In the first month of existence of the Shark Savers web site, many of you signed the petition to Alibaba to stop selling shark fins. We've been accumulating the signatures received thus far and have just sent them to Mr. Jack Ma, Alibaba's CEO. We will continue to collect signatures, so please ask your friends to visit Shark Savers and sign our petition.

Here is the cover letter that accompanied the signatures:
 

Dear Mr. Ma,

In October of this year, Shark Savers sent you a letter urging that you stop the sale of shark fins on Alibaba. At the beginning of November, our web site launched with a petition asking visitors to join with us to respectfully request that Alibaba no longer sells shark fins. We are including the names of those who signed our petition during the past month.

During this past month, Alibaba enjoyed a highly successful IPO. We congratulate you on this accomplishment. Also during this month, an estimated 6.5 million sharks were killed for their fins.

We heard that, at your IPO press conference, you stated that you and your family have stopped consuming shark fin soup after becoming aware of the problems associated with the over-exploitation of sharks. Assuming this is the case, we applaud this.

We will continue to call for the stopping of shark fin sales on Alibaba, but also think that, given your convictions, you could play an important role in encouraging your fellow Chinese to stop eating shark fin soup until we reach sustainable levels of consumption. May we suggest that, as a first step, we join together to encourage the Chinese business community to refrain from serving shark fin soup at their business functions? We would be delighted to discuss such a cooperative effort.

 As you can see, we've added a new challenge to Mr. Ma. Let's hope he views this as a new opportunity. We're ready to join with him in a campaign aimed to slow consumption of shark fin soup.