Tuesday's Dan Rather Reports will present exclusive and disturbing video footage of the barbaric and inhumane practice known as "shark-finning," which is when fishers pull live sharks from the water, cut off their fins, and then dump them back into the water while still alive.

PETA Interview With Dan Rather

PETA's Colleen O'Brien interviewed Rather about it.

Dan Rather Reports Video Clips

The following clips feature never-before-seen undercover video footage of just some of this shocking cruelty:

• Dan Rather Reports "Shark Fin" clip 1
• Dan Rather Reports "Shark Fin" clip 2
• Dan Rather Reports "Shark Fin" clip 3

Without their fins, the sharks die a slow and agonizing death, usually from suffocation. And the practice is on the rise, feeding the public's growing appetite for shark-fin soup.

Watch the Exclusive Video Live! 

Dan Rather Reports premieres on HDNet on Tuesday, January 24, at 8 p.m. ET, with an encore at 11 p.m. ET. Tune in to learn what steps are being taken to protect these majestic animals of the sea so that they don't disappear forever.

Some folks made Christmas merry, while others are in need of making some serious New Year's resolutions to shape up:

• Kisses to hip international clothier Mango. The retailer will no longer sell fur or exotic-animal skins.
• Hisses to Essence magazine for featuring real animal pelts alongside their far more attractive—and humane—faux counterparts in a gallery of "opulent furs."
• Kisses to the Pacific Islands Conservation Initiative for working to designate the waters surrounding the Cook Islands as a sanctuary where sharks won't have their fins cut off for soup.
• Hisses to San Juan Mayor Jorge Santini for sending disturbing Christmas cards showing his family standing alongside taxidermied animals.
• Kisses to the Seattle City Council for protecting animals in Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean by banning plastic bags from groceries and other retail stores, which can kill birds, turtles, and other marine animals when the bags wash into the water and animals ingest them or become entangled in them.
• Hisses to forever flip-flopping Drew Barrymore for betraying animals by ditching her vegetarian diet to please her boyfriend.
• Kisses to Israel for making cat declawing a crime punishable by up to one year in prison and a $20,000 fine.
• Hisses and gag reflexes to Wendy's for adding a $16 foie gras burger to the menu in its Japanese restaurants.

It's the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In the case of animal abusers, every so often they get done unto them just as they do. Here are this year's best stories in which the Golden Rule put its game face on: 

Leg photo © iStockphoto.com/Shelly Perry  Shark photo © Getty Images/Digital Vision/Carl Roessler

• What do you get when you attach knives to birds' legs and bet on how quickly one will kill the other? One California man attending a cockfight found out the hard way.
• Ah, España. So much to love—the beaches, the cathedrals, the food, the evisceration of men who insist on tormenting animals who have large, pointy horns …
• Isn't there a saying (and if not, there should be)—when the gun is in someone else's paws, the hunter gets shot?
• If fish had newspapers, the headline for the article about this incident would've been "Shark OK After Angler Attack."
• When a mortally wounded deer uses the last of his strength to kill his attacker, the tragedy at least has a bittersweet ending.

Looks like animal abusers might want to consider a New Year's resolution to adhere to the Golden Rule … or else.

A man who was spear-fishing off Anna Maria Island in the Gulf of Mexico found out what it was like to be speared by a fish when a shark bit his left thigh. By issuing a series of biting (geddit?) ads placed in the area, PETA is using this incident to remind Floridians that the deadliest killers in the water aren't sharks—but human beings.

Sharks aren't the only animals who have been striking back:

• A grizzly bear made sure hers was the last life an avid hunter ever claimed when she charged a pair of men who were hunting animals along the border of Idaho and Montana, killing one of them before she was gunned down. 
• A woman "hunting" mice inside her California trailer dropped her gun, sending a shot through her knee and her male companion's groin. The mice escaped.  
• An Indonesian man who left his seven dogs alone for two weeks without food or water returned to find that they had developed a taste for chow mein man.

Perhaps if animals always fought back, people might think twice about abusing them. It would save a lot of lives all around. And speaking of saving lives—maybe these surfers will always be spared from shark attacks in return for their compassionate actions.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

Get ready to practice your high-fives and Bronx cheers—here's our quasi-monthly round-up of animal friends and foes:

• Kisses to California for making the water safer for sharks. The state banned the sale, trade, or possession of shark fins, which are cut off live sharks who are then thrown back into the water to sink to the ocean floor and die. An extra smooch goes to the Toronto City Council for voting to ban shark fins in that city.
• Fish foe Alex Andon makes our hiss list for developing the Desktop Jellyfish Tank, in which up to five jellyfish can be imprisoned. To help understand what's wrong with this, take a look at the online documentary Jellyfish Lake.
• A kiss to the New York state government for passing a dissection choice law that lets students choose not to cut up frogs and other animals and instead opt for state-of-the-art-computer programs that leave animals in peace.   
• Rihanna has crawled her way onto the year's worst-dressed list, first for her penchant for fur—and now for ostrich feathers, which are cruelly torn off live birds or birds who have been sent to slaughter.
• Kisses to the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation for adopting dogs from shelters to be trained as disaster search dogs. The dogs are paired with a human rescuer who provides them with a real home and affection.
• And finally, a kiss for truth in advertising to Dex Media Inc. When the company listed Bozeman and Belgrade, Montana's Bar 3 Bar-B-Q restaurants in its yellow-pages directory under "Animal Carcass Removal," it certainly had the restaurant's number!

