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[bobf <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

I just thought this was an interesting article and know that a good part of 
the list has some connection to the SE portion of the country.......

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Editorial

Eating the Wild 


Published: January 25, 2009 

In America, there are foragers among us, out searching for morels in the 
spring, and there are hunters too. Yet most of our food, except for fish 
caught from the sea, is farmed. We do not trap songbirds for savory pies. (We 
destroy too many of them through other means.) 

 Once you look beyond the parochial culinary habits of most Americans you 
discover that wildness, and the tastes associated with it, have a talismanic 
power that is very hard to eradicate. It is what keeps the Japanese whaling 
and keeps some Africans eating bush meat. And it is one of the things that 
helps explain the voracious and utterly destructive Chinese appetite for 
turtles. 

As global wealth rises, so does global consumption of meat, which includes 
wild meat. Turtle meat used to be a rare delicacy in the Asian diet, but no 
longer. China, along with Hong Kong and Taiwan, has vacuumed the wild turtles 
out of most of Southeast Asia. Now, according to a recent report in The Los 
Angeles Times, they are consuming common soft-shell turtles from the American 
Southeast, especially Florida, at an alarming rate. 

Some scientists estimate that two-thirds of the tortoise and freshwater 
turtle species on the planet are seriously threatened. Some of that is 
secondhand damage — loss of habitat, water pollution, climate change. But far 
too many turtles are being lost to the fork and the spoon. 

In the United States, the solution is relatively straightforward. States 
should impose much tighter restrictions on the harvesting and export of wild 
turtles. Internationally, the problem is more complicated. There have been 
efforts to monitor the species of wild turtles found in Chinese markets, but 
as long as the appetite for turtles — and traditional medicines derived from 
them — persists, we fear it will be hard to curtail such a profitable and 
disastrous trade. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/opinion/26mon4.html