The Dorsal Fin

According to an AFP article, basketball player, Yao Ming has recently unveiled a new television commercial "aimed at wealthy Chinese" urging them to turn away from the consumption of shark fin soup. The commercial was produced by WildAid and features Ming pushing away a bowl of shark fin soup that is being offered to him in an upscale restaurant, accompanied by a narrator asking, “If you could see how shark fin is made, could you still eat it?”

Ming is quoted as saying, “We have species that need our attention and protection. They are endangered by excessive hunting by humans and deprived of habitats due to human greed.” Along with the television commercial, the basketball star’s image is also appearing on shark conservation billboard in China. Ming has been involved with WildAid in the past and made news in 2006 with his pledge to give up eating shark fin soup. Ming has also appeared in previous conservation PSAs for WildAid, including the one below which focuses on the hunting of elephants.

Hopefully, WildAid will post the new Yao Ming PSA online in the near future, as they generally do an exceptional job with their commercials (except that they tend to rely on the 100 million sharks a year “magic number”).

To counterbalance the stupid whale shark video posted earlier, I thought I’d re-visit one of WildAid‘s excellent shark conservation public service announcements. The video features 7-time Olympic medalist (2-time gold medalist) Amanda Beard and addresses the impact of finning and over-fishing on the world’s shark populations. While the video has been around for over a year, I figured it was worth re-visiting to hopefully give it some more exposure (it only has about 3,500 views on YouTube versus the 137,000 views of the guy riding the whale shark, as I write this). I think the people who put this one together did an awesome job.