Last Friday, China’s forestry authority urged provinces across the county to prepare for the wild animal consumption ban by the end of September.
The administration stresses that efforts must be made to rectify and stop artificially breeding wild animals. The Grassland Administration will introduce a supervisory mechanism to urge provinces to speed up their bans.
Although the ban focuses only on terrestrial animals, it is a step in the right direction.
Qian Yefang, a professor from the school of law and politics of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, tells the Global Times, “This shows China’s determination to protect wild animals, maintain biodiversity, and ensure public health.”
The nationwide ban follows the February 24th legislative decision banning wild animals’ consumption and illegal wildlife trade all-around. Twenty-five provinces in China have since launched measured to rectify wild animal breeding.
China is trying different measures to stop wild animal breeding while also ensuring farmer’s incomes remain sustainable. Techniques are creating new job opportunities, providing skill training, exploring new business opportunities alongside economic compensation. The campaign’s species include snakes, pheasants, bamboo rats, ducks, porcupines, and civet cats.
Unfortunately, protections offered by the ban exclude sharks. Shark fin soup is an expensive delicacy around the world. The soup only requires a shark fin; however, the soup’s production kills an entire shark. Therefore, the shark finning industry has brought some shark populations to critically endangered levels (Dulvy et al., 2008).
Staying optimistic, as we try hard to do here at Sharkophile, this ban may kickstart conservation movements in China that may eventually result in the prohibition of shark fin soup.