Congress passes legislation to end US participation in global shark fin trade
humanesociety.org
humanesociety.org
The short attention span of the electorate and the sound-byte focus of most media means that politicians have a very tough time explaining that they only supported bills B and C because it was a necessary compromise to get A passed.
Transparency is a net positive, but it seems spaghettification of bills in an unforeseen consequence.
Americans love their omnibus bills but everyone else just passes them all on the last day of the session. Or has the two bills sitting hostage, one in each chamber (when the chambers aren’t controlled by the same party) while a compromise is formed. Etc. No real difference in transparency or outcome or anything else. Just that in the US there are really quite a lot of people involved and a lot of interest groups in what amounts to a very large democracy. It is always clunky to have that many people represented.
You can still give a name to a sub-bill and talk about it individually. I don’t really see a problem with it except for the offices that have to deal with it.
Also, seeing as you cannot stop them from agreeing to vote a certain way in private, the omnibus bill is something of a transparency measure itself, in that at least we know in an omnibus bill which things were on the trading table and agreed upon at the same time. When there isn’t one, all you can lob is kinda evidence-scarce accusations that your party gave up something you care about and they have some plausible deniability.
DC Politicians love Omnibus bills. Seems weird to say it a way that implies most voters support the omnibus bill concept.
As smart as this sounds to me, I'm afraid that it goes against the adversarial tribalism that's baked into humans.
Amputation of the fins from a living, awake animal then tossing it into ocean while it thrashes around in pain.
There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity.
edit: I was kidding. Sorry shark lovers who took it seriously, I get it...
I did a brief Google and found this account.
2015/01/27, 3:30 am Maui, Pali scenic lookout
Fishing
Water Depth: onshore
Victim: M. Pollard
Description: Lacerations to left calf. Considered a provoked incident due to activity.
Shark: Requiem shark, length 4 feet.
https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/sharks/shark-incidents/incidents-lis...
Animals do all sorts of horrifying things to one another. I mean, when a human does gruesome, cruel things, we often call them “an animal”.
We know better.
I really love sharks, but I think it’s cognitive dissonance to pretend factory farming does less harm. Even if per animal it doesn’t get as bad, the scale is incomparable.
Saying: “ There's no excuse for that level of inhumanity.” when people excuse factory farming every day is hypocritical.
It’s easy to disavow this because it doesn’t affect you.
If you don’t like it, downvote and move on.
My interpretation is that if we are going to do something on the shark fin industry, it makes complete sense to also take a look at factory farming.
Shark finning should be banned but we should also be able to look at the inhumane things we ourselves are perpetuating instead of only those that don’t affect us.
I hope that we can all celebrate this win, without getting mad at each other for celebrating it.
1. No human has time infinite time to champion every single cause we care about. Even the busiest, most proactive activist in your community deeply cares about things they have no time to do anything about.
2. People can (and should!) use language to disavow things. It is a low effort way of generating social contracts, which is a good thing!
3. If we disavow things that do not directly impact our day to day lives, it's a form of empathy.
4. Finally, people can disavow shark finning while still approve of factory farms. Count your blessings if you find any overlap at all with another person's values because then at least some change is possible.
Just remember, we can talk about one thing without bring up other things. Multiple things can be bad while some are more bad than others, despite all being bad. If you actually care about these chickens as you are so saying, then your goal should be to convince people to help you change the industry, not shame them. Shaming is just picking a fight and going to make people ignore you instead of listening. Even though it feels good, this is a terrible strategy for pursing your goals.
Is it?
I’d say it’s mostly better, nothing more, nothing less.
By definition, yes. I mean if it isn't "mostly better" then that's a different argument, but by definition, yes, that's what those words mean.
But I think you also missed the main point of my argument for a small portion. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
No, I am not vegan.
Granted it can be good to raise awareness when someone expresses a moral judgment of atrocities which might reach further than their stated objections. But it can be done without making assumptions about their position on those further reaches.
