Congress Outlaws Shark Finning

On December 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the Shark Finning Prohibition Act, a bill from California Republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham that had cleared the House by voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent. It made it illegal to cut the fins off a shark and discard the carcass at sea, or to land fins without the matching carcasses, and it gave enforcement a blunt but workable test: if the fins on board weighed more than five percent of the shark carcasses on board, the boat was presumed to have broken the law. Finning was already banned in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean; this extended the ban to the Pacific, where it had been unregulated. The law did not cover buying fins that someone else had already cut, a gap a Hong Kong-based trawler called the King Diamond II would exploit two years later when the U.S. Navy stopped it carrying more than 32 tons of shark fins and no sharks to match.