I don't think it's far fetched to eat feral animals at all.
The meat should be used.
It's one of the solutions - it's not the total solution
but it's certainly one of them.
Good morning, girls and boys!
I've been in the meat business since I was just on 14.
I'm 64 and 1/2 now
and I love the business.
There was nothing in meat that I wouldn't get,
One of my favourite customers was an Asian fella
who was having Chinese New Year
needed a snake.
I went out hunting until I found one.
If you needed something you came to Mr Flesh.
The reality is that we will live off our staples.
Our staples are beef, lamb, pork and chicken
but Australia is far more adventurous.
They have to have emu, and crocodile, and wild boar.
You name it and they want to taste it.
Kangaroo is without a doubt the most humane meat
that's being processed on this planet.
It's shot from a distance,
it doesn't know what's about to happen to it,
If an animal lives a free-range life
it's the best meat for you
because it's not sitting idle in a shed fattening itself up
and becoming obese.
We came to this country, and because it was so plentiful,
we only used them as pet's meat.
It was criminal!
Wallaby