If it’s anything like ostrich? Delicious!
A bit gamy but mostly … tastes like chicken!
Are there any tasty carnivores?
I can think of at least snakes, lizards and fish, and only the first two taste like chicken.
Mahi is a carnivore. Its appearance and texture strongly resemble chicken breast meat. It has a bland mild flavor, and if the cook uses a lot of spices, you could easily imagine that you were eating chicken.
Crocodile is decent, though I have only have had it as a steak.
I imagine as cerviche it could be quite good.
It is jokingly refered as “tastes like chicken” but I’d say a really fishy turkey. Really fishy.
I definitely did not think about apex predator fish when I posted that. Haven’t had crocodile but have had alligator. Weird. The first bite tasted good but after that, not?
I say yes. Crocodiles are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, notwithstanding the fact that Class Aves are also descendant from dinosaurs. Crocodiles can be trained, some keep them as pets, and breeding could make them more docile.
Wiki has pics. One of them is below. There are others.
Admittedly this c. 1900 pic appears to be a cut and paste job, about as convincing as ectoplasm. Still, I say that to the extent that crocs can be tamed and raised in farms, so can dinosaurs.
Could be a cut and paste, but a “California Alligator Farm” image search shows quite a few examples of similar tourist/reptile interactions that appear to be “real” like this one:
Interesting. Here is the best article I could find on the California Alligator Farm (there were a number of options, including wiki):
During the 1960s they stopped raising alligator leather, because the market for it had collapsed. The park closed in 1984. They suffered surprisingly few injuries:
Despite seeming immensely dangerous, especially in its early years, the Alligator Farm existed for decades without any cases of harm to visitors, with one exception, and the victim was Francis Earnest Jr., the son of one of the owners. In 1925, at age eight, Junior was playing with a large gator, when it bit his hand, his uncle jumped atop the gator, and gouged its eyes. The son was taken to the hospital with minimal damage, and lived the rest of his life with only a scar on his hand.
Two alligator parks remain open in Florida. Both offer a gator zip line for minutes of fun, as well as educational programs: they are billed as conservation organizations of course.
Is that how long it takes the gators to eat you?
Train? Sure, to some extent. Tame? Not at all.
I think this guy who runs an alligator experience in Florida says it best. The alligator he works with would kill him at any time if it thought it could. The alligator has no love for him and would eat him if he did not handle the alligator appropriately. It is not tame and never will be tame and it has no love for its handler and it will eat him even if fed minutes earlier.
I think alligators about as close as we get to dinos that are alive today (don’t start with birds).
Crocodilians diverged from the ancestors of dinosaurs some 250 million years ago, well before dinosaurs began to split into saurischian and ornithischian groups (and, as previously noted, even those two groups are only barely related).
Crocodilians are technically the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs but they’ve been on their own path longer than dinosaurs have existed so it’s hard to say that their behaviors would be related.
I think we don’t generally eat carnivores because that’s more expensive. But in addition to fish (and tuna are delicious) people eat pigs and bears that are happy to eat meat. And ducks that are happy to eat fish, and chickens that are happy to eat bugs.
But we mostly eat animals that can use resources that we can’t use (like grass) for economic reasons.
Does the OP permit breeding? I think of the silver fox domestication experiment in the Soviet Union, where foxes were bred for docility and ability to be handled by humans. Or the fact that domesticated horses can be traced to only a couple of (docile) male ancestors. Surely crocs and iguanodon could be bred to be passive. I guess there may be limits: I’m not sure hippos, leopards or spinosauruses would be good candidates, never mind T-Rex.
We definitely need a time machine.
Choose me! Choose me!
Ah, I was wondering why my ornithologist girlfriend nicknamed me “ducky.”
…er, with regard to your first link of course, not the second.
And, speaking of crows, this is one of the better examples I’ve seen illustrating Corvidae problem-solving intelligence.
Bear, lion, puma, lynx, and fox are all excellent fare, just off the mammal list, and not going deep.
Taste is not the reason carnivores aren’t routinely eaten, even though that is a widely held belief.
I’ve had bear. Blech.
I’ve had terrible beef and pork, too. It’s (almost) all in the making, somewhat in the specifics of the diet / age / sex of the meat animal, too.
I’m told that the taste of bear, like pork, is influenced by what the animal ate recently. Bear that was raising garbage cans and eating spoiled food isn’t very good. But bear that is raiding your apple trees is delicious. (This from a mailing list of commercial apple growers.) My guess is that bear that ate clean fresh meat would be tasty, too