Over the course of seven weeks last fall, workers in Costa Rica allegedly filled 194 sacks with dried fins that had been sawed off the backs of an estimated 15,000 sharks. In six separate shipments weighing one ton each, the fins flew over the Pacific Ocean, miles above the waves. When they finally reached their destination 10,000 miles away, the small gray triangles were unloaded, sack by sack, and dropped into soups across Hong Kong.
The company hired to ferry the fins across the ocean to Hong Kong is the biggest delivery company on Earth: United Parcel Service, or UPS. And despite outcry, UPS isn’t saying how many more shipments of shark fin it makes—or whether it has plans to stop.
According to an export certificate by Costa Rica’s National Animal Health Service, UPS isn’t shipping just any old shark fin, either. The documents show that, working with China Airlines, UPS shipped the fins of several species of shark that are considered “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. The listing connotes that the species is facing “a high risk of extinction in the wild in the medium-term future.”