Written by Michelle Sherrow

We're spitting mad at people who have been lashing out at animals, but we've saved up some wet, sloppy puppy-dog kisses for those whose compassion is the cat's pajamas.

Chadh | cc by 2.0

• Kisses to Canadian national pet store chain PJ's Pets, which has stopped selling puppies and started promoting adoption. Are you listening, Petland? 
• Hisses to Scripps Research Institute for torturing rats for almost 40 years to develop a vaccine for heroin. Apparently, these experimenters just couldn't say "No."
• Hisses to MMA fighter Brock Lesnar for going on a prairie-dog killing spree. Hey, Brock, why don't you stick with picking on someone your own size?
• Kisses to the Iowa State Fair for including a vegetarian booth, the Veggie Table, in this year's festivities. Yes, they really do have veggie corn dogs on a stick.
• Hisses to South Korean scientists for genetically modifying a dog to glow in the dark, giving new meaning to the term "barking mad."
• Kisses to Food Network for helping to keep sharks in the ocean waves by taking shark meat off the airwaves.
• Hisses to students at New York's Cooper Union High School for using electric currents to make roaches "dance." Why not stick with iPods and leave the arthropods alone?
• Hisses to actor Andrew McCarthy for participating in a bull run. Taunting and harassing bulls isn't pretty, no matter how you color it.

For up-to-the-minute info on what PETA is doing, follow us on Twitter.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

If you're a regular PETA Files reader, you no doubt know that sharks' bad rap is undeserved. While there are a handful of well-publicized shark attacks around the world every year, humans pose the bigger threat—we kill about 73 million sharks annually. According to the Discovery Channel's Shark Week website, you're more likely to be bitten by another person than by a shark! In honor of Shark Week, here are five other facts about these mysterious ocean dwellers:

hermanusbackpackers/cc by 2.0

 
1. Sharks may seem to be all business, but they also have a playful side. Porbeagle sharks have been observed playing with objects floating in the water, repeatedly rolling themselves in kelp fronds, and chasing after other sharks who trailed pieces of kelp behind them.  

2. Sharks work together to obtain food—and mind their manners when eating. Biologist Peter Best once saw several great whites working together to move the carcass of a partially beached whale to deeper waters so that they could eat it. Caribbean reef sharks follow a pecking order when eating, with the biggest shark eating first.

3. Frightfully fast, sharks are excellent swimmers, thanks to scales covered with tiny teeth that enable water to flow smoothly over their bodies. Several years ago, Speedo introduced a swimsuit modeled after shark skin—but the suits worked too well and were banned from major swim meets for giving swimmers an unfair advantage.

4. We don't know if great whites like Great White (ahem), but they love AC/DC. A charter boat operator in Australia has discovered that great white sharks become less aggressive when songs by AC/DC are played underwater.

5. While whale sharks can give birth to 300 babies at a time, most sharks grow and mature slowly, have long gestation periods (up to two years!), and produce few young—making these animals particularly vulnerable to overfishing.

 
Written by Paula Moore

If the thought of sharks makes you envision a water skier meeting his end while the Jaws theme plays, think again. The reality is that there are only a handful of shark attacks around the world each year (only a few of which prove fatal), while humans kill about 73 million sharks a year. Hopefully that number will now take a dive, as the Bahamas has banned shark fishing and made 243,000 square miles of ocean into protected territory.  

So why do we kill 73 million sharks every year? It certainly isn't in self-defense. One of the main reasons is to fulfill the demand for shark-fin soup. Since only the fin is desired, sharks are dragged to the surface, their fins are cut off, and they are thrown back into the ocean to slowly die from their injuries, stress, or suffocation.
 

HuntFishGuide/cc by 2.0

The United States, Canada, the European Union, and several other countries also have laws against shark finning. Only if compassionate people continue to decry shark fishing and refuse to purchase any shark meat or shark products (including shark cartilage supplements) will sharks be protected from the truly dangerous predators: people.   
 

Written by Michelle Sherrow

Patrons of a California pet-store chain were appalled when they saw black-tipped reef sharks displayed in small tanks. As is the case with most captive sharks, these animals were swimming into the tanks' glass walls, resulting in chronic injuries. 
 

 
After PETA was alerted to the sharks' plight last summer, we convinced the chain  to release one injured shark so that the animal could receive veterinary care and be given a new home; the chain also said that it would not place sharks in new stores. But after another shark was injured a couple months ago and PETA posted an action alert on its website, the pet store made the compassionate decision to release all its sharks to more species-appropriate facilities.

Sharks naturally roam for miles in the ocean. In captivity, they often exhibit neurotic behaviors as a result of stress, including repetitively swimming into the sides of their tanks. Confinement also deprives them of engaging in natural behaviors such as foraging for food, choosing mates, raising their young, and exploring reefs.

Please, don't patronize any pet stores, aquariums, or other businesses that sell live animals or use them as "props."

 
Written by Michelle Sherrow

The U.S. banned "finning"—a practice in which fishers cut the fins off sharks and dump the still-living animals overboard to die a slow, agonizing death—back in 2000, but the ban only extended to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Now, a decade later, the Senate has finally voted to extend the ban to the Pacific. 

Disappointingly, the bill does not ban the sale of shark fins in the U.S., which means that restaurants can still sell the deadly "delicacy" and thereby continue to fund the mutilation of sharks in less protected waters.

The bill now heads to the House, which has already passed similar legislation. Keep your fingers crossed that these "lame ducks" will rally to the rescue of maimed sharks in the waning days of their last session.

If pigs had fins, would the Senate throw them a lifeline too?

Written by Alisa Mullins