Sharks are persona non gratia at the best of times. They are not something you can farm without a lot of cruelty.
You don't love sharks - that's mad. No one loves sharks: one on one a shark will kill you. You might love diversity and that's fine.
One on one a lot of humans could kill me, I still love people.
The concern arises when people take a whole shark, then cut the fin and dispose of it --only for the fin.
Imagine if Tigers only ate the tails or ear flops of their prey and then ran off after that.
With shark finning, the product (fin) is worth less than the shark even by the most conservative estimate.
We can also recognize that prisons today are tortuous and should be improved (much like the farming/slaughter industry), and the death penalty is hard for many to justify as well, but paralyzing a human and throwing them in a hole to rot while still alive—even if they were a major criminal—would probably outrage nearly everyone.
It's like those golden tomahawk steaks. There's no point in covering a steak with gold, yet we spend effort digging a hole in the ground to do it.
It’s possible now to generate those B vitamins, but saying humans don’t need to consume animals is like saying we don’t need to walk to be healthy. Technically true, but most of us have two legs that we evolved to live a human lifestyle and getting around that requires a bunch of atypical lifestyle changes that are massively difficult and unnatural for most people.
If they did they wouldn't need to eat the amount they do.
There is a large difference between killing animals as swiftly as possible to use as much as possible and knicking off a small bit they need to live and leaving them to a slow painful death.
Not exactly the same, but orcas literally follow baby belugas until they are too tired to swim any further and drown. Then the orcas eat the lower jaw (most delicate part I guess) and leave the rest of the beluga to go to waste.
Point being, probably better to not point to the practices of other animals to determine whether or not what we’re doing is ethical.
Baseless projection.
> I think it’s cognitive dissonance to pretend factory farming does less harm. Even if per animal it doesn’t get as bad, the scale is incomparable.
This would be more persuasive with reliable numbers qua comparable harm rather than conjecture. What constitutes inhumane treatment is also at a much different threshold for activists than it is the average person (e.g. captivity).
Case in point: the number of sharks maimed and killed every year for their fins "range from 10 million a year (United Nations) to more than 100 million (various sources)" - https://saveourseas.com/how-many-sharks-are-caught-each-year.... In commercial agriculture, are there enough farmers going out of their way to cause harm in excess of what is done to those sharks to at least 10 million chickens per year, out of the billions? The only way this is possibly true is if you construe the entire commercial agriculture system as equally harmful. Chicken slaughter is pretty fast.
If your argument instead is that any percentage of possible abuse invalidates farming, that's your call.
Go meet a farmer, buy from a local field if your diet needs meat.
Is that true? I know people who have raised cows for slaughter and I've not seen any "torturing" going on? Many people probably care for their livestock, I don't think it's an easy life honestly.
My friend is a veterinarian, who is a vegetarian, she's pretty honest about the meat industry and she told me that cows (at least in Australia) are almost never indoors or in factories during their life for various reasons, mostly just practical reasons and more often then not are left to roam around eating grass and feed. They don't have especially bad lives at all.
Yes in the end the animal is slaughtered for food, this sucks. On the other hand I've spent enough time fishing and hunting to realize that the "natural world" isn't very kind either.
Ever seen a a live fish have it's face slowly chewed off by a squid or octopus until it dies? A wounded animal get torn apart by a pack of wild dogs? A lamb dropped from the sky by an eagle so it dies after having it's bones shattered? It's super confronting.
I won't try to argue the savage aspect of nature means humans can do whatever we want, but to say that animals are being "tortured", I'm not quite sure about that.
Alan Watts gave a great talk on this subject and makes the argument that really, killing plants and fungus is also killing something or ruining another organisms home and morally questionable in it's own right, his argument is the best thing we can do is make the most of whatever we eat by cooking it beautifully and enjoying our meal giving it proper attention / appreciating it. I think he makes a pretty good point.
