Support European Shark Week

Watch this animation and pledge your support to protect sharks.The Shark Alliance, founded by The Shark Trust has released an animation to illustrate the plight of sharks as they are stripped of their fins and dumped overboard for the production of shark fin soup. The Shark Alliance is calling for a closure on loopholes which still allows sharks to be finned and dumped at sea.

Currently, EU Member States can grant special permits that allow their fishing vessels to remove shark fins at sea as long as the amount of fins on aboard is kept under five percent of the weight of shark bodies.  The EU’s allowable fin to carcass ratio is the highest in the world and widely criticized for hampering enforcement and data collection while providing room for finning to occur undetected and unpunished. Hundreds of tonnes of shark fin have been landed by the UK fleet under these permits since the EU shark finning regulation was adopted. The UK Fisheries Ministers have now announced they will stop providing special permits and pressure is mounting on other EU countries to join the ban.

The Shark Trust pages have lots of information on sharks, identification guides, pictures and you can sign their petition to close loopholes in finning legislation. European Shark Week runs from 10th-18th October.