Eating Manatees
At Orlando Weekly, there is a story about an underground restaurant that serves manatee. In addition to the descriptions of how manatee tastes (indistinguishable from possum, apparently), it offers a view into how some anti-environmentalists view the world.
Interestingly, the poachers seem to like the idea of a free-market system for manatee protection:
“‘It works like this: If we could farm manatees — ya’know, catch moms and pops and let them mate, then breed their kids, the population would get bigger, right?’‘In captivity, you mean?’
‘Yep. You farm them in warm-water springs — they migrate down here in winter to avoid the cold. And once they build up, people can eat manatees, just like God intended. Anyway, there will be more manatees than there are now too, so everybody wins. It’s exactly like buffalo.’”
Well, not exactly. With bison the ranchers hold private property rights to individual bison. I don’t see anything in there about private property rights being assigned to individual manatees (or government-set quotas), and there are obvious problems with declaring equivalence between a captive population and a wild one, so I can’t say it’s a good (or fully-formed) idea. What I’d really like to see is someone who can bridge the gap– who can actually communicate with people like this and explain that if it weren’t for the “tree-huggers and manatee-humpers”, as they call them, the manatees wouldn’t be there today for their poaching. By a rough estimate using the numbers in the article, the 12-15 manatees a year that they poach means that they’re responsible for killing a number equivalent to about 10% of the manatees that are found dead in an average year (their kills aren’t included in the count because they’re not found, they’re eaten).