It’s a little charade that was supposed to attract customers. The supermarket chain Leclerc apologized after putting on sale – and promoting via social networks – a blue shark, in the fish department of its supermarket in Blaye, Gironde. And for good reason: the fish, if it is not officially considered a protected species, is threatened with extinction.
In an image posted on the store’s Facebook page (now deleted), Leclerc de Blaye asked its subscribers to guess what this “new species” was which “just arrived in the fish department”. “I am… a pelagic species”, “I am about 1.5 m tall”, “My skin color has a particularity”, “I weigh 25 kg” or “I can swim up to about 40 km/h” are so many elements with which the store wanted to make people guess that it was selling blue shark.
A fish threatened with extinction
“A small bubble is missing on this pretty montage”, reacted Thursday, on Twitter, the journalist and defender of ecology Hugo Clément. And to suggest, as a missing “bubble”: “I am a blue skinned shark, a species whose numbers are collapsing to the point that I am classified as critically endangered in the Mediterranean. »
“When endangered species continue to be authorized for sale, it gives this: the worst of advertising creativity in the service of the worst of fishing”, had for its part reacted the NGO for the protection of the oceans Sea Shepherd, calling the Secretary of State for the Sea to prohibit “the sale of endangered species”.
“Our store did not comply with the E Leclerc brand’s tide policy”, reacted Friday on Facebook to the Leclerc store in Blaye, thus apologizing, the blue shark being part “of a list of prohibited species in marketing” within the group. “We apologize to you and are sorry to have offended your sensitivity”, also writes the supermarket, promising to “never reproduce this error”.
A month ago, the Sea Sheperd association had already denounced the marketing of a blue shark on the stalls of an Intermarché store in Narbonne (Aude). “It’s a shame, we will be much more vigilant in the future,” replied its director to our colleagues from L’Indépendant. In September 2020, in another Leclerc store, in Val-de-Marne, it was a thresher shark that had been marketed by the brand, despite the ban on its fishing.