NBA star Yao Ming pledged to give up eating shark's fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, as he joined a campaign to promote wildlife protection.

Steve Trent, President of WildAid; basketball star Yao Ming, who plays for NBA's Houston Rockets; Liu Huan, a respected and popular musician; and Li Ning, an Olympic gold medallist turned entrepreneur (R-L) join hands during the launch of WildAid's public awareness campaign to save endangered species and sharks in Beijing August 2, 2006. [Reuters]

"Endangered species are our friends," Yao said on Wednesday at a news conference organized by the San Francisco-based conservation group WildAid.

The group said China is the world's biggest importer of shark's fins, which conservationists say are cut from sharks that are thrown back into the ocean to die. WildAid put the worldwide trade in shark's fins at 10,000 tons a year.

"As the human population increases, many wildlife species are decreasing, and the primary reason is that humans fail to treat animals as friends," said Yao, who played for the Shanghai Sharks basketball team before moving to the Houston Rockets.

A conservation advertising campaign featuring Yao includes other wildlife as well as sharks.

A television commercial shown at Yao's news conference featured him jumping up from a basketball court to block a bullet fired at an elephant.