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Tang selling shark fin soup in Hong Kong
Neil Millard24.07.09
A restaurateur has been dragged back into a row over the sale of shark fin soup after apparently continuing to offer it at his venues in Asia.
Sir David Tang's China Tang restaurant at The Dorchester Hotel was criticised this month for offering a diner the chance to sample the Chinese delicacy "off-menu".
Unfortunately for Sir David, the diner was conservationist Lord Anthony Rufus Isaacs, who protested in an email to the businessman.
The restaurant said it had removed the dish from the menu three months ago and claimed it had been offered by mistake.
But after discovering it was still on sale at its sister restaurant, Island Tang, in Hong Kong, charity People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals launched an email campaign to have the dish banned. The soup is condemned by animal welfare groups because sharks are routinely "finned" and thrown back in the sea to bleed to death.
Peta's director of special projects Poorva Joshipura said: "Sir David's decision to sell the soup in Hong Kong while taking it off the menu in the UK for ethical reasons is hypocritical."
In an email to the Standard today Sir David says : "I have taken sharks' fins off my menu. And I am prepared to engage in rational and scientific debates.
"What I abhor is Peta writing to me to say that if I couldn't confirm to them my policy of sharks' fins worldwide, they will tell the press about it, which is what they have done. That is blackmail and totally unacceptable."
Reader views (5)
Monte. You are wrong. In fact, you are inhabiting a realm of inaccurracy which is quite staggering. As a shark conservationist, I am in a position to inform you that the movement to protect our sharks is not "political" it is in fact a motion to stop the destruction of our oceans, the most important eco-system to our survival. Without sharks, the oceans cannot function and your ascertation that because we are decimating other marine animals it makes sense to decimate sharks is both absurd and also frightening in it's astonishing level of ignorance.
100 million sharks are killed each year, there are more than 60 species that face exinction within the next decade, including Great Whites and it is a very real possibility that up to 80% of the world's shark species will be extinct within the next 60 years. Humans have already destoroyed the world's shark populations by 90% in only thirty years and if attitudes like yours, formed through ignorance, arrogance and misinformation continue, we as a species are doomed. That's the facts. Your opinion is typical of the human arrogance which is destroying the planet, something you seemingly seem to find less important than a bowl of soup.
- David, Leeds, United Kingdom
Shark Fin soup has a place on David Tang's menue, just as much as Lamb-Chops has a place on the Menues in London! This is pure hypercritical invasiveness for Westerners to dictate to the Occidental Cultures. There are more sharks than humans on this planet. This preservation of sharks is much more political than anything else to make names, money, and power out of the subject. We fish out so much of the sharks prey from the oceans, that it only makes sense to also reduce the ocean's predators. Shakrs are not endangered, and that includes the World's Great White population.
- Monte, Greenwich, CT, USA
greedy even as the money system crumbles from it's foundations like a house built on sand. what bout ethics, human conscience, or ecological science?
- Dan, Cow eat town
How disgusting. But what can we expect ? Money first to these people.
- Michael, Kensington, UK
Sir David is simply accommodating a variety of cultures and political stances. What is bad in one country is fine in another. In essence his decision has nothing to do with deeply held values or ethics, its all about.... the money.
Politicians act like this every day.
- Trunk, US
