Canada becomes first G20 country to ban trade in shark fins | Hacker News Reader

Canada becomes first G20 country to ban trade in shark fins

japantimes.co.jp

218 pointsUltramanoid36 comments

>... Canada is the largest importer of shark fins outside of Asia.

Wow, TIL. Thank goodness then, that's likely a substantial cut.

Worth nothing tho that the USA, also a G20 country, has had arguably similar bans since either 2000 or 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_finning#United_States

Thanks for sharing that wiki link. This paragraph was particularly interesting to me.

> In 2010, Hawaii became the first state to ban the possession, sale and distribution of shark fins. The law became effective on 1 July 2011.[95] Similar laws have been enacted in the states of Washington,[96] Oregon,[97][98] California,[99] the territory of Guam[100] and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.[101] California governor Jerry Brown cited the cruelty of finning and potential threats to the environment and commercial fishing in signing the bill.[99] Opponents charged the ban was discriminatory against Chinese, the main consumers of shark fin soup, when federal laws already banned the practice of finning.

Why is there a market for shark fins in Canada to begin with ?

A long time back (i.e. when I was a kid, which was a long time back), you could get a visa to come to Canada if you invested a certain amount of money into a company and ran that company for a few years (2 was the minimum, I think). For relatively well off people in China this was a great opportunity and basically the default thing to do was to open a Chinese restaurant. Lots of these restaurants went under after the proprietors got permanent residence status, but a suprisingly large number of them stuck around. My good friend's father was one of those immigrants and he said that he had no interested at all in running a restaurant, but after doing it for a few years he found that he really enjoyed it. So historically there have been a lot of Chinese restaurants in Canada and a large population of Chinese Canadians. Over time, quite a few of these restaurants have gotten very good and the owners hire famous chefs from China to come over and cook in them (at one time that was a thing you could do... I'm not so sure any more). Because of this, famous Chinese dishes started to appear in the restaurants. Again, when I was a kid, most restaurants had 2 menus: one in Chinese and one in English. The English one had "Chinese Canadian" food like sweet and sour pork balls in neon red sauce, while the Chinese menu had actual Chinese cuisine. As Canadians became more aware of this, they started preferring the Chinese menu. By the time I was in University, everybody I knew wouldn't dream of ordering off the English menu (I grew up in Winnipeg, which had a very good set of Chinese restaurants at the time). Again, over time, Canadians started to appreciate fine Chinese cuisine. One of the dishes that is popular is shark fin soup. That's basically the long and the short of it as far as I can tell.

Canada has a relatively large (~5%) Chinese and Chinese-Canadian population. A large immigration event happened during the 90s due to the uncertainty surrounding the UK handover of Hong Kong[1] and many resettled in Vancouver.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_immigration...

The number of Chinese immigrants to Canada cannot be underestimated. There are whole cities where Chinese constitute more than 50% of the population [1].

---

[1] http://www.richmond-news.com/news/chinese-reach-majority-in-...

Large Chinese population.

There is several species of shark which is critically endangered, many other are listed as vulnerable. Please try also and help conservation by consuming right, never eat shark fin soup.

List of threatened sharks species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_threatened_sharks

And I wonder how many sharks die simply as a result of being bycatch in regular commercial fishing. People could be guilty of indirectly killing sharks by eating fish like tuna.

> Throughout the 1990s, fishermen captured 12 million sharks and rays as bycatch every year, just in international waters alone.

https://usa.oceana.org/blog/bycatch-spotlight-one-biggest-is...

Even if some sort of release policy is implemented by fishermen, being hooked by the gills, dragged up to 1 atmosphere pressure, and being thrown back into the water is probably harmful to the sharks.

Agreed. However the trade in shark fins is very profitable and leads to excesses and unspeakable cruelty. Just search for "sharks cut off fins" in your favourite video site. Warning: the search results are graphic.

This how you win elections now? Ban stuff?

Does shark fins actually have any real nutritional values or it's just pure myth? It doesn't really matter though, population of some shark species has decreased up to 80% in the last 50 years so this practice just has to stop.

