In a shocking turn of events, the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals SUPPORTS efforts to kill the snakehead fish.
In further news, Pope revealed to be Jewish and bears apparently don’t shit in the woods!
Is someone asleep over there, or is it a drug thing?
They found out that they eat meat.
So, your not from around here? Your habits a little odd? Name sound funny? Off to the Rotenone chambers with you and no one to shed a tear! Tell your children about this day, if any survive, this was the day America fell! The innocents were sent to the slaughter and PETA held them down!
Does anybody have the recipe for that soup?
I guess Orwell was right… Some animals are more equal than others.
Zev Steinhardt
Just don’t try and make a coat out of one of them.
Snakeheads drink milk. They support the oppression of cows in the dairy industry. That’s why.
While I think PETA are, typically, a bunch of mindless jerks, I think someone there actually had a moment of clarity and did the right thing in supporting this decision. The snake-head fish is not native to those areas, is not even a candidate for endangered species status and is screwing up the local ecological balance. We need to be less concerned with individual animals and more concerned with the balance. Don’t destroy local ecologies by importing non-native predators and don’t destroy local ecologies by destroying “pests” that are a primary food source for tertiary consumers. The extermination of the prarie dog that lead to the starvation of it’s natural predators(coyotes which were already being squeezed out of their old hunting grounds by urban expansion) was every bit as bad as the importing of the snake-head fish.
I’ve heard stories that incautious importation of non-native species, plants, bacterium, animals, etc, into Australia had some pretty nasty ecological repercussions. Anyone have a link to a good site which discusses such things? Or has a history of what happened? I’ve been curious about it for a while but without specific plants/animals to reference in my searches I’ve not found much that was useful.
Steven
Snakehead, Snakehead
Rollie pollie Snakehead
Snakehead, Snakehead
Eat’em up yum!
I didn’t know prarie dogs were extinct. I drove through the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana back in in 1997 and they were pretty easy to find.
Yappy little devils, they are, though fond of Cracker Jack.
At first glance, I thought this thread was going to be about PETA’s reaction to the labrador pup being gassed by Al-Qaida.
They haven’t succeeded in exterminating prarie dogs, but there are efforts to do so. Several cities in Texas have initiatives to remove prarie dogs because they fear they cause problems with cattle ranching or their burrows divert groundwater supplies. I’m not aware of a nationwide initiative, but it’s done in several locales.
Thanks for the info on Australia’s rabbit problem davidm interesting stuff. I didn’t know it was rabbits, I thought it was a bacterium of some sort that messed up the native bacteria and caused a bunch of plant-life losses. Rabbits are indeed vicious, foul-tempered rodents.(with nasty, sharp-pointy teeth)
Steven
I’ve had snakehead soup many a time; it’s quite popular in Thailand (don’t know if it’s the same as the Chinese version). If you’re seriously interested in a recipe I could dig one up for you. The meat of this vicious little carnivore is delicious.
I’ve never tried them, but there are recipes for snake-head fish at http://www.snakeheads.org
Enjoy?
Steven
I wondered if despite their invasiveness they could be raised her commercially as a food fish.
MtgMan, the problem is with cane frogs (I think) in Australia and New Zealand in addition to rabbits. As an aside, rats are a problem on the Galapogos islands since none of the animals there realize that they are predators if my memory serves me correctly.
Kudzu in the southern US, too. I also vaguely remember reading something about a shellfish in the bottom of the great lakes that had pushed everything else out shrug. Personally I am surprised and heartened by this reminder that even the insane have their lucid moments 
. The last thing we need in our beautiful and delicate Bay is some evil fish from heck lousingeverything up. The pond will be restocked; the Bay could not be if snakeheads got in.
Super Gnat, you are probably thinking of zebra mussels
Can’t help you with your search for information about Australia, but FWIW, conservation biologists generally find that the introduction of non-native species to an intact ecosystem is considerably more destabilizing than the local extinction of a native species. [Note the use of the term ‘local.’]
Obviously, this doesn’t hold true in the case of extinctions of top predators or other keystone species, but, think of the displacement of native songbirds in North America caused by the introduction of the European Starling, et. al.
There is an updated story on CNN now (http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/09/05/snakehead.maryland.reut/index.html) which includes this:
I bet they got some heat from their members and decided to “clarify” their original comments.