A Warning About Ostrich Farming

Have you ever eaten ostrich?

I missed my chance when I gave up poultry as the last land animal on my eating list.

My guess is that you haven't had a lot either.

It turns out that there was a huge bubble in ostrich farming (yes, they have bubbles off the internet, too). Once a few clever promoters (Ostriches On Line - Chad.) realized that the world would go crazy about ostrich meat (and don't forget the eggs) there was money to be made selling breeding ostriches.

So, you bought two ostriches and a bunch of land, and soon you have some baby ostriches. You sold those ostriches for $20,000 or more each--to other people who wanted to breed ostriches. Do this for a few generations and pretty soon there would be plenty of ostrich meat available (and the breeders at the top of the pyramid would be rich indeed).

You can guess the punchline. The breeders sold their ostriches to other breeders, and soon there were plenty of ostriches but in the end, restaurants didn't want to sell the stuff because people didn't really want to eat it.

The blogads survey (see below) says that more than 20% of blog readers are also blog writers. Imagine a world where 20% of the people who read novels, wrote novels. Hope we're not breeding ostriches. We're so busy writing that maybe, just maybe, nobody who shows up is going to actually spend the time to read! As a parting shot, here's a quick blurb from the ostrich site:

The ostrich industry is the fastest growing agricultural business in the world. With the vast array and almost unlimited supply of products and services that we have available, your opportunities to resell these products has never been better.