How would you feel if someone broke into your house, cut your limbs off with machettes and left you to die. This is what happens daily to thousands of sharks around the world mostly by Asian fisherman. Because sharks don't fit into the "cuddly" category most people don't give a damn, they tend to think its great because another maneater has been removed from the water. Live sharks are hauled from the water, their fins are lopped off by machettes, and the live animal is thrown back in the water. Unfortunately a shark doesn't have a big enough blood supply to actually die from these wounds, instead it sinks to the bottom, unable to swim and slowly starves to death, being cold blooded (relatively) this can take many months. Very occasionally a shark will survive by eating whatever it can rummage off the bottom. I have witnessed a shark like this once in a marine park of all places and it was pitifull to see. Man is surely the cruellest species on earth, not to mention wastefull, if the entire shark was being used and killed humanely it would be nowhere near as bad, but because these fisherman don't want their boats filled up with low grade product, they resort to these brutal practices.

Sharks perform a very important and vital role in the marine ecosystem, which has a flow-on effect to terrestrial systems. They remove diseased and injured animals from breeding stocks and keep certain species numbers under control. Entire ecosytems will collapse without the presence of sharks to keep them healthy and regulate populations. Unlike some creatures which spawn thousands of eggs/larvae, sharks are incredibly slow at reproducing, they have no natural predators (except man) so reproduction rates can be as low as 1 pup every 2 years. At the rate we are decimating them they will probably never recover. At the moment there are only 2 species of shark that are protected in Australian waters, the "Great White" and the "Grey Nurse". Both populations are thought to be already below critical mass, ie. there are not enough breeding adults left to replace the natural mortality rate. It is thought that there are only 500 "Grey Nurse" left in the oceans of Australia.

What can anybody do about this situation? Next time you are in an Asian restaurant and you see Shark Fin Soup on the menu, politely say that you will not support the finning of sharks by eating at a restaurant that encourages it, then leave the restaurant. If enough people do this the restaurants will stop supplying the dish and the demand will dry up. No demand, no finning. You can also write to the Dept. of Primary Industries and insist that the Government fully protect the critical breeding areas. These 13 areas are tiny but because the fishing lobby has so much power the DPI is too gutless to protect them. Almost every "Grey Nurse" that I have seen has had a wire trace from fishermen trailing from its mouth. This will almost always lead to the death of the animal from Peritonitus. A 500m exclusion zone for fishing has been proposed around these critical habitats but so far they have not been granted.

If it were whale tongues or tiger penises the public would be outraged, but because they are sharks, very few people seem to care.