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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

My first though was "good", but then I started to wonder why it wasn't illegal and if there's some downside we don't see. For example if it's like foie gras that people don't like because they think it's cruel but has important culinary value, and isn't driving species extinction or anything. Seal fur is another example that comes to mind, opposition is based more on how cute the animal is than any actual environmental concerns.

Eleven people voted against the bill, I wonder what their motivation was. Personally I have no idea, if this is the equivalent of an ivory ban, makes complete sense, if it's foie gras, not so much.

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>Eleven people voted against the bill, I wonder what their motivation was.

The bill seems to be mostly about military funding: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/7776...

The bit about shark fins is somewhere around page 4 thousand.

Props for looking beyond the headline. I am only about 1/5 through and have 4 pages of notes so far (many of which are "things to expect context-free outrage bait headline/talkshow topics to focus on". We'll see how it goes.

Yes, it's the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed once per year to fund the U.S. military. Because the NDAA is considered a "must pass" bill, it's used as a vehicle to pass a bunch of other legislation (all bundled into the same bill). There's only limited opportunity to debate or offer amendments. The NAY votes likely had nothing to do with the shark fins.

A bloated and excessive NDAA gets bloated further still. And Congress wonders why so many have so little faith in Uncle Sam.

But hey. The sharks are safe.

Members of both chambers of Congress have a near 100% reelection rate. The only time a politician is replaced is if they decide to retire or their own party doesn't support them in the primaries. Even if Americans really have "so little faith in Uncle Sam" they definitely don't show it in the voting booth.

> they definitely don't show it in the voting booth.

It's a demonstration of that lack of faith that they see the candidates, then rationally decide their time would be better spent doing anything but voting.

Maybe it’s time to become single issue shark fin voters.

When one of the two major parties runs on the platform of "government == bad," we shouldn't be surprised when they try to make the government as unproductive as possible.

That's a different issue. This is both parties "conspiring" on an excessive DoD budget and then both actively partaking in the adding on frivolity. And then the POTUS gladly signs off.

This is the Politics Industrial Complex at its finest.

There is no conspiring, there is no conspiracy. There is, however, a must-pass bill which can bypass some political roadblocks, so common-sense riders get attached to those bills.

If we had a functional government, this could have been passed with the regular Senate rules. We don’t, so it gets attached to something that’s going to pass anyway, because no one is gonna fight on behalf of sharkers.

You'll find the bits about The Politics Industrial Complex interesting. Perhaps not a "conspiracy" per se, but the game tilts itself in favor of itself. That being normalized doesn't make it right.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/im-your-biggest-fan/

My understanding is that the shark fin trade is threatening extinction but I could be wrong

I was actually thinking the opposite, which also might be wrong, that most sharks are dying because of overfishing in general and climate change.

edit: not to say that this isn’t a good thing, we just need a lot more if we want to save the sharks

It's hard to specifically attribute why any fish population is decreasing, but it's not at all a stretch to say demand for shark fins contributes to overfishing of sharks. This isn't something anyone can quantify well because so much fishing is done illegally and shark finning especially being controversial isn't something folks advertise themselves as doing, but it seems very safe to assume there is an impact here caused by the trade.

We also know that sharks take a long time to grow and as important apex predators, their declining numbers have bad knock-on effects for other species (threatening extinction may apply to not only the sharks themselves but the ecosystems they are part of). So banning finning feels unambiguously good?

Banning finning is unambiguously good, and sharks are indeed and important keystone species. However if the majority of shark deaths occur as by-catch or due to global warming there isn’t a lot of change in outcome.

This is like the whaling on Greenland, cruel and highly visible but also doesn’t impact you or me in any way. It’s easy to push these types of bans through, but it can also be a distraction of the actual harms that we are perpetuating.

The health of fisheries is often death by inaction because every special interest group blames each other -- recreational anglers blame commercial anglers blame climate change and nobody can point the finger hard enough to get anything done, exactly by way of arguing "this is just a distraction from the actual harm"

We just can't know whether any action will move the needle, not for sure, unless we go do it.

> they think it's cruel but has important culinary value

You mean it's cruel but it tastes good, so shrug? I mean that's certainly a position to take. I'm pretty neutral on it but mostly because it is possible to get cruelty-free foie. [1]

[1] https://nuvomagazine.com/daily-edit/guilt-free-foie-gras

And here I was thinking you linked to a vegan alternative. While less cruel, I wouldn’t call murdering an animal to satisfy your tastebuds cruelty-free.

Fair enough, I was alluding to the fact there's 100% less feeding funnel shoved down their throats daily.

Here's a photograph of the production process from Wikipedia, but I'd probably avoid it if you're feeling hungry. [1]

Personally I don't mind killing animals for food, I'd just prefer to avoid torturing them first.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras#/media/File:Mulard_d...

I agree with your point, these geese live way better lives than their force fed brethren. I just couldn’t agree with the cruelty-“free” part.

If we're playing ethics, how do you feel about murdering introduced animals to lessen their devestating impacting om pre existing ecologies?

eg: Clean skin bull roundups in the Northern Territory and camel roundups in Central Australia?

These are large coordinated musters to funnel feral animals into yards, to tracks, and to slaughter.

There's a profit, sure, but the incentive for many is to stop them tearing up and destroying the land.

I think that’s a really interesting ethical question, personally I think the profit incentive will cause a cobra effect type situation and these species will never be made extinct where they were introduced.

Having that in mind it’s a situation where one needs a crystal ball to determine whats the right things. A single large ecological shift, with all ethical harms that come with it, or a long term lower level of ethical harm.

I'm familiar with the areas in question and I fall on the side of believing that feral donkeys, camels, bulls, dogs, cats, cane toads, et al will never be erradicated as the area is vast and the animals are dug in; the best that can be achieved is to routinely cull back.

On another ethical point; the "natural" boom | bust cycle of kangaroos in the Australian outback - their numbers explode when there are years of rain, and the ground is littered with bones in the years that follow.

Is it ethical to cull booming kangaroo numbers (that will die in any case) to prevent the otherwise inevitable pressure on limited water supplies that follows?

This is the land of Peter Singer (and others).

> For example if it's like foie gras

Its not.

Imagine that an unknown being hauls you out of your environment, chops your legs off with no anesthetic, then casts you back into the world crippled and bleeding. That's what shark fin hunting is like. They don.t kill the animal. They mutilate it and let it die a slow death.

> Its not.

But only because we have differing set-points for defining animal cruelty. Force-feeding an animal so vigorously that it develops hepatic steatosis, only to kill it and consume its liver sounds equally cruel to me. Don’t get me wrong; I’m delighted the U.S. Congress saw fit to ban this practice. Now go ban the thousand other forms of cruelty visited on non-human animal species.

I get your point. But does hepatic steatosis cause the animal to suffer? The end result for the animals in both cases is death. How quick you make that death is is the difference between humane and inhumane.

> but has important culinary value

Let's devastate the earth for our taste buds

I’m not sure foie gras have sustainability implications, it scales up and down well.

Basically the only principle involved is to insert a pipe into a bird’s throat, and force feed it to the point vision will be lost from complications. The bird is then slaughtered and liver harvested. Resultant specimen is butter-like but rich in flavor and pleasantly elastic.

Gods forbid foie gras enjoyer entering heavens, but the sin of it isn’t in environmental division.

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