You must remember that it is only the popular species. I'm from Portugal and here sharks have another name and are eaten regularly under that name. If it was called shark (the Portuguese equivalent to shark) there would probably be a whole commotion about it.
From a pragmatic/utilitarian point of view, eating whole sharks is maybe much less cruel and much less wasteful than eating shark fins. After all, you can only eat so many whole sharks.
This is the part I personally find most disturbing. When you see videos of shark finners slicing them off the shark while still in the water, leaving it to bleed to death it's very disturbing.
If people were eating the meat as well, and they were being fished at a sustainable level (so not endangered species), I'd have no issue with it.
Exactly. For instance, I go on a day-trip deep sea fishing every year, for cod and pollack and haddock, etc. Wherever those other fish are, there are always schools of dogfish too - basically garbage little sharks. When somebody pulls up a dogfish on their line, the mate on the boat just smashes it against the rail and tosses it overboard. Technically, I think dogfish are protected or vulnerable or some sort of classification, but they are like seagulls, no shortage of them and they are a big nuisance.
Moreover, I don't know if you have ever been deep-sea fishing, but when you pull a fish up from a hundred-plus yards underwater quickly, they tend to not survive if you do toss them back - quite often the pressure differential blows their lungs right out their mouths, and if not, they usually get scooped up by the blue sharks that also dog behind fishing boats.
I'm sure you know, but for the people down-voting you: You often have to kill dogfish when you pull them up because they have poisonous spines on them and you don't want to get pricked while they're thrashing around.
I've never done deep sea fishing, but when fishing with my grandpa he'd cut them up and use them as crab bait, which seemed like a good use for them to me.