Well, it has "real nutritional value", in the sense it provides calories, and probably aminoacids but nothing out of the ordinary or with medical value

I'd suggest looking into the geopolitical issues behind the promotion of "traditional Chinese medicine"

"Shark fin soup was a status symbol for wealthy and powerful Chinese, who would consider a family who couldn’t afford to serve shark fin soup at the wedding banquet a family not worth marrying their daughter into."

https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/a-brief-histo...

They love pangolins now.

Replace "now" with "too". They've been killing pangolins for countless decades.

> Canada becomes first G20 country to ban trade in shark fins

I'm not a native English speaker and was expecting s/in/with since I read you are not allowed to use shark fins as transportation for trade.

"trade in shark fins" is correct, "shark-fin trade" would be too; "trade with shark fins" would be weird. Compare the frequencies for a more common commodity: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=trade+in+wheat...

"Trade with shark fins" sounds like you'd be using the shark fins as currency to me, that is to say grammatically correct but generally nonsensical.

"it’s an important [step] and sends a signal to the world that this practice is wrong, has to be stopped, and Canada will not participate in the import of these fins anymore.”

i don't get it.

why can't they be fished sustainably like anything else? why is it wrong to eat a shark fin but ok to trawl fish, or to wear a jacket filled with down plucked from a goose? this just seems like propaganda.

https://www.oceana.ca/en/blog/how-seafood-caught-look-fishin...

I never really understood what looks to me like an obsession with preserving endangered species. Maybe it does have to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity_(social_psychology)

Maybe because we are responsible for pushing ~1 million species to go extinct https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/05/ipbes.... We're slowly starting to realize that if we don't stop ASAP, we might trigger a collapse of biodiversity that will ruin the foundations of our "economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life worldwide".

Who is "we"? I'm certain I had nothing to do with this.

You must remember that it is only the popular species. I'm from Portugal and here sharks have another name and are eaten regularly under that name. If it was called shark (the Portuguese equivalent to shark) there would probably be a whole commotion about it.

From a pragmatic/utilitarian point of view, eating whole sharks is maybe much less cruel and much less wasteful than eating shark fins. After all, you can only eat so many whole sharks.

Are they an endangered species? That is the point here. That and poaching them only for their fins.

>That and poaching them only for their fins.

This is the part I personally find most disturbing. When you see videos of shark finners slicing them off the shark while still in the water, leaving it to bleed to death it's very disturbing.

If people were eating the meat as well, and they were being fished at a sustainable level (so not endangered species), I'd have no issue with it.

Why does the method of killing make a difference to you?

Exactly. For instance, I go on a day-trip deep sea fishing every year, for cod and pollack and haddock, etc. Wherever those other fish are, there are always schools of dogfish too - basically garbage little sharks. When somebody pulls up a dogfish on their line, the mate on the boat just smashes it against the rail and tosses it overboard. Technically, I think dogfish are protected or vulnerable or some sort of classification, but they are like seagulls, no shortage of them and they are a big nuisance.

> the mate on the boat just smashes it against the rail and tosses it overboard

Do you endorse this behaviour then, killing an animal for no good reason?

Yes, absolutely. They are pests.

Moreover, I don't know if you have ever been deep-sea fishing, but when you pull a fish up from a hundred-plus yards underwater quickly, they tend to not survive if you do toss them back - quite often the pressure differential blows their lungs right out their mouths, and if not, they usually get scooped up by the blue sharks that also dog behind fishing boats.

I'm sure you know, but for the people down-voting you: You often have to kill dogfish when you pull them up because they have poisonous spines on them and you don't want to get pricked while they're thrashing around.

I've never done deep sea fishing, but when fishing with my grandpa he'd cut them up and use them as crab bait, which seemed like a good use for them to me.

> when you pull a fish up from a hundred-plus yards underwater quickly, they tend to not survive if you do toss them back

I see, so you're doing them a favour.

The only thing that still seems a bit off is, who gets to define them as 'pests'?

I suppose some deep sea fishermen have that opinion, but they must serve some purpose in the ocean?

Why do you think they must serve a purpose?

Because everything in nature is eaten by or eats something else, and that the whole system tends towards equilibrium over time.

..so what's the purpose humans serve?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com