News Blog
Monterey Audubon Society Goes Boycotting
April 19, 2011
The Monterey Audubon Society is taking it upon themselves to be the first conservation group to take formal action against long line fishing for the purpose of “shark finning,” and the construction of a highway through the Serengeti National Park (a World Heritage Site) in Tanzania.
The society is boycotting eco-tourism to Tanzania in an effort to put enough economic strain on the country that they no longer see the highway as a viable option. The Serengeti is home to some of the largest land migrations in the animal kingdom and wildlife scientists and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee have yet to sanction the building of a highway. Completion of the highway puts the Serengeti in danger of losing its World Heritage title.
Becoming more and more prominent on the mainstream environmental issues stage is the devastating practice of long line fishing to procure shark fins for medicinal and culinary uses. The Monterey Audubon Society “resolves a formal boycott to participating in any activity with any business or company and their sponsors, associated with promoting, endorsing, or using “long lining,” “shark finning,” or “shark fin soup.”
Long lining is a form of fishing that uses hundreds and sometimes thousands of hooks on a single line that can stretch for up to 20 miles. The hooks are indiscriminate, killing hundreds of thousands of other animals including birds, turtles and marine mammals every year. The brutality of how the sharks are dealt after being caught was documented in an interview with TV Chef Gordon Ramsey by Britain’s Daily Mail. Ramsey relayed the shocking way in which the sharks are caught, stripped of their fins and thrown back into the sea alive (as very few sharks are good table fare), sentencing the animals to a slow death by starvation or predation.
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