Jarett Sitter
Activist groups wants shark parts off of the menu
What are your chances of being attacked by a shark? According to the University of Florida’s International Shark Attack File one in 11.5 million. By comparison sharks have caused fewer fatalities in the U.S. in recent years than falling vending machines and collapsing sand holes.
No one appears to have calculated the odds of a shark being killed by a human but it’s a safe bet they’re considerably higher and with finning claiming as many as 73 million sharks a year it’s growing by the day. The toll of this practice which involves cutting off a live shark’s fins and then throwing it overboard to drown was chronicled in the 2007 documentary Sharkwater . The film had a great impact on Joanna Clarke a Calgarian who says she’d always loved oceans but had never given shark conservation much thought.
“I saw Sharkwater and it completely turned on something with me” she says “and after that I just loved it and did everything that I could about conservation and awareness and really getting people to understand how they have a connection to it just through simple consumption and how they could be proactive about conservation even within landlocked areas.”
Last June Clarke and some other concerned Calgarians founded Shark Fin Free Calgary a group campaigning for a municipal bylaw banning the sale possession and consumption of shark fin products within the city. Clarke says a few council members have expressed interest in the proposed bylaw which already exists in cities such as London Ont. and Toronto but some have questioned whether it falls under municipal jurisdiction. Whatever the case it’s hard to argue sharks aren’t facing a bleak future. A third of all shark species are at risk of extinction and finning is widely acknowledged as the major cause.
The primary cause of finning in turn is the demand for shark fin soup — a historic Chinese delicacy that’s crossed the Pacific. Clarke says a survey conducted by Shark Fin Free Calgary found at least 30 local restaurants sell the soup — which is also a staple of Chinese weddings — although the group has declined to name them for fear of creating “animosity.”
With even a small bowl costing as much as $32 shark fin soup isn’t cheap. Indeed Lloyd Sciban a professor of East Asian studies at the University of Calgary says the dish’s appeal owes more to shark fin’s priciness than its taste of which there is none.
“It’s a delicacy and it fits into the etiquette I suppose of having a fancy meal a meal that is ceremonious” says Sciban “because it’s obviously expensive it’s not that tasty and then now of course there’s some environmental concerns those are very important now. But there’s a tradition there especially because so many of the ceremonies the rites of passage Chinese do celebrate or mark they’re also done with food or banquets.”
But while shark fin soup may be a valued tradition Sciban notes traditions do change within Chinese culture — foot-binding for instance is no longer practised. If the campaign against shark fin soup is portrayed as part of a wider push for conservation instead of an attack on a specific custom Sciban believes the Chinese community might be receptive to a bylaw on the issue. But education he stresses must precede legislation.
“You pretty well have to in a sense go the route of trying to educate people” he says. “The reason for that is that if you make the bylaw and there isn’t an awareness of why the bylaw is in place then I think people could work to circumvent it.”
The odds of sharks’ continued survival might appear dim and the role they play at the top of the marine ecosystem is irreplaceable. But as Shark Fin Free Calgary’s Ingrid Kuenzel notes finning is far from the first threat sharks have faced.
“They’re a machine that we can only aspire to re-create” she says. “Everything about them is so perfectly evolved. Everything from their tissue that’s currently being studied for aerodynamics to the fact that they’ve survived four extinctions including dinosaurs and three other global extinctions. They’ve been around for 400 million years.”
