For anyone wanting a science discussion from Australia regarding their scientific views and debate about Kangaroos as sustainable meat, The Science Show has a piece on July 23 about it that has the transcript and the audio posted online.
I just really don’t think we need to be introducing any species. History is rife with unfortunate results of this type of effort. Plus, there are several native species here that can be used for meat. I don’t know if this exists or not, but it would be nice to be able to purchase hunted, not farmed, venison/elk etc. Maybe certify hunters and processors to do so.
Are there ANY non-domesticated or recently-domesticated land animals that are commonly eaten in the developed world? That is, that fill more than a niche market?
Well, no. That’s almost the definition of a non-domesticated animal isn’t it?
It’s impossible imagine a situation where a non-domesticated animal *could *be more than a niche market in the developed world. If we consider non-niche to be, say, 1% or more of total meat consumption, that would require millions of tonnes of the meat to be produced each year. If we allow that we can get even 50kg of meat off each non-domesticated animal, that still requires am annual slaughter of 50 thousand or so animals each year, and thus a wild herd numbering in the hundreds of thousands. While such herds do exist in a few places, the sheer logistics of getting them to market at competitive prices is mind boggling.
There’s a good reason why people domesticated animals in the first -place, and this is it.
As far as recently domesticated animals, they aren’t going to be competitive precisely because they are recently domesticated. It’s hard to compete commercially with species that have been selectively bred for millennia. Even with the benefits of modern breeding practices and genetic selection, we wouldn’t expect a newly domesticated animal to be commercially competitive for at least 100 years.
My neighbors here in Bug Tussle would probably think the kangaroo came to eat them.
Not sure I would let the Gilroy chefs, fine as they may be, set the bar for that meat’s taste.
I’d certainly be willing to try it again. To be fair though, most of the food at the garlic festival is pretty tasty. At least in my experience. That’s where I had the alligator and it was very good.
Depending on your definition of ‘grazing’, there’s pandas…
Spam made from kangaroo reported. (ItchMonkey)
According to Wikipedia most of the kangaroo meat even for dog food is actually from hunting them. Australia has a lot of hunting tags every year for roo…
[sigh]
I thought we had this nailed down 5 years ago. :smack:
There is no farming of kangaroos.
ALL commercial supply of kangaroo meat is sourced by hunting.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this… I don’t know which would be worse: hopping cows, or boxing ones.
Oh. Burrowing cows. That’d be worse.
We had Ostrich steaks for dinner last week - I bought them in Tesco’s. Very lean and low cholesterol which is ‘good’ but IMHO, it needs a sauce.
There has been a history of Ostrich farm scams over here:
There were others too.
Unless something drastic happens to the food production industry (and even BSE wasn’t enough) I doubt that exotic meat will ever stop being exotic.
As for letting kangaroos roam free in the USA, I have no doubt that the authorities are always going to be highly concerned about the unforeseen consequences of introducing an animal that breeds fast and has no predators (other than man) with little value in the carcass.
Australians are pretty paranoid about this kind of thing; especially since they introduced cane toads.