It’s more upsetting to know that over 2.7 million are killed for cosmetics. Humans truly know how to dispense misery on mass scale.
Also, without context, is 500,000 a lot of sharks? How many exist in the wild? How many are needed to have a stable population? If we don't cull millions of sharks annually, what effect would that have?
And what is "shark" in this context, anyway? There are dozens of fish species, at differing levels of endangerment, colloquially referred to as "sharks".
Everyone has an agenda. I don't see an agenda of conservation of our ecology as one we need to resist. Especially when their conclusion at the end is not just "Save the Sharks", but a hope that we will research other possible ingredients instead of just running with the first working prototype.
The fact that you like it is no reason to not look at what's behind it.
Climate change deniers, for example, say the agenda “the redistribution of wealth“
Now we can have a discussion.
Oh yeah, this one has Big Shark written all over it.
The ones that produce no results are more likely to be victims of other agendas than ineffective because of their own.
Many people seem to rationalize away much of the destruction that humans do to the world.
That’s probably why we will soon be drilling for oil in Alaska.
That doesn’t mean that there’s not environmental reasons to justify shark conservation. But from the standpoint of animal suffering killing apex predators is almost certainly a net good.
Look at the situation in the Scottish highlands. The entire landscape has changed beyond all recognition because of the loss of apex predators (wolves, bears). The deer population is massive, and it prevents forest growth and regeneration, and results in a landscape devoid of its natural biodiversity. This isn't just bad for the environment, we also suffer from related problems such as the spread of ticks spreading Lyme disease.
Yes, I'm making fun, a little. I think that's fair in this instance. Someone who has taken the time and thought to identify utilitarianism as a philosophy on which to base consequential decisions has I think no excuse for not having likewise studied ecology, and the modern history of the human role in ecosystems, to at least the minimal extent required to recognize that ecology is really complicated and humans don't understand it nearly so well as we like to think we do. When we behave as if we did, we break things that very often can't be fixed.
These people don’t understand that we have to manage the environment we created (removal of predatory animals that eat deer) and part of that is harvesting deer to prevent mass starvation from lack of winter food. I’d bet if you showed them footage of a deer starving to death in winter, they’d agree herd culling is more humane.
It's possible that there may be second order environmental affects on the utilitarian calculus. I.e. the loss of sharks, causes enough ecosystem imbalance that it out-weights the direct suffering caused by species X. But that's specifically an empirical claim, and simply claiming that "sharks feel pain" isn't sufficient.
In general there's no reason to believe that the current ecological balance is the utilitarian optimal. Darwin selects for inclusive fitness, and doesn't give a hoot about animal suffering. Imagining that the pre-existence of a large predator population exists to improve the lives of the prey population is succumbing to the fallacy of group selection.
“Bonnetheads also ingest large amounts of seagrass, which has been found to make up around 62.1% of gut content mass. The species appear to be omnivorous, the only known case of plant feeding in sharks. The shark may perform this activity to protect its stomach against the spiny carapaces of the blue crab which it feeds on. A 2018 study with a carbon isotope-labelled seagrass diet found that they could digest seagrass with at least moderate efficiency, with 50±2% digestibility of seagrass organic matter, and had cellulose-component-degrading enzyme activity in their hindgut”
seriously though, ecosystems are interdependent and predators have their place. I remember watching a documentary about white wolves on a remote isolated island keeping the local population of yaks and rabbits from eating the island clean. They are absolutely vital for that particular ecology. Similarly it is not our place to rank animals by importance, since we are as a species quite obviously imbeciles.
Well the sebaceous gland in human skin produces this organic compound called "squalene" and we want that to make vaccines and cosmetic creams. But we don't want to kill all humans: squalene production significantly slows after the age of 30, so its more about killing young humans. /s
"Snow and his co-workers concluded that elasmobranchs lack the neuronal machinery absolutely essential for the perception of pain."
At best this shows that shark pain perception has a different neurological basis to humans. We still have no idea what sharks do and don't "feel".
Shark is a wild animal that presumably doesn't want to be murdered by a human, to have their livers harvested, just because humans messed up with other animals and caused themselves to be infected with other animals' endemic viruses. I don't really know. I haven't talked to any sharks about this, just guessing.
We slaughter 80 billion animals each year for food. On a planet of 7 billion humans, each year. Those animals only purpose is to be born, get fat, and get eaten by humans. Mostly in horrible conditions because it's cheap. We need to look into the mirror for more than just cosmetics industry.
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production#number-of-animals...
Note, for consistency, you should be equally horrified at companies like Ynsect, which are growing trillions of living creatures to be eaten by billions of other creatures:
Thing is there will be unavoidable consequences from being at the top of the food chain. Morality will have to be relative when you live by consuming organic matter from other living things.
"An astonishing 7 out of 8 creams surveyed had animal squalene. This equals roughly 2.7 million shark lives taken a year for our cosmetics."
It seem to be of no importance. And as long as humans are concerned, it may even be the reverse, heuristically. The bigger species is (measured by total weight, for example), the more important it may be for sustaining the ecosystem.
A. suffering and death on a large scale only because of cosmetics but more sharks are born to replace those that are killed.
B. suffering and death on a large scale only because of cosmetics AND possible extinction of the species.
Both are bad, both should be stopped... But B. is worse and needs more immediate efforts to stop it.