168 Man and Shark 



price for herring. Some sharks are marketed under the trade name "Sea 

 Eel." 



Norway ships iced belly-walls of dogfish to Germany, where they 

 are prepared by smoking. During the smoking, they curl up. These are 

 a deUcacy called Schillerlocken, after the long, flowing curls affected 

 by the poet Schiller. Usually sold packaged, they are a popular food in 

 thousands of homes. 



In Denmark and Sweden, the tender meat of the Thornback or 

 Thorny Maid skate {Raja clavata) is savored as a substitute for lobster. 

 About 500,000 pounds of Thornbacks are caught each year in Denmark 

 alone. The Common skate {Raja batis), which also ranks with lobster 

 as a seafood on Danish and Swedish tables, is hauled in at the rate of 

 220,000 pounds a year by Danish fishermen. 



Such statistics are feeble, however, when the world-wide catch of 

 sharks, skates, and rays is compared to the catch of fishes that are not 

 saddled with prejudice. A United Nations survey of food fish in 1956 

 showed that selachians accounted for a bare 1 per cent of the world's 

 total marine and fresh-water harvest. Herring, sardines, and anchovies, 

 by comparison, accounted for 24 per cent. 



These UN statistics are not wholly reliable, however. Some countries, 

 perhaps because of a piscatorial form of nationalism, do not report any 

 landings of sharks, skates, and rays. One of the authors has seen all 

 these unmentioned selachians on sale in markets of countries whose 

 fisheries reports to the UN are sharkless. 



In nations where common sense has won out over prejudice, sharks 

 have become a dietary staple, and an extremely nutritious one, too. 

 Analyses of the flesh of a lowly dogfish {Sqiiahis acanthias) have shown 

 that it contains more protein and more energy value per pound than 

 eggs, milk, oysters, mackerel, lobster, or salmon. Yet, in the United 

 States and Canada, this same dogfish is labeled a predator and marked 

 for execution, not for use as food. Since 1956, the Canadian government 

 has been posting a bounty on dogfish in an attempt to eradicate them 

 as a pest. In 1958, President Eisenhower signed a bill authorizing the 

 U.S. Department of the Interior to spend up to $95,000 a year to find 

 new ways to exterminate dogfish or to find some use for them. The 

 fact that some countries have found a use— as food— has been almost 

 totally overlooked in the United States. Driven by an obsession to ex- 

 terminate sharks instead of utiUzing them, American fishermen annually 

 destroy tons of dogfish. 



At a time when a burgeoning population is exhausting traditional 

 food supplies, such wanton destruction of a cheap, abundant, nutritious 

 maritime resource is absurd. The world's 2,900,000,000 population has 

 almost doubled in the past 70 years and is expected to redouble every 



