Home > Activism, Animal welfare, Biodiversity, Conservation, Oceans and fisheries, Politics > California Passes Ban on Shark Finning

California Passes Ban on Shark Finning

September 12, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

No doubt that California has its problems but here’s a good news story we can all admire. Why is it that the Golden State always seems to be ahead of the rest of us on environmental initiatives and legislation?

Francesca Koe: Long Live the Sharks: California Passes Ban on Shark Finning

Here’s an excerpt:

More than 1/3 of shark species are threatened with extinction as a result of the international shark fin trade, with some populations declined by 99%. Although 26-73 million sharks are killed every year, just for their fins, many states and nations around the world are taking bold action to stop the wasteful “finning” of sharks: Chile, one of the biggest fin exporters, recently banned shark finning in their waters, joining the Bahamas, Honduras, the Maldives and Palau. In the U.S., Hawaii passed a first-of-its-kind law banning the sale, possession, and distribution of shark fins in the state) last year, and similar measures have passed just this summer in Washington State and Oregon.

This is exciting for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that our oceans’ apex predators play a critical role in the health of the ecosystems that support and feed people across the globe… A shark’s value is squandered when sharks are killed for short-term gain from the sale of their fins. And because California is one of the largest markets for shark fins outside of Asia, by stopping the fin trade here we can help put an end to this type of destruction in international waters.

 

 

  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: