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Humans now kill 80 million sharks per year, 25 million of which are threatened species
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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Why?
Shark fin soup.
I had it as a kid before I knew better. It's nothing special and just a status symbol at this point. There are so many other things that can substitute it and it's wild that people still pay for it.
Theoretically for the meat, sold mostly in Brazil, Uruguay, and Latin Europe*, at a comparatively low price for seafood. In practice for the fins, sold mostly in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and China.
What makes it worse is that Brazilian norms are notoriously sloppy on what you can sell as "cação" (shark or ray meat), including 40 species, quite a few of them vulnerable, and a lot of times the person buying it has no way to know. And if you tell people "only buy cação if the species is listed, otherwise you might be eating a threatened species", they'll usually whine and tell you the equivalent of "I dun unrurrstand, y buy dat one? Dis one is cheaper lol lmao".
*the link is in Portuguese but I can translate it if anyone so desires.
In addition to the reasons already mentioned, there is also a probability that the corporations operating the trawlers see sharks and other predators as competition, especially since their yields are dropping.