My Aunt and Uncle attempted to farm Emu and Ostrich starting in ~1994 when it was “about to boom” and spent their life savings on property in rural TX to start an Emu farm with the idea that Emu oil was going to be the next big thing.

Obviously it didn’t work out and within only a few years they switched to cattle and Bison (I bought a bison that lived out its days on the ranch till it died).

I think the bottom just fell out of the Emu market, and so it was a long shot bet on commercial alternatives that consumers just didn’t buy into.

If you look at the map on the page, there’s a little dot in Texas with ostrich right near their old farm in New Ulm. I didn’t realize it was so localized!

Knowing what I know now, they were most likely caught up in what was the ag equivalent of crypto - “hopes of getting in early on a huge future market”

Seems to be a common way to lose one’s life savings

Note: Bison and Ostrich are effectively impossible to farm - the complications costs and infrastructure are just too high cause they are really hard to manage and quite dangerous

Emu on the other hand are small and relatively docile but still pretty dangerous very smart and can jump very high, so fencing is no joke.

I just dont see any upside to raising these giant birds

Circa 2000 my wife and I were planning to get into farming and would up visiting quite a few Llama and Alpaca farms that were frequently run by very rich retirees from corporate America. We wound up keeping horses which are a much better business because people really do want to ride horses.

Up to 150lbs of muscle, claw, and beak, and they can stand over 6ft tall.

Emus are so weirdly neurotic and aggressive, I hate being around them. If an Ostrich is even more unpredictable than an Emu it's hard to imagine farming them would even be possible.

If I had a bit more land I'd quite like to have some Emu. I like them and my mother is scared of them so I see only positives.

There's one spot where there's a bridge over what's effectively a ditch with a small creek running through it. A few emu followed us around the park, but several of them camped out on the far side of the bridge.

When I drove into the bridge, they all moved to the middle of it and boxed the car in. They wouldn't let us pass until most of them got a handful or so of food.

It was quite surreal, and I don't know that I'd enjoy trying to run a farm of large birds like that.

Now, Canada Goose meat... yum.

There are various detailed federal regulations pertaining to Canada Geese allowing control in certain situations.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-50/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

I cannot recall appreciating it, probably because 1) its gamey flavor was a poor substitute for beef 2) my teenage palate was not appreciative of such "interesting" flavors.

But perhaps it would be worth re-visiting with semi-refined tastebuds?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

We didn’t listen. We didn’t listen!! ;)

The actual topic is interesting, but yes I definitely thought the same as you.

It's a tourist attraction though and they make their money charging admission and selling handfuls of food so people can feed the birds.

When those birds peck at the food, you can see how they could pierce a scull with that speed and mass.

Some day, his dog started a playful fight with the bird, the game got more serious and the man, worried by the dog, tried to stop it and put himself between dog and emu. The belt received the single hit so instead to have an opened belly, velociraptor style, he just had a leather belt severed in two. In a second. Really lucky man.

He got rid of the bird not longer after that. The progressive disappearing of Emus and ostriches after a peak in popularity suggest that other farmers also had the same reveal one by one.

Due to changes in land management from traditional times we have had literal plagues of emu and kangaroos. They are of least concern in terms of population. With all other species in decline these two are really taking over.

We fought a war against them to keep their numbers down (and lost!). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

If emu meat was going to take off in the USA it would have happened already long ago from imports from Australia. Yet somehow people bought into the idea that emu's are worth a lot of money and you should breed them!?

There's a Youtube channel from Australia I watch of a guy who does heavy machining and welding in service of construction equipment. In the most recent episode (working on the boom of a crane) at one point a cute little brown snake crawls out from some metal and aggressively chases him, eventually crawling under another pile.

He calmly tells us this thing (an eastern brown snake) is the second most venomous snake species in the world, and he wonders if the much bigger mother is around somewhere.

This felt like peak Australia to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DalniFq6WHI (around 29:50)

It's definitely not aggressively chasing him. Snakes are way less aggressive than the average person realizes. The problem is that we are huge to snakes. So while we're thinking, "Oh, shit! This snakes is chasing me!" The snake is thinking, "I gotta hide! Quick to these two big rocks right near me. Wait! The rocks keep lifting and moving away! I gotta get to them!"

90% of the time when someone thinks they're being chased by a snake, it's either:

1. You are between the snake and where it knows shelter is (water, cover, hole, etc.).

2. There is no visible shelter nearby and the snake thinks your legs are a place to hide.

I've spent a lot more time around snakes than most, including many venomous ones in the wild, and I've never been "chased". Snakes are small animals with very limited energy budgets. To them, you are a giant monster running on high octane fuel. All they want is to get away from you as easily as possible so they can go back to running in low power mode until prey comes along. They don't have the inclination or energy to tussle with you.

Neighbours apparently see them fairly regularly.

Brown snakes generally move in the opposite direction to "where there are people", so despite being highly dangerous, paths don't cross closely unless quite unlucky (for either human or snake).

It's almost like the money equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, except that it sort of does work sometimes, just not typically for a random given layman, and it's not usually worth it compared to literally any other way of making money.

Keeping geese taught me that this phenomenon is quite normal for birds with long necks.

Male llama can kill dogs and coyotes and will protect a diverse herd.

They're also pasture Cassanovas that can and will talk anything into laying down with them for an unreasonably long time.

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/ostrich-hugs-offer-belgian...