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The Pros And Cons Of Shark Finning

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If you had to pick between buses or sharks, which would you think killed 1,082 people in 2013? If you chose sharks, you are wrong. Sharks only killed 2 people in 2013, compared to the 1,082 killed by a bus. (A. Kasprak, 2015) Sharks are portrayed as ruthless and merciless killers. But what if we found out that instead of them being the predators, that they are our prey? Humans have been hunting sharks for as long as we have known they exist. Now, they are becoming rare and some are even extinct. The main reason of this is shark finning. Shark fins are in high demand, so more sharks get killed every year. What we do not realize though is that without sharks, the whole ecosystem will change and maybe even fall apart. Many people are skeptical that this is not really a problem, …show more content…

The sharks are alive while all this is done so they feel everything. Not only are they in extreme pain, they usually die a few hours after having their fins cut off. They sink to the bottom and either bleed to death or suffocate. Sharks use their fins to swim. Without them, they cannot swim so they just sink to the bottom after having their fins cut off, while struggling and trying to swim but to no avail. Sharks need to swim in order to breathe because they get oxygen from the water as they swim and the water flows into their gills. They cannot breathe if they are laying at the bottom of the ocean not being able to move because their fins have been cut off. This is not only inhumane, but it introduces the argument of how wasteful this practice is. Shark finning takes the fins of a shark and dumps the rest of it back into the ocean, like garbage. The rest of the shark body has parts that can be used. Sharks are being fished anyways along with shark finning. So that makes the number of sharks being killed double the number that they should and that they can be.
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