Shark Slaughter
In the next few months, I hope, you're going to be hearing a lot about a documentary called Sharkwater. Made by a Canadian named Rob Stewart, it's not out in the United States yet, but will be this fall. A friend who has seen it says it's amazing, and if you take a look at the preview linked to above, you may agree that it looks powerful.
Sharkwater tells the story of the international trade in shark fins, a commerce so lucrative that only drug smuggling can rival it. Shark fishermen around the world longline and net sharks, cutting off their fins and throwing the living animal back in the water to die. Shark meat, you see, is less lucrative than the fins, and if the fishermen kept the whole fish, they'd have less room for the valuable fins. It's a horrific practice and it's leading to the eradication of shark species around the globe.
In one scene in the film, Stewart came across two fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands which had put out 60 miles of longline hooks.
Sixty miles. There were an estimated 16,000 baited hooks on those lines.
Americans don't eat shark fin soup, of course. (The Chinese are the real problem here, just as the Japanese are with tuna and whales.) But we still host pointless and coarsening "monster shark" fishing tournaments, and we still eat shark.
Here's a small thing you can do to save sharks: Don't eat them. And if you're in a restaurant that serves shark, please don't order it, but instead pass a message to the chef that you don't support the presence of shark on the menu.
It's a small part of the solution, but it's something.