Take a read of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html
I doubt it's too much different down under.
> Ever seen...
Sure, nature is cruel and can be horrific. We are part of nature, true, but we're also (perhaps striving to be) reasoning moral beings, and so we can draw a line on where our tolerance for acceptable suffering of another animal stops. Doesn't mean everybody needs to be a vegan by any means, but IMO meat eaters should consider an honest look at what goes into producing their food and figure out what they're most comfortable with (that may be, e.g., fully locally raised meat, which is more expensive to pay for the luxury of animals having happier lives.)
> morally questionable in it's own right
It's been a while since I read Watts, but I'm pretty confident he would be appalled by what industrial meat production has grown into.
Not a very good refutation there sorry.
Also being a vegan is a luxury as far as I'm concerned. I've tried being a vegetarian and ultimately I just ate a bunch of cheese, eggs and whey protein so I stopped feeling hungry. I'm also a naughty boy for eating eggs, cheese and whey according to most vegans.
During my time as a vegetarian I ended up insanely depressed and had a lot of digestion issues, for the first time in my life, I don't know why but once I started consuming animal protein again, I felt like I had more energy and happier.
In the end I just realized this isn't my problem alone to solve. I didn't ask to be a person who really (IMO) needs to eat some meat to survive and be happy, nor did I ask to be born into a planet with 7+ billion people, who want to eat meat so factory farming was born.
The only way I can feel ok about eating meat is hunting it myself, or fishing however, I live in a country where having guns is naughty, and rivers are polluted near me so fishing is also dangerous.
I obviously tried to be a vegan because I want to be a more moral person but it didn't work out for me, I can't feel guilty for it anymore. So I just try to do the best with the energy I receive from eating meat, try to cook it and enjoy it as best I can, for now that's all I can do.
I think being be a v*<whatever> works for a slim segment of the population, and Californians (because it's one of the only places I know of where it's pretty easy to be a vegan, if you're rich) unfortunately.
Honestly, people who care about animals would be better off to lobby for livestock to have nicer lives rather than just telling people to stop eating meat, because it's not going away anytime soon.
I'm guessing Australia and if so I'd amend that to mention that you're living in country where guns are regulated and licenced, where 12 year olds can join a pistol club, where a firing system capable of 1 million rounds per minute was invented [1], and where my next neighbour shoots 24x24 inch targets at 5,000 yards (five thousand yards) [2].
Guns don't shoot people, naughty people shoot people (and thus should be treated as drunk drivers are treated and prevented from operating a gun or a vehicle).
Pigs are truly awful: https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
I have zero objections to eating meat, but factory meat is absolutely complicit in industrial suffering.
There’s an obvious practical difference, exactly because of the scale. Shark finning is a gratuitously cruel luxury, and so (relatively) easy to stop. Whereas most people like meat and don’t want it to be twice as expensive. As long as that’s true, ending factory farming will be an extremely heavy lift.
Personally I think we should stop doing bad stuff where we can, without worrying too much about whether the order makes logical sense. Progress is hard enough already.
Are factory farmed animals stuffed with antibiotics, force fed obscene amounts of food, and shoved into crowded environments? Yes to all of those.
But they aren't mutilated while still alive and left helpless, unable to move, while they slowly die over the course of hours or days with nearly all of their meat is left unused in favor of a single bodypart. Further add that many of these shark species are endangered and their diminishing populations endanger thousands of other species. Sorry, but that's worse than factory farming.
Not saying that factory farming is good. There's plenty of improvement to be made there and plenty of horrors to talk about. But as bad as it is, its no where near as bad as shark finning. At least factory farming are killed humanely and their meat is put to good use.
Once factory farming starts taking cows, chopping their legs off to harvest the hooves and then leaving the cows alive in a field while they bleed out slowly, unable to move, eat, drink where they die several days later after days of suffering. Once that happens, then you can start comparing factory farming to shark finning.
Both finning and factory farming are horrific. We don’t need to compare them.
