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On this day in vegan history · September 12, 1980

Yao Ming Is Born

The tallest man in the NBA grew up to talk an entire country out of shark fin soup.

Yao Ming Is Born
Wikimedia Commons / Yao Ming

The facts

Date
Born September 12, 1980, in Shanghai, China
The pledge
On August 2, 2006, Yao Ming pledged at a WildAid news conference to give up shark's fin soup
The result
Consumption of shark fin soup in China fell by 70 percent from 2011 to 2018
Later role
Yao became an ambassador for elephant conservation and filmed PSAs for the 'Say No' campaign against ivory and rhino horn with WildAid and the African Wildlife Foundation

Yao Ming was born on September 12, 1980, in Shanghai, and went on to become the most famous Chinese athlete of his generation as a center for the Houston Rockets. After retiring, he turned the same celebrity to conservation, pledging at a WildAid news conference on August 2, 2006, to stop eating shark fin soup, a delicacy served at Chinese weddings and banquets that requires slicing the fins off living sharks and dumping the rest of the animal back into the sea. He kept appearing in WildAid ads for over a decade, and later became an ambassador for elephant and rhino conservation as well, fronting the 'Say No' campaign against ivory and rhino horn with the African Wildlife Foundation. It was a bet that one credible messenger, in the right country, could move a market that no law had touched.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. Endangered species are our friends

    Yao Ming, at a WildAid news conference, August 2, 2006

    Source: WildAid

  2. As the human population increases, many wildlife species are decreasing, and the primary reason is that humans fail to treat animals as friends

    Yao Ming, at a WildAid news conference, August 2, 2006

    Source: WildAid

Why it still matters

A decade of Yao's ads made shark fin soup socially awkward to serve rather than illegal to sell, and the market moved anyway, a reminder that changing what a country eats sometimes starts with one person people already trust.

Sources

This history is still being written.

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