishermen caught sharks, they sliced off their fins and threw the mutilated animals, still alive, back into the water.
This is sick, Hueter says he thought at the time. Today, shark finning is the subject of documentaries, public protests, and Facebook posts.
Hueter says the fishermen were handed minor fines for killing the dolphins—and no penalty for finning the sharks. Since then, Hueter has been an advocate for sharks. But, he says, a ban will ensure that fins from dead sharks are wasted. We want to use absolutely everything we can. The fin, which is made of cartilage, adds a certain texture to the soup, a hard to describe mixture of both crunchy and gelatinous and is essential to the essence of the soup.
In traditional Chinese medicine the shark fin is said to have special properties such as enhancing blood circulation and improving the qi , the essential life force of a person. Along with the growing demand for the soup comes modern fishing practices which allow for a much larger number of sharks to be killed for their fins alone than was ever possible in imperial China.
The reduction in shark populations is due solely to human fishing, and a vast majority of that fishing is done for the purposes of harvesting fins for shark fin soup. Opponents of the soup propose the use of alternatives, such as artificial shark fins, or the fins of non-threatened fish species, as a more environmentally friendly way to achieve the same effect.
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