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Hippo Meat Nearly Became an American Food Staple
- nonethewiser 4y agoThe most interesting detail of this story IMO is that they may have been released into the Louisiana bayou. Imagine these creatures wild in the swamps!
- gadders 4y agoProbably a bit like this: https://www.dw.com/en/colombia-pablo-escobars-hippo-population-is-a-huge-problem/a-65546180 https://www.dw.com/en/colombia-pablo-escobars-hippo-populati...
- nbardy 4y ago> Since Pepe, authorities have been trying, unsuccessfully, to limit hippos' numbers by chemically sterilizing them or castrating them. This is a hard task given their immense size, aggression and internal testicles.
- euroderf 4y agoThey are killers. BAD idea.
- Aleksdev 4y agoI feel like that’s the perfect climate and temperature for the hippos to thrive, they love the heat. I believe hippos were accidentally introduced into Columbia and took over some of the places because of the perfect climate conditions.
- willdough 3y agoI dunno. No one has brought up the question of whether hippo meat is tasty or not. If it were tasty then Louisianans would cook 'em up and eat 'em! Anyone tried a hippo burger? How much meat on a hippo? How much fat? Is the fat tasty? Is hippo leather useful?
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoFYI, this a bad idea because Hippos are not cute placid animals. They are deadly dangerous. They may be herbivorous, but a Hippo is two tons of bad-tempered "aggressive and territorial" bastard, and they can move faster than you can, on land or in the water. "the hippopotamus is the world's deadliest large land mammal, killing an estimated 500 people per year https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36320744 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36320744
- bigyikes 4y ago> "the hippopotamus is the world's deadliest large land mammal, killing an estimated 500 people per year” ah yes, the humble hippopotamus, my favorite LLM (sorry llamas!) :)
- qup 4y agoThey rejected the RLHF, no doubt
- dmm 4y agoreinforcement learning from human fatalities
- kerkeslager 4y agoThis would have been a pretty bad AI (animal invasion).
- jokowueu 4y agoTechnically speaking , arnt humans the most dangerous land mammal ?
- jylam 4y ago"large land mammal"
- soegaard 4y agoMeanwhile in Floria: I Cooked A Whole Alligator ft. Guga - Joshua Weissman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v__SIw48G-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v__SIw48G-I
- danparsonson 4y agoWhat a great story! > The New York Times coined the phrase “lake cow bacon,” Seems like a wasted opportunity not to go for the portmanteau and call it Lakon
- Dalewyn 4y agoThe Lakon Type-10 Defender: Built like a steakhouse, handles like a bistro.
- weard_beard 4y ago07 (this is a requisite greeting among enthusiasts of the game the parent comment is referencing - elite dangerous. Captains salute each other upon a random meeting in the millions and millions of space stations in the galaxy.)
- thatguy0900 4y agoThis is a Futurama reference, no? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uFNN5Qf2AR4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uFNN5Qf2AR4
- barbecue_sauce 4y agoLooks like a combo reference.
- rythmshifter 4y agoI think this was first used in EVE online but I could be wrong
- Forgeties79 4y agoFuturama. This is clearly the work of the greatest poet yet to be born, Zapp Brannigan!
- MadsRC 4y ago
- BigCryo 4y agoOur meat Staples here in America are very unhealthy.. we really should be aqua farming cetaceans and walruses and seals and stuff. Loaded with healthy fats... Eskimos eat pure meat and fat from these animals and they never get heart disease.. something to think about..... PostScript... Some would say we should not aquafarm cetaceans, but surely there are dumb cetaceans...
- causi 4y agoDifferent human ethnic groups have different dietary needs. Eating like a traditional Inuit would not go as well for, say, a Frankish man. https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/europeans-evolved-to-eat-more-vegetables-several-thousand-years-ago/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/europeans-evolved-to...
- tpush 4y ago> Eskimos eat pure meat and fat from these animals and they never get heart disease.. That is probably more of a myth than anything [0]. "The evidence for a low mortality from IHD among the Inuit is fragile and rests on unreliable mortality statistics. Mortality from stroke, however, is higher among the Inuit than among other western populations." [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12535749/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12535749/
- BurningFrog 4y agoThe Eskimos surviving after thousands of years in the arctic have evolved to thrive with the available diet. That very likely does not apply to the rest of us.
- ch4s3 4y agoThere's no evolutionary pressure to not die from a stroke at 50 because you subsist on that sort of diet. Rates of stroke mortality are higher among Alaskan natives than other US ethnic groups, for example[1]. [1] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2008.148221?role=tab https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2008...
