Help Toronto Take Shark Fin Soup Off the Menu, Support a Movement

Shark fin soup, a delicacy consumed mostly by wealthy Chinese, is leading to the decimation of tens of millions of sharks every year.

But now Toronto, the largest city in Canada and 5th largest in North America, is poised to add some...er, teeth, to a growing movement to ban shark fins from menus around the world.

Today,  any high-end Chinese restaurant or traditional wedding banquet is likely serving shark fin soup. It's an old tradition that has come to be quite the status symbol. But the lofty price tag (up to $100 per bowl) is only part of the high cost—the destruction of shark populations around the globe is the larger cost to society.

Shark finning is an extremely cruel and wasteful practice: Fins are cut from sharks while they are still alive, and the bodies tossed back overboard where the shark sinks and either drowns or bleeds to death. The practice of shark finning has been banned in U.S. waters since 2002, and some international agreements have ended the practice in regions of the high seas. Yet, finning continues in many places, driven by the lucrative trade of fins to supply the soup (a meal that contains hardly any nutritional value, by the way).

Given the increasingly threatened status of shark worldwide, some leaders, such as in Hawaii and the town of Brandtford, Ontario, a city only a short drive from Toronto, have decided to take things a step further and ban the sale, consumption and possession of shark fins—the only real way to decrease the number of sharks slaughtered for fins each year.

California is currently debating a similar ban, and now Toronto could soon be on board too.  Getting major population centers such as these to join the bans would bring significant reduction in worldwide slaughter of sharks, and Toronto has the largest Canadian-Chinese population in the country. North Americans of Chinese descent who care about sharks are getting behind this movement in droves—just check out the amazing work of Shark Truth, an organization in Canada that is mobilizing young Chinese couples to reject serving shark fin soup at their weddings.

Shark Truth has created a petition on Change.org that would help support the proposed ban in Toronto. You can sign onto their campaign here, or supporting Chinese Americans working towards the same goal in California here.

Photo credit: easy traveler