Vietnamese Fisherman Refuses $439 For Rare Sea Turtle, Throws it Back into the Sea

Nguyen Van Truong, the fisherman in question, caught the turtle off the central coast of Ha Tinh Province on Wednesday, but was only reported to the public by the management committee of Ha Tinh’s fishing ports on Thursday, according to Baong Hean, as translated by VNExpress.

The fisherman was offered 10 million Vietnamese dong ($439) by a dealer for the turtle, identified as a green sea turtle (chelonia mydas), back into the ocean.

The average annual income in Vietnam is reportedly around 54 million dong ($2,385). The offered money could have very much helped the fisherman in many ways. However, he declined the offer and proceeded to release the turtle without any sort of payment in return.

“Turtles are endangered animals so I want to release it back into the sea and play a part in the conservation of the species,” the fisherman said.

Local authorities then helped the fisherman release the turtle back into the ocean.

The chelonia mydas has been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, according to the report.

The number of green turtles are decreasing. As said in WWF Global, there is an estimate of about 100,000 green turtles being killed in the Indo-Australian archipelago each year for its meat.

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons / Bernard DUPONT (CC BY-SA 2.0)