- itamarst 4y agoThere's a fun pair of alternate history novellas based on this: https://publishing.tor.com/americanhippo-sarahgailey/9781250176424/ https://publishing.tor.com/americanhippo-sarahgailey/9781250...
- ubermonkey 4y agoClicked into this thread to ensure their work was mentioned! Those stories are fun.
- mzpmzpmzp 4y agoMakes me think of that Bong Joon Ho movie, Okja!
- Chazprime 4y agoSounds a bit like Okja!
- throwawaydc223 4y agoAn excellent long-read of this topic can be found at https://magazine.atavist.com/american-hippopotamus/ https://magazine.atavist.com/american-hippopotamus/. It's one of my favorite pieces of online journalism and goes deep into the unique lives involved and prevailing culture of the team.
- karaterobot 4y agoHa, I came here to link the same article. It's really fantastic.
- nonethewiser 4y agoHow can it be a good article if the word “bison” cant even be found in it? /s
- nonethewiser 4y agoThanks you for sharing this. The ripleys article highlighted some interesting points so I chose that, but I was hoping to find a better account. Like the one you shared.
- twic 3y agoMy company uses something called Menlo Security to police our web access. It blocks this page: > Menlo Security > Request Blocked > This website or download request has been blocked. The request is classified as: Hate and Racism I have come across a few pages blocked in this way, and none of them were hateful or racist. It's not at all clear to me how they make that decision. It's mildly concerning.
- citizenkeen 4y agoThis is fascinating, because the current TV show _Mrs. Davis_ has references to hippo meat which I think really cements that it's a parallel universe.
- smcl 4y agoI can understand that this was glossed over somewhat to focus on the quirky and bizarre rather than the grim. But here: > Bison had become nearly extinct The use of the passive "had become" in the above is hiding a pretty important part of this story - the snippet below from http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php http://www.ozarkbisons.com/aboutbison.php explains a bit more about what happened. > But the fur trade and other commodities from the Bison is only a small part of the story. The American government encouraged elimination of the Plains Indians' primary food source, the bison. The idea was to kill off the Buffalo to starve the Indians, force them into relatively small areas, or north into Canada – make their food source either scarce or non-existent. The results would be starvation and high infant mortality amongst the Indian populations that would pave the way west for European settlement and the start of the western beef industry So they didn't really just "become" nearly extinct, they were very deliberately eliminated in a sort of genocidal effort. Not saying people shouldn't enjoy the story (because it is interesting after all), I just think this additional context is worth knowing.
- bombcar 4y agoNow I'm imagining an alternate history where the Indians were forced into Canada, and came back years later riding war hippos.
- kalupa 4y agoI came for hippo burgers but left with hippo warriors
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> an alternate history where the Indians ... came back years later riding war hippos. You'd need more than an alternate history, actual hippos aren't that tractable.
- bequanna 4y agoWhat you’re saying isn’t false, but I guess I don’t understand what you’re suggesting. That this article should take some white guilt detour to delve into this topic? I think most are growing weary of having content about how terrible white people are injected into every possible thing.
- hnburnsy 4y agoAnyone watching Mrs. Davis on Peacock? The Resistance lives in an old Hippo Meat Factory known as the Hippo Campus.
- jimmytucson 4y agoThere's no reason to think this would have worked. To quote Jared Diamond, only 14 of 148 large herbivorous mammals have ever been domesticated because they need very specific traits to be domesticable - pleasant disposition being one of them that hippos lack. Is there any evidence that humans have ever succeeded in domesticating hippos?
- byyyyy 4y ago[dead]
- nonethewiser 4y agoDomesticated? They planned on releasing them in Lousiana. Which — to be clear — would be WAY worse!
- ben7799 4y ago"Nearly" seems to be a big stretch.. journalists assuming 99% of the work is the idea and getting it cleared from a regulatory perspective. Implementation is always so much harder once you have to actually do it then when you just have to talk about it or write articles about it.
- sf_rob 4y agoEven post-implementation, even in a poorer era, dietary preferences are sticky. There are fads in farming, for instance my distant family got into the emu hype of the late 90s and lost a decent chunk of money because there was only a small specialty market that never grew. There's also been bison and alpacas.
- johnwalkr 4y agoIt’s easy you just pick the right framework, then domesticate the hippos, then monetize hippos as a monthly service.
- kernal 4y agoIt's surprising that the most obvious question hasn't been answered. So what does Hippo meat taste like? The taste is mild, less than lamb and more than beef, slightly more marbled than usual venison.
- porkbeer 4y agoCame here wondering exactly this.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]