Wildlife

Texas Bans Shark Finning

Across the globe, sharks are being murdered for a culinary gimmick — shark fin soup, even though shark fins offer virtually no flavour or nutritional value. Shark finners slice off sharks' pectoral and dorsal fins, often while the animals are still alive, and throw them back overboard to drown or bleed to death. According to the most recent statistics from the journal Ecology Letters, shark finning accounts for 73 million shark deaths every year.

This weekend, the state of Texas took an important step forward for global shark conservation by becoming the 10th U.S. state to ban the trade of shark fins. Although shark finning is banned in U.S. waters, it continues in other countries where fishing is more poorly regulated. And even though finning itself is illegal, many U.S. states have no rules against the trade of shark fins, allowing them to be imported and exported within the country.