An acquaintance with a better understanding of ranching than I once gave me this bit of advice: never raise anything that eats a lot and is hard to catch.
I thought that was good advice, even though I never actually planned to go into ranching. It also explained why cows are so popular among farmers. You never see a farmer in a footrace with Herefords these days. The spunkiness has been bred out of most cows. Now, they just sort of stand around and look disinterested in life. Which is not a bad attitude for a future hamburger steak to adopt.
The reason I bring this up is that there apparently is a new trend popping up across the country: ostrich farming.
Proponents of ostrich farming points out that ostrich meat is low-calorie and low-fat, which is a big deal these days. It's considered "red meat," which a few marketers think is another selling point. (Ostrich... the OTHER red meat!) In addition, ostrich leather is so touch it can stop a bullet.
While some investors are flocking to the ostrich industry, others are leery. Investors in one partnership paid $500,000 for 11 pairs of breeding ostriches. That's not chicken feed. There are some 4,000 ranches raising some 75,000 ostriches in the U.S. right now, many more. Yet, last year, Americans ate only 6,000 pounds of ostrich. That's only about 75 birds. That is chicken feed. Especially when you consider that even the crummiest McDonald's around, located in a bad part of town where one out of ten customers is wounded in drive-by shootings, moves about 4,000 pounds of hamburger a day.
More importantly, I think ostrich breeding probably isn't a great idea because it clearly violates both of the basic principles of animal farming that my ranching friend warned me about. To wit: ostriches eat a great deal and they are hard to catch. It takes a hell of a lot of feed to keep a bird the size of a refrigerator happy. And on those 2,000 horsepower drumsticks, ostriches can run like the dickens. (Not to mention ostriches are just plain mean. They consider spitting an acceptable form of greeting, and their favorite pasttime is pecking out eyeballs.)
But, all is not lost. With a few changes, ostriches may yet become a mainstream comestible, and a good investment to boot. First, they have to give up trying to sell ostrich as red meat. People don't like to think of birds that big as having red meat. We're a whitemeat society. Even beef producers have started calling T-bone steaks, "the other sort of white meat. Kind of."
They also have to come up with a better term for ostrich meat that "ostrich meat." We don't eat "cow meat." We eat beef, steaks, sirlion and hamburger. No one wants to think they are eating dead ostrich. (And you are never going to see an entire roasted ostrich sitting on a Thanksgiving dinner table. For one thing, you'd need a chain saw to carve it.) They need to come up with acceptable edible terms like fleetmeat, quickchick, turbo-chops, swiftlets, speed-chunks, skedaddle-dumplings and mega-neck-nuggets.
Finally, they have to solve this ostrich mobility problem. They've got to slow those buggers down. I suggest cross breeding them with slower animals, such as pigs. Now, there would be a delicacy! Imagine enjoying a bacon strips the size of a surfboard that actually is good for you! If they could do all that, I'll call Charles Schwab tomorrow.
And on that note, have a pleasant day and enjoyable evening my friends...hugs Howzits :)
{credit C.Memminger}
