You mean “rabbi meat.”
:hijack:
A friend had an obscure animal’s horn for their shofar {bugle made from an animal’s horn} instead of the customary sheep. I wondered aloud if a giraffe had a horn that could be used as a shofar. Anybody care to weigh in with TSD?
Is it, though? I had thought that the animal had to be domesticated (in addition to the cud/cloven hoof bit) to really be considered OK.
This assumption dates back to a trip with Typo Knig to the American Museum of Natural History in New York a couple of decades ago, where I pointed to various stuffed critters, noted their hoof status, and asked if they were kosher. He didn’t think so for that reason, but we could be very wrong.
Curious myself, I looked into it. Would you believe Wikipedia has an article about this?
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That either. “Long pig” is too close to the other sort.
Slight hijack: Most fish is kosher, and supposedly* a 16th century pope declared capybara (large rodent - think guinea pig on steroids) to be “fish”. So an ecumenical-minded Jew might chow down on guinea pig fritters on Shabbat, with no qualms whatsoever.
*yeah, it’s a popular urban legend but google doesn’t turn up any hard cites for it but it’s a fun story anyway
Doo-dah! doo-dah!
That and 3.3 million other articles. From the article on Giraffe horns:
:byejack:
While a lot of fish is kosher, I wouldn’t say “most” is. I heard the capybara story in a different context: it was a pope that declared it to be a fish, so Catholics were allowed to eat it over lent. Here’s an article that seems to support that theory.
An animal doesn’t have to be domesticated to be kosher, but once you get outside the realm of domesticated animals, effecting a kosher killing is pretty difficult - meat isn’t kosher unless it dies an instant death without pain, and the official method is to sever both the jugular vein and the esophagus with a blade free of blemishes. If the animal feels pain or is physically marred in the process, the meat isn’t kosher.
Deer, for instance, is a kosher animal, but the meat isn’t kosher when killed by hunting.
I believe there’s a reference somewhere in the Old Testament to “Eat it as you would deer”, or some such, which makes explicit that deer are considered kosher.
And the rule isn’t that fish per se are kosher; it’s that anything which lives in the water and which has fins and scales is kosher. Some fish (sharks, for instance) are considered not to have scales, and I imagine some (some kinds of eel, maybe) might not be considered to have fins. Capybaras, of course, have neither.
I do wonder about icthyosaurs, though. On the one hand, they live in the water and have fins and scales, and all such animals are said to be kosher. On the other hand, though, they’re reptiles, and all reptiles are said to be unclean. Which rule takes precedence?
Man, I was totally expecting this to be another “I burning your dog!”
And that’s not even the most retarded thing about that statement considering that most Jews aren’t so observant that they stay off of the internet on the Sabbath and do know enough about their own culture to correctly answer the question. Why do people persist in saying stuff like that?
What if you’ve got a super-duper razor sharp metal hunting boomarang that could completely decapitate a deer or giraffe in one go from a distance? Would that meet the letter of the law, if not the spirit?
For several years here on the Dope our Jews who usually answered such questions WERE observant enough to stay off the internet on the sabbath, so it become a sort of running joke that folks who had questions about Judaic practice would always ask on the Jewish sabbath and we’d all have to wait a day until they showed up to answer.
Of course, things change. Perhaps we have more Jews who are non-observant now.
I have been around here just as long as you and it has NEVER been the case that questions weren’t answered because the Jewish Sabbath prevented it. You are flat out wrong about this. There HAS been a long ago played out joke akin to the “Hi Opal” thing but that has nothing to do with reality.
Just chill, OK? Sure, other people can come in and try to answer the question, but our most observant Jews won’t be here on the Sabbath. I really don’t understand why you have your panties in a bunch over that. We really do have members who are highly knowledgeable about Jewish law and custom who really don’t post on Jewish sabbath. We have other knowledgeable people (some Jewish, some not) who can and do post 24/7. It’s not like anyone is forbidding anyone to post on a particular day here. On the other hand, some people don’t post on the sabbath. Why is noting this fact making you upset?
Assuming you had the forethought to have the blade inspected and certified, you’d probably be good.
Then again, “build a fence around the torah,” my goyishe friend. (when in doubt, don’t do it).
I’m no theologian, but I’m pretty sure Jews don’t have to listen to the Pope.
eta: This is also known as the “just because a guy in a funny hat said it was a fish…” principal.
Fun item on kosher practice here,
So a rabbit is considered to chew the cud because it eats its pellets? I did not know that.
Interestingly, I am familiar with at least one industrial-scale hog rearing facility that uses a giant auger/press arrangement to squeeze the moisture out of the pig manure, so that the manure solids can be mixed back into the pig feed. A diet consisting of 15% dried pig manure increases pig average daily weight gain by ~10% compared to a no-manure diet. Actually, here’s a link addressing all sorts of manure refeeding schemes: poultry to poultry, cattle to poultry, pig to lamb, etc.
Does this qualify as chewing the cud, like in the case of rabbits?