Essentially I've come to the conclusion that we shouldn't kill animals at all. You can say all sorts of things about how well they're treated, and what end they'd meet of we didn't kill them, but in the end they don't want to die and they never consented to this deal where we feed them and keep them warm in exchange for their meat.
Of course I'm the biggest hypocrite in the world when it comes to living by it, but at least I can see it's wrong.
Being a descendant of genocide survivors I have come to understand that most people are good and organized groups or mobs can be evil beyond comprehension. That's just reality. It has nothing to do with profit. Genocides don't have profit as their root cause.
The other problem is that, in the presence of extreme behavior the "moderates", despite being the overwhelming majority, are irrelevant and useless.
The southern US border has been a major source of sex slavery and human trafficking (last I remember, about 40K per year, more now). And yet, the very politicians and the media who purport to be for human rights, fairness, compassion and, in particular, women's rights, do nothing to stop it and say nothing about it. In fact, they have been ignoring this to such a degree that the problem has reached indescribable proportions.
If we can be brutal and cruel to human beings in such ways, why would we be kind to sharks?
Not a lot of inhumanity to be placed on either of those groups.
Which is at least quite brief compared to factory farming, as a sibling commenter mentioned. I think the reason shark fins get so much attention in the English speaking world is because most of us don't consume shark fins, so there's nothing for us to give up to decry an otherwise unspectacular act of cruelty.
Maybe I’m not a very compassionate person but its hard to appreciate if fish really are significantly beyond primitive levels of cognition (with obvious exceptions for dolphins, whales, and to a lesser extent sharks).
Most of them would never think twice about murdering thousands to propagate their own species. Such is the fundamental nature of life we all were born into.
The fact it’s an asphyxiation over ice over an hour vs being eaten alive in nature isn’t much of a big difference.
But maybe like lobsters there’s a middle ground? The shark fin thing is clear bad idea but calling out fishing in general probably won’t win you many supporters.
I'd lead instead with the fact that fishing is largely an ecological disaster.
It is like the argument against eating meat based entirely on killing being bad, but we can see that killing happens all over the place in nature. However, the problem is that we've gotten way too good at killing and need to practice a lot more restraint.
Humans are the most apex of apex predators... I hope that doesn't disqualify us from deserving compassion.
But fish clearly experience pain and possibly fear:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_fish
“Dr Lynne Sneddon, with her colleagues, Braithwaite, and Gentle, were the first to discover nociceptors (pain receptors) in fish. She stated that fish demonstrate pain-related changes in physiology and behaviour, that are reduced by painkillers, and they show higher brain activity when painfully stimulated.
Professor Victoria Braithwaite, in her book, Do Fish Feel Pain?, wrote that, fish, like birds and mammals, have a capacity for self-awareness, and can feel pain.”
Donald Broom, Professor of Animal Welfare, Cambridge University, England, said that most mammalian pain systems are also found in fish, who can feel fear and have emotions which are controlled in the fish brain in areas anatomically different but functionally very similar to those in mammals.
But if part of your reasoning for not extending compassion/humane treatment to another creature is based on the degree to which it appears to extend compassion/humane treatment to other creatures... that would seem to imply we should extend less compassion to you vs. humans who extend more compassion to these same creatures, right?
I'm not suggesting that we treat you worse than other people, but rather suggest that this line of reasoning might need to be reconsidered.
That is, your rule seems to put you at a disadvantage if applied universally. Am I missing something?
It's against my base instincts, but the older I get, the more I try to extend compassion unconditionally. Among other things, I find it just makes me a calmer person. YMMV.
Why is this against your base instincts? It’s quite the opposite for me so I’m curious how that developed in you.
The most horrible form of hunting id have to say is trapping as its much slower in a sense but similar to fishing.
Fishing comes in various forms obviously and I totally think finning is horrible but as they say, "nature is metal".
