Alice Newstead Submits to the Horrors of Shark Finning

Alice Newstead has taken her protest against shark fishing to Hong Kong, again backed by Lush, the British cosmetics company. Instead of hanging in a store window as she did in Paris, Alice is hanging in an arts centre courtyard for 20 minutes at a time.

Her purpose is to protest the killing of 73 million sharks a year, threatening their extinction. The killing of the sharks is particularly inhumane. Their fins are sliced off to make the soup and they are thrown alive back into the water, unable to swim and sentenced to death.

Because Hong Kong serves as a key trend setting city among Asian communities, it’s only the people of Hong Kong who can lead the way to stopping this brutal luxury consumer practice of using shark fin soup as a display of wealth. Currently the fins are worth about $300 a pound.

Original Story December 2009

When Dave Head sent me this photo of Alice Newstead hanging by fish hooks in a Parisian shop window, I was amazed by her creativity. In some photos Alice looks amazingly mermaid-like. Being a fashion director and former fabric-development expert, I marvelled that her fish-skin fabric didn’t tear.

British performance artist Alice Newstead, suspended from then ceiling with hooks through the skin on her back hangs in the window of a cosmetic shop in Paris, Thursday, July 2, 2009 while talking with Paul Watson, right, head and founder of the conservation group Sea Shepherd. It never occurred to me that Alice Newstead was hanging in a Lush cosmetics shop window with shark-hooks piercing her own skin. I remain horrified by her performance art concept, in which Newstead creates her own religious rite, an ashura-like drama on behalf of sharks.

As a stunned crowd gathered to watch her performance, Newstead said, “I am doing this because the demand for shark fin soup and other shark products is wiping out the shark population.” Unlike the 100 million sharks who are brutally slaughtered each year for their fins, Newstead commented, “I will be left with scars, but the wounds will heal.”

LUSH and Sea Shepherd Launch Global Anti-Shark-Finning Campaign

Humans don’t have a warm relationship with sharks, sea creatures in desperate need of our help. “Sharks will be the first to go,” says Sonja Fordham, policy director of the Shark Alliance and one of the authors of the report. “Despite mounting threats, they remain virtually unprotected on the high seas.” via London Times

The principal customers for shark fins are mainly eastern cultures (80% in Hong Kong) with an appetite for shark fin, which consists of 90% cartilage and is essentially tasteless. After sufficient boiling, the fin softens and absorbs the taste of the broth. It shark fin soup sounds like a poor man’s meal, it’s actually a status symbol in eastern culture.

Shark Finning and Long Lining

Finning is the brutal method of cutting off the fins of the sharks. Often alive as their fins are sliced off, the trunk of the shark (dead or alive) is thrown back into the water, leaving 86% of the shark to sink. Finning is cruelly lucrative, with a kilo of shark fins in Asia fetching over £6,000.

Sharks are slow-moving and slow to reproduce. The fish are late in sexual development and produce few young. A third of open-ocean sharks including hammerhead sharks and giant devil rays are threatened with extinction, part of a total estimate of one-third of sharks becoming extinct in the short-term.

The Mediterranean Sea was a haven for hammerheads, not 99 percent extinct in the region. Despite their lack of Disney crib appeal, sharks are vital for keeping an ecosystem in balance.

Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd’s captain, said: “If we can’t save the sharks, we will fail to save our oceans, and if our oceans die, civilisation and humanity will die.

“Lush and Sea Shepherd recognise that we need to save the sharks if we are to save ourselves, and we are working together to make this happen.” Brand Republic

I remain deeply disturbed by Alice Newstead’s performance art. And yet, with so little love in our hearts for sharks, her dramatic gesture does succeed in raising our consciousness about the importance of protecting sharks, just as we try to do dolphins and whales. Thanks, Dave. Anne

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