Read Online Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species by Jackson Landers - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jackson Landers
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hide is tightly bound to the body compared to how it is with most other mammals.) We put the carcass on ice in a large cooler and did most of the final butchering when we returned home.
In the end, neither Kiera nor I shot a pig on that trip, but we were happy that our expedition was successful and that we had meat to bring home. As far as I know, she’s still a vegetarian, but before we parted ways, she carved off a forequarter of her own and cooked it up for dinner.
I did a lot of cooking with that pig and with other pigs, wild and domestic, that I’ve killed since. What I found is that the flavor of a wild pig is just about identical to that of a pig raised in the open on a small farm. The difference is in fat content: Domestic pigs put on a lot more fat, which makes for thicker bacon that’s easier to cook in the usual ways. There’s also more consistency in the size of hams and pork chops from domestic pigs, because they’re slaughtered at a specific point in their growth, when they’ve reached a standard weight. I found no gaminess and no toughness to the meat beyond what happens to any animal as it ages and collagen builds up.
As food, wild pigs are superb. Hunting them takes work and skill, but once a hunter gets to be as good at it as Daniel Gentry is, a lot of mouths can be fed (and wildlife habitat saved).
Lionfish
“I know that if I come back every couple of weeks and kill every lionfish I see, the other fish are gonna come back,” Mojo said. “So that’s what I do, man. And that’s my little corner of the ocean, where we still see the wrasses and the damselfish and the baby grouper and everything else.”
My lungs felt as if they would burst as I swam to the back of an underwater cave at the bottom of a cliff. I readied the steel trident in my hand and launched it through the murky water into the body of a reasonably large lionfish. The angry mass of venomous, needlelike spikes twitched and flopped, impaled on my spear. Desperate for air, I swam backward as quickly as I could while trying not to bang my head against the roof of the cave.
Suddenly, just as I was inches from a breath of air, the lionfish managed to wriggle off the end of the spear and dart toward me. Alone and hundreds of yards from the nearest point along the cliffs where I could get out of the water, I wondered whether I would be able to make it out if the lionfish chose to give me a dose of venom.
What the hell had I gotten myself into?
Having gotten a pretty good taste of how invasive species are being dealt with in the United States, I wondered what was happening differently in other countries. This curiosity coincided with coming across the work of Maurice “Mojo” White.
Mojo hunts lionfish around the island of Eleuthera, which is in the Bahamas. He hunts them with an evangelical passion. I think Mojo, an American who’s been spending most of the year on Eleuthera diving and surfing since the late 1980s, feels possessive about the reefs: They’re his reefs, and the lionfish have invaded them.
The lionfish is a species native to the Pacific and Indian Oceans and is so named because of the manelike array of long, venomous spikes extending from its fins. It reaches no more than sixteen inches long, but the lionfish brings trouble out of proportion to its size. Each of those spikes works like a hypodermic needle and is capable of pumping deadly venom into anything that picks a fight with it.
The danger to humans can be compared with that from the bite of a black widow. A lionfish’s sting on land isn’t usually lethal, but if you get poked while you’re handling the fish in a boat or in the kitchen, it’s going to ruin your day. Some people are all right within an hour; others describe a blinding pain that rendered them unable even to stand, followed by the affected limb swelling to twice its normal size and a recovery process that lasted months. The effects seem to vary depending on what part of the body is stung,
In the end, neither Kiera nor I shot a pig on that trip, but we were happy that our expedition was successful and that we had meat to bring home. As far as I know, she’s still a vegetarian, but before we parted ways, she carved off a forequarter of her own and cooked it up for dinner.
I did a lot of cooking with that pig and with other pigs, wild and domestic, that I’ve killed since. What I found is that the flavor of a wild pig is just about identical to that of a pig raised in the open on a small farm. The difference is in fat content: Domestic pigs put on a lot more fat, which makes for thicker bacon that’s easier to cook in the usual ways. There’s also more consistency in the size of hams and pork chops from domestic pigs, because they’re slaughtered at a specific point in their growth, when they’ve reached a standard weight. I found no gaminess and no toughness to the meat beyond what happens to any animal as it ages and collagen builds up.
As food, wild pigs are superb. Hunting them takes work and skill, but once a hunter gets to be as good at it as Daniel Gentry is, a lot of mouths can be fed (and wildlife habitat saved).
Lionfish
“I know that if I come back every couple of weeks and kill every lionfish I see, the other fish are gonna come back,” Mojo said. “So that’s what I do, man. And that’s my little corner of the ocean, where we still see the wrasses and the damselfish and the baby grouper and everything else.”
My lungs felt as if they would burst as I swam to the back of an underwater cave at the bottom of a cliff. I readied the steel trident in my hand and launched it through the murky water into the body of a reasonably large lionfish. The angry mass of venomous, needlelike spikes twitched and flopped, impaled on my spear. Desperate for air, I swam backward as quickly as I could while trying not to bang my head against the roof of the cave.
Suddenly, just as I was inches from a breath of air, the lionfish managed to wriggle off the end of the spear and dart toward me. Alone and hundreds of yards from the nearest point along the cliffs where I could get out of the water, I wondered whether I would be able to make it out if the lionfish chose to give me a dose of venom.
What the hell had I gotten myself into?
Having gotten a pretty good taste of how invasive species are being dealt with in the United States, I wondered what was happening differently in other countries. This curiosity coincided with coming across the work of Maurice “Mojo” White.
Mojo hunts lionfish around the island of Eleuthera, which is in the Bahamas. He hunts them with an evangelical passion. I think Mojo, an American who’s been spending most of the year on Eleuthera diving and surfing since the late 1980s, feels possessive about the reefs: They’re his reefs, and the lionfish have invaded them.
The lionfish is a species native to the Pacific and Indian Oceans and is so named because of the manelike array of long, venomous spikes extending from its fins. It reaches no more than sixteen inches long, but the lionfish brings trouble out of proportion to its size. Each of those spikes works like a hypodermic needle and is capable of pumping deadly venom into anything that picks a fight with it.
The danger to humans can be compared with that from the bite of a black widow. A lionfish’s sting on land isn’t usually lethal, but if you get poked while you’re handling the fish in a boat or in the kitchen, it’s going to ruin your day. Some people are all right within an hour; others describe a blinding pain that rendered them unable even to stand, followed by the affected limb swelling to twice its normal size and a recovery process that lasted months. The effects seem to vary depending on what part of the body is stung,
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