Gordon Ramsay Threatened at Gunpoint in Costa Rica

Many of you who have seen Sharkwater probably remember the massive operation that they discovered in Costa Rica. Well Gordon Ramsay, of Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen fame, has joined the fight against shark finning in his new show Gordon’s Shark Bait.

“It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, completely unregulated. We traced some of the biggest culprits to Costa Rica. These gangs operate from places like forts, with barbed wire and gun towers.

“At one point, I managed to shake off the people keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands of fins, drying on rooftops as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me.”

“Back at the wharf, there were people pointing rifles at us to stop us filming. A van pulled up and these seedy characters made us stand against a wall. The police came and advised us to leave the country. They said, ‘If you set one foot in there, they’ll shoot you.’”

thesun.co.uk.

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Kesen-numa City: Japan’s Shark Fin Capital

The video below claims to show a massive shark fining plant in Kesen-numa City, Japan where hundreds if not thousands of tons of shark are butchered weekly. Apparently the fishing port in Kesen-numa City is the only port dedicated to catching sharks, but we all know that where there are profits there are people willing to stretch the bounds of the law.

KESEN-NUMA CITY, JAPAN – It’s 5am on the the north eastern tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu, and 75 tons of dead shark is being meticulously arranged into a neat grid of tidy piles, of twenty sharks per pile.

If you thought shark finning was exclusively a Chinese problem, think again. Welcome to Kesen-numa City, Japan’s shark fin capital.

Here, six days a week, small teams of Japanese workers go about the hushed business of industrial shark-finning.

By 6.30am, with piles arranged, the sharks are disemboweled first. Hearts are ripped efficiently from their bodies by men wearing brightly coloured rubber boots and aprons. At 7am, the shark corpses are cleaned of their blood by workers wielding water hoses. And by 8am, small teams are silently moving up and down aisles and rows like robots in a Japanese car factory, quickly slicing off every dorsal, pectoral and tail fin from the lifeless, grey lumps. Big hungry black crows squawk in the shadows, looking for bloody morsels. And shark fins plop with regularity into small yellow plastic baskets. The baskets fill up fast, are then weighed, and finally carried to a nearby truck, where a man with a notepad strikes a deal. At 9.30am, it’s all over for another day. Fork lift trucks scoop up tons of limbless carcasses, then dump them into a high-sided truck. The process is a brutal sight to behold, and not for the faint-hearted.

-Allex Hofford

You can continue reading the very long and graphic description of this video on the Allex Hofford’s Vimeo page.

Crazy Shark Tattoo

Most people who get attacked by sharks want nothing to do with them, but this guy decided to get a tattoo to commemorate the occasion!

And he’s not the only one who doesn’t hold a grudge. Several shark attack victims have been banning together to protect the very creature that attacked them. They aim to protect all sharks in US waters from finning. (more from the Chicago Tribune)

image via Buzz Feed

Shark Finning

In case you haven’t had the chance to see Sharkwater (and if you haven’t, you really should) – heres a short video on the scary and heartbreaking reality of shark finning, the only trade more lucrative then the drug trade.