A Chinese food blogger has been fined £15,000 for cooking and eating a great white shark she bought online.
In April 2022, the blogger, who posts under the handle Tizi, shared a video of herself cooking and eating the animal on social media like Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok and Kuaishou.
Identified by officials as Jin, the vlogger said she had bought the shark on the Chinese shopping site Taobao for 7,700 yuan (£926).
The videos of Jin cooking the 2-metre-long great white shark in a spicy broth and eating its meat went viral.
In the video, Jin says, ‘It may look vicious, but its meat is truly very tender’ before taking a bite.
Tizi is known for posting mukbang videos of herself eating exotic animals like crocodiles and ostriches, with a following of 7.8 million on Douyin.
Investigators identified the shark in her video as a great white by DNA testing the leftover tissues and the Nanchong City Market Supervision Bureau said in its report that the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural affairs valued the shark at 25,000 yuan (£3,004).
Jin was fined 125,000 yuan or £15,017. Local media reports say authorities had already identified and arrested the individuals who sold Jin the shark last year.
Jin claimed that she had bought the great white shark legally when Chinese authorities first began investigating her in August last year.
‘These people are talking nonsense,’ she told the South China Morning Post.
In her video she claimed that the shark was ‘bred in captivity’ and was ‘edible’ but an editorial by a Chinese state-run news site, The Paper, said there were inconsistencies with Jin’s claims.
‘It cannot be excluded that there is a black market,’ The Paper said according to The Times.
‘After all, to ship a big shark from the coastal region to Nanchong [an inland city more than 1,100 miles away], it requires coordination,’
What is Mukbang and where did it come from?
Mukbang – which comes from the Korean words for ‘eat’ and ‘broadcast’ – originated in South Korea.
It is an Internet craze where a host gets on camera to eat large portions of food while having a chat with their audience.
Great white sharks are a protected species in China under the Wild Animal Protection Law, which prohibits anyone from transporting, buying, and selling them and violators can receive hefty fines or up to ten years in prison.
The animals are hunted for their fins and teeth and are considered vulnerable to extinction, according to the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF). Numbers are also falling due to overfishing globally and bycatch – where sharks are accidentally caught in fishing nets.
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