Today, the California Senate Appropriations Committee is voting on sending Assembly Bill 376 to the Senate floor. The proposed bill would ban the possession, trade, sale, and distribution of shark fins in California. Currently, the laws that ban shark finning deal with shark handling, but do not address the issue of how many sharks can be killed, so the shark finning trade is alive and well. By eliminating the shark finning market, the hope is that millions of lives would be saved and many a shark species can be removed from the threatened species list.
Blue Shark image: Elasmodiver
As it stands right now, approximately 73 million sharks are killed each year for their dorsal fins, which are used in shark fin soup and other shark-based products. And the way sharks are handled is quite atrocious. Usually they are seized from the ocean, thrown onto the deck of a boat, their dorsal fins are chopped off while they are still alive, and then they are thrown back into the water. Now unable to swim, they typically sink to the bottom and drown or bleed to death, if they don’t get eaten by other sea life before that. And the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List of Threatened Species estimates that 200 shark species are currently threatened. Sharks have been on this Earth for more than 400 million years, yet they are dwindling with these current slaughter rates. Click here to learn more about the practice of shark finning and what you can do to help save the lives of these apex predators.
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