Old man strumming on banjo singing:
“Oh, I have a farm with cats and rats.
The cats for their fur, the rats as food for the cats.
We’ll feed the rats to the cats, the cats to the rats,
And get the fur for free!”
I imagine that’s what an ad for this interesting business proposal would go like.
According to Snopes, an Illinois newspaper editor told the AP back in 1875 about an absurd business:
This dubious “business proposal” wasn’t figured out as a hoax until 125 years later.
Do you think that such a business would be profitable or successful if actually done? I imagine nowadays, if it existed, groups like PETA would be angry, but do you think it would work?
And another thing, what would the profit on a thing like this be? If my calculations are correct, a farm like this would make almost $11 million dollars a year (probably more in 2001, since fur probably goes for more than 30 cents nowadays).
And to correct an earlier mistake- it only took 65 years to find out it was a hoax. But that’s still a long time to debunk something as ridiculous as a farm which basically involves skinning cats and feeding cats and rats to each other.
Of course it wouldn’t work. Digestion is an inefficient process. In this closed system, the cats and rats would have to be able to assimilate 100% of the biological energy of their food. If they didn’t the animals would either need to be supplemented with additional food from outside the system, or they’d eventually starve or dwindle in population down to nothing.
In addition to what Chas.E said, I would have to add: 100,000 cats!? 1,000,000 rats!? Good Lord. Have you ever gotten more than 3 cats to stay in one place for any length of time? Cat hearding indeed.
1,000,000 rats brings to mind the Ripley’s or Guiness show of the world’s worst mouse infestation (in Australia I think). It was just a sea of mice. So then, without having to resort to huge tracts of land, you would have quite closely packed rats, and I think they would end up eating each other (fur and all) before you could get the cats to them.
I’m sure there are other problems to the plan, but that’s just what jumped out at me.
I read a news story about a major retailer, Walmart I think, that sold winter parkas with fur around the hoods. They had to stop sales due to public outrage when it was discovered they were made with cat fur.
So there’s the ultimate flaw in the plan: no market for the end product.
I remember that story, it actually was Burlington Coat Factory. Here’s a link at the Humane Society (there may be others, I just did a search on Google for “Burlington” and “Fur”) http://www.hsus.org/current/dc_fur/fur_facts.html
As a huge Husker Du fan, I am particularly amused by this thread. The band quotes pretty liberally from the text of the hoax in their song “How To Skin A Cat.”
I would take the land and put 500,000 cows and 500,000 bulls where the cats would be, and next door, I would put 500,000 Matadors and 500,000 bull riders. I would feed the Matadors and the bull riders to the cows and the bull and feed the bulls and the cows to the Matadors and the bull riders and take the leather, milk, red carpets that the matadors use, the cowboy boots and hats for nothing. Also, I imagine quite a few people would pay to see this spectacle.
