In addition to the ecological issue, the "acting low class"(inhumane) issue, there are also two additional "acting stupid" issues.
Lot's of people who own businesses- and not just in the U.S.- approach natural resource exploitation in a, "I'll squeeze out as much for me now, screw the future" way. I lived out West in logging country, and saw alot of the practice and ugly (for people) results. Especially in Oregon where the very worst kind of clearcutting is practiced. The land is so chewed up it erodes too fast for replanting, even on the rare occaision that the primary corp there bothers to. The result is a perfectly sustainable and restockable natural resource is disappear in entire regions. On one hand that's resulted in entire semi-ghost towns of already lower-middle class workers all jobless and on the dole. Another result is that about the time I hit a nursing home and am going to really REALLY resent it, I'm not going to have any decent toilet paper.
A second kind group of stupids is the sensely waste of the food. Some sharks taste better than others, but none of the ones I know of that they harvest for fins don't taste good. Some are better than swordfish. To make things worse, we've already fished a good number of other traditional species to the final years of extinction, so there are huge numbers of fishermen going out of business just like those loggers in Oregon. The last thing we need is to kill off another major- and sometimes lucrative- fish species they could turn to.
For me the whole thing isn't about siding with any particular argument- I don't think you need to go that far. All you really have to say is that there a whole, whole bunch of good arguments why it's everything from stupid to base and there are any real reasons to do it except that some posers with more money than they deserve say, "I wanna."
