Before I Eat Snakes... (Mad Cow and Me)

The Red Cross won't take my blood. No matter how overdrawn the blood banks are, some blood is just too muddy to be accepted as a donation to those who desperately need a transfusion.

As you might infer, my post today is an opinion piece, anecdotal, unscientific and bordering on a rant... and inspired by some of the legal blogs I've read this week about "Green-washing" in advertising.

One such blog is by David Mallen of the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLP, and appears to discuss one State's objections to bovine flatulence and the claims of a farming enterprise that they are going to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint to net zero, or some such thing.

https://quicktakes.loeb.com/post/102j2cu/advertising-aspirations-for-reducing-environmental-impact-invites-charges-of-gree#page=1

My understanding was that greenhouse gases were at a rather higher level when dinosaurs roamed the earth, ate massive quantities of vegetation or each other. In fact there is an article (by Eyder Peralta) that reports on an amusing theory that dinosaurs farted themselves to death. It seems apocryphal. It has been debunked.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/05/07/152203680/scientists-estimate-dinosaurs-passed-enough-gas-to-warm-up-the-planet

Nevertheless, there was a virtuous cycle to Jurassic carbon levels. Plants grew faster in the presence of extra plant food (or carbon dioxide). See the science fair project for proof.

Maybe, instead of eating bugs and snakes, we should grow bumper crops of lettuce, and hardy and prolific dandelions, and cactus. It could break "Big Pharma" because it could prevent a lot of very profitable lifestyle diseases and maladies.

The trouble with snakes is that they eat their own kind. They are cannibals, and the trouble with cannibals is that they go mad and die young. That is an over-generalization, of course. One example is KURU.

There have been studies on the acquisition and grim progression of prion diseases, such as by Johns Hopkins:https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/prion-diseases

There is also a provocative study about the source of one of Americans' most favorite breakfast food. http://www.cresa.cat/blogs/sociedad/en/sobre-porcs-i-levolucio-dels-prions/

Unfortunately, pigs are omnivores, which means that they will eat their young, and others. The other possible reason that Leviticus banned the eating of pork is that they are vectors for human tape worms. 

 

The Bible also has something to say about eating snakes. 

https://evangelicalfocus.com/zoe/2165/eating-reptiles

So, before I eat snakes, I would turn vegetarian while I wait for at least a two-generational study of what becomes of snake-eaters over time. Maybe they could serve snake at Davos and Greenbriar, or, they could start by feeding fillet of a fenny snake to humanized mice. 

By the way, see the Comments on the Witches Brew, the comments are (IMHO) better than the commentary, but I used the link for the quote from The Scottish Play.

As for my blood, it might have 50-year old prions in it, still, from the possibility that I might have consumed a portion of a cow that had been fed the unnatural diet of feed enriched with Scrapie-infected sheep bits and bobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy 

 

Obviously, that is ridiculous (about Mad Cow Disease and me), but my reservations about snakes in my diet, even if they really do taste like chicken (and they say that about alligator tail, too) is reasonable, look what a witches' brew they are of diseases:

https://www.merckvetmanual.com/exotic-and-laboratory-animals/reptiles/viral-diseases-of-reptiles

 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://SPACE www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com