I was picking the littleheart-shaped rice substitute things out of my ears for a day or so after our wedding. My wife was lucky enough to have long hair so it just got stuck in her hair, not in her ears.
I have been to the Air Force survival school in Spokane. Pilots are not, to my knowledge, taught that Alka-Seltzer will help them catch seagulls. No pilot I have ever met carries Alka-Seltzer for this purpose. What we are taught, actually, is to catch and eat bugs. There are several reasons for this:
1: Bugs are plentiful, easy to catch, and reasonably nutritious.
2: Enemies looking for you are less likely to notice that some of their bugs are missing than if, for example, you shoot a cow. Besides, shooting a cow might increase the number of hostiles in the area.
3: Don’t eat bugs known to be poisonous.
[quote=“waddlingeagle, post:22, topic:622616”]
I have been to the Air Force survival school in Spokane. Pilots are not, to my knowledge, taught that Alka-Seltzer will help them catch seagulls. No pilot I have ever met carries Alka-Seltzer for this purpose. What we are taught, actually, is to catch and eat bugs. There are several reasons for this:
[ol]
[li] Bugs are plentiful, easy to catch, and reasonably nutritious.[/li][li] Enemies looking for you are less likely to notice that some of their bugs are missing than if, for example, you shoot a cow. Besides, shooting a cow might increase the number of hostiles in the area.[/li][li] Don’t eat bugs known to be poisonous.[/li][/QUOTE]
[/ol]
So, THAT’S why the pilots carry Alka-Seltzer!
Snopes page:
I actually am a farmer, retired,and I can say with confidence that birds can eat rice in any form except maybe the precooked stuff that takes only a minute or so to fluff up again in hot water.
I think I may have dispatched one of my own free ranging chickens by throwing out a bunch of that stuff which got bugs in it and it may have swelled enough in volume and fast enough to have killed her. She died and that’s all I know for sure.
Most birds are not able to regurgitate food at will but some species feed their young this way.
All sorts of birds forage on all sorts of crops and except in rare cases where pesticides are involved there are virtually no reports of bird fatalities associated with them feeding on grain in the fields.
Now as to cows swelling up and dieing from overeating certain things , this is a very real possibility and every country vet and a lot of livestock farmers as well know how to save the cow by actually sticking her with a long thin bladed knife or other tool so as to relieve the pressure of gas in her guts.
I doubt if a cow ever bloats this way from chowing down on dry grain which is often fed to cows as a normal part of their diet or I would have heard about it.
But a cow turned out on a nice fresh green pasture in the spring after being on dry feedstuffs for weeks or months is at high risk of the fresh grass and other stuff she eats fermenting in her and if this happens she is apt to die unless the pressure is relieved.
The danger passes after the first couple of days as her digestive system adjusts to the new diet.
I believe that the vets these days have an apparatus that can be shoved down her gullet to save a bloated cow which is safer and easier on her than sticking a hole in her but cows are tough and the small puncture wound doesn’t seem to bother them at all.
You must ventilate her in just the right spot of course.