But I will admit that most fly fisherman do not keep their catch. The vast majority is catch-and-release, which receives very open criticism. But in order to protect the sport, most fly fishermen go to extreme efforts to protect the species.
Likewise most hunters actually go to extreme measures to protect environments they hunt in. And hunting tags and fees are the largest source of funding for environmental restoration programs. Hunters also commonly contribute to conservation programs. A few bad hunters that make the news tend to spoil this reputation. But if you enjoy the outdoors, hiking, and other similar sports it is thanks to hunters that a lot of those programs are funded and continue to exist.
In both these cases, The humanity of the animals and the protections of their species and environments are encouraged strongly throughout the community.
Shark finning is very much the opposite. No care is provided to the humanity of the animals. An equivilant western version of shark finning would be hunting a bear or wolf (a protected diminishing species), then cutting its liver out while its alive, and then leaving it helpless in the woods to die slowly over the course of the next few hours or half a day.
While I understand everyone's argument that ethnocentrism over eastern beliefs prevent us from understanding this practice. But there is a line that needs to be drawn between the humanity of an animal and the conservation of its species. Neither of these factors are being considered in Shark finning. If they want to eat shark fins, I don't inheritely have a problem with that. But programs should exist to propagate the shark species. Also the animal should simply be killed before harvesting. If those conditions were met, I don't think the practice would receive anywhere near the scrutiny that it does today.
I’ve never been convinced we can reconcile relativism with humanity.
Then it would be irresponsible for the US congress to be spending public money to buy tools which create the expectation that we would sustain our effort sending our beloved sons to immerse themselves both in that culture and the cruel trauma of war.
----
But does anyone here actually think that pointless cruelty is an important part of the relevant east asian cultures? I know myself that my understanding is so superficial that I'd be arrogant and lazy to make any judgements without spending far more time and attention to learn. I also have not seen any evidence of that in the individual people I've met, only the same varied mix of human cruelty and compassion in other peoples.
Only if you're fishing for wild trout, which is the minority in the UK. Most fly fishing is stocked fish in still waters and your ticket normally has a limit on how many trout you can take (typically 5 in a day), and once you hit that limit you stop fishing.
I do support the ban on shark finning, but we should recognize that other animals can be just as vicious and destructive when they get a chance.
In addition, to those who seem to feel we should extend compassion to creatures based on the degree to which they appear to extend compassion to other creatures... that would imply that to maximize the amount of compassion that should be extended to us, we should strive to extend as much compassion as possible to other creatures.
A weird ironic twist of the irrationality of our brains
(my comment was poor attempt at sarcasm over the internet)
Yeah, I'm sure those billions being tortured and killed in your animal farms don't have brains as or more developed compared to sharks or dogs or whatever else has come into the good graces of your elites.
Clearly a miniscule number of sharks being killed (worse in another way, yes, since they're not domesticated and endangered) is way less civilized than these billions treated in the most horrible of ways.
This has nothing to do with meat-eating. The entirety of the modern world has become so much crueler to animals that it is astonishing we consider ourselves to be more civilized than our ancestors.That this farce of 'western progress' goes on (even in the East) is doubly amusing.
I suspect there's significant overlap between the group of people opposed to shark finning and the group of people opposed to factory farming. We don't need to solve one before the other. Why not make progress on both in parallel, rather than use lack of progress in one to drag our feet on the other?
I think it's like a religion for them... complete lack of common sense.
Most people don't care about things unless it affects them. They were taught this by their parents and peer. They don't think they are wrong.
That's it
Folks interested in learning more can look up Project Hiu. I follow her @sharkgirlmadison on Instagram, where she posts pretty regularly.
But instead, they’re still spinning tires over pre-internet age ideas of cruelty and reopening wounds of settled policies? This congress does not represent modern humankind.
What do shark fins have to do with the military?
I’m not claiming this is a good system, it’s just how this happens sometimes.
Picking elephants removes the fact that finning is done for culinary reasons. Sure it’s a delicacy but so are many other animals that are being eaten.
Debatable, cheap foods seem to straight up allow me lesser cognitive abilities than “better” ones. Personally I think we should seek to maximize positive effect of life including those of animals eaten, rather than chasing calories and counting skulls.
Eleven people voted against the bill, I wonder what their motivation was. Personally I have no idea, if this is the equivalent of an ivory ban, makes complete sense, if it's foie gras, not so much.
edit: not to say that this isn’t a good thing, we just need a lot more if we want to save the sharks
We also know that sharks take a long time to grow and as important apex predators, their declining numbers have bad knock-on effects for other species (threatening extinction may apply to not only the sharks themselves but the ecosystems they are part of). So banning finning feels unambiguously good?
This is like the whaling on Greenland, cruel and highly visible but also doesn’t impact you or me in any way. It’s easy to push these types of bans through, but it can also be a distraction of the actual harms that we are perpetuating.
We just can't know whether any action will move the needle, not for sure, unless we go do it.
You mean it's cruel but it tastes good, so shrug? I mean that's certainly a position to take. I'm pretty neutral on it but mostly because it is possible to get cruelty-free foie. [1]
[1] https://nuvomagazine.com/daily-edit/guilt-free-foie-gras
Here's a photograph of the production process from Wikipedia, but I'd probably avoid it if you're feeling hungry. [1]
Personally I don't mind killing animals for food, I'd just prefer to avoid torturing them first.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras#/media/File:Mulard_d...
eg: Clean skin bull roundups in the Northern Territory and camel roundups in Central Australia?
These are large coordinated musters to funnel feral animals into yards, to tracks, and to slaughter.
There's a profit, sure, but the incentive for many is to stop them tearing up and destroying the land.
Having that in mind it’s a situation where one needs a crystal ball to determine whats the right things. A single large ecological shift, with all ethical harms that come with it, or a long term lower level of ethical harm.
On another ethical point; the "natural" boom | bust cycle of kangaroos in the Australian outback - their numbers explode when there are years of rain, and the ground is littered with bones in the years that follow.
Is it ethical to cull booming kangaroo numbers (that will die in any case) to prevent the otherwise inevitable pressure on limited water supplies that follows?
This is the land of Peter Singer (and others).
The bill seems to be mostly about military funding: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/7776...
The bit about shark fins is somewhere around page 4 thousand.
But hey. The sharks are safe.
It's a demonstration of that lack of faith that they see the candidates, then rationally decide their time would be better spent doing anything but voting.
This is the Politics Industrial Complex at its finest.
If we had a functional government, this could have been passed with the regular Senate rules. We don’t, so it gets attached to something that’s going to pass anyway, because no one is gonna fight on behalf of sharkers.
Let's devastate the earth for our taste buds
Basically the only principle involved is to insert a pipe into a bird’s throat, and force feed it to the point vision will be lost from complications. The bird is then slaughtered and liver harvested. Resultant specimen is butter-like but rich in flavor and pleasantly elastic.
Gods forbid foie gras enjoyer entering heavens, but the sin of it isn’t in environmental division.
Its not.
Imagine that an unknown being hauls you out of your environment, chops your legs off with no anesthetic, then casts you back into the world crippled and bleeding. That's what shark fin hunting is like. They don.t kill the animal. They mutilate it and let it die a slow death.
But only because we have differing set-points for defining animal cruelty. Force-feeding an animal so vigorously that it develops hepatic steatosis, only to kill it and consume its liver sounds equally cruel to me. Don’t get me wrong; I’m delighted the U.S. Congress saw fit to ban this practice. Now go ban the thousand other forms of cruelty visited on non-human animal species.
What else is in this years NDAA?
The 83-11 vote suggests nobody really knows, since anything's that's not related to keeping the government open and financing the military gets a 51-49 vote along party lines, which is not enough to pass in the Senate as you need 60 votes.