It seems to me that if we actually DO learn to eat (as a general poplulation) any rare creature such as the Manatee, its number will increase to perhaps that of chickens, pigs or cows?..What do you think?
Mark in Boston
Well, I’m a vegetarian and mostly horrified but…
Not all animals domesticate well. Cheetahs were at one time popular pets of rich folk (I seem to remember the practice being revived in oil rich countries with royalty like Saudia Arabia?) The problem is, cheetahs require large ranges and don’t reproduce well in captivity. As a result, mothers have to be shot and the cubs taken and raised to semi-domestication. Similar practices with the wool-bearing but undomesticatable chiru have pushed it to the brink of extinction.
If manatees are delicious, but people can’t reproduce their environment cheaply and easily, or can’t give them the appropriate conditions to breed (zoos are having this problem with pandas), the most likely result is active hunting rather then passive motor boat destruction - and the eventual end of the species.
Other examples that contradict the theory raised in the original post (OP): the bison, the dodo bird, the moa in New Zealand …
I’m not sure if the american passenger pigeon was ever used as a food source, but I imagine that since people were so keen on hunting them, they were eaten after they’d been shot down.
I’m sure many others can be thought of.
The mailbag item to which the OP refers is “Are manatees white meat or dark meat? (05-Jul-2000)”
Howdy there, pardner. Howsa bout a cup a joe before we head on out and lasso us summa them manatees? We gotta start this brandin’ before the sun goes down…
Fred’s Manatee Ranch
ps – In China they don’t stop hunting or eating species when they become endangered. The meat simply goes up in price and they become a “delicacies.”
I’m not sure that these contradict the concept implicit in the OP – that numbers may be increased through domestication (and then presumably decreased through being turned into McManatee burgers. 
As Kyberneticist stated, not all species domesticate well (or at all), but did anyone even try and domesticate Dodos? Or were they just eaten into extinction? Bison were shot in huge numbers, but were attempts made at sustainable farming? Aren’t there people farming Bison these days?
I’m fairly sure the Maori didn’t farm Moa – and the Kereru or New Zealand Wood Pigeon nearly went the same way (through being noisy, slow, stupid, and tasting good).
This has been suggested in Africa - that big game be actually farmed and hunting controlled.
Out of curiosity, has any attempt ever been made to domesticate large water mammals? Is it cost effective? I know Japan does a lot of whaling for “research purposes” - perhaps cordoning off a couple of bays and raising whales would be more popular internationally?
I visited some Save the Manatee sites. It appears that manatees have been successfully born in captivity.
However, as this site points out:http://www.fpl.com/html/kid_manateebook.html
manatees reproduce very slowly, about one calf every 3-5 years starting at age 7-9. They apparently live to around 60. Kinda human like…
Still, with birth rates that low, I don’t see a big commercial success coming soon. You’d have to build these huge, heated tanks, keep feeding them, and only expect one calf every 4 years?? Dunno, maybe it’d work, but I think the more likely fate would be rapid extinction of wild populations, and slow loss of any zoo/farmed animals due to small gene pools.
This faq:
Mentions the Steller’s Sea Cow, a creature in the same family as the florida manatees. It was hunted to extinction for food within 27 years of it’s discovery.
Yep, they did eat Passenger Pigeons
I posted here a couple of days ago, but apparently it didn’t take: It’s not exactly nonfiction, but in J. F. Cooper’s The Pioneers, there’s a scene depicting the yearly pigeon hunt. According to that book, the townsfolk would eat the pigeons, but they shot far too many to eat them all. The primary reason for the shooting was that the pigeons would (supposedly) ruin the wheat fields if not kept under control. The book doesn’t specify, but judging from the descriptions of the flocks (shoot straight up, don’t even aim and you can’t miss), it sounds like they’re talking about passenger pigeons.
We sent the column in question to a colleague studying aquaculture down in the Everglades. Here’s what she had to say:
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i could’ve answered that in a much briefer time. Manatees were refereed to as "sea cows’ by sailors. hence I would say red meat (which seems to be what they predominantly are by the article below). I would serve a nice Chianti.
Though, because America is fat on the whole we should not be eating blubbery meat…most definitely not good for the cholesterol levels. I would also assume manatee to be an oilier meat like lamb due to it’s high fat content. Not to mention the amount of fat soluble toxins that are locked up in that blubber. The Inuit of northern canada have a diet that consists of whale and walrus…they also have extremely high levels of PCBs, dioxin and heavy metals in their systems thanks to their diet. Knowing the waters of Florida like I do, and their toxin content…especiallly the mercury we have in the glades…I would hazard that manatees too have high toxin contents. Speaking of toxins and manatees…red tide is another threat. A couple years back about 10% of the know Florida pop died due to inhalation of aerosol from a sever red tide. The toxin algae got all into their respiratory tract. Lesson learned: Though washed up manatees may be easy pickins…I’d stay away from them.
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Thanks for the info., Beruang and friend!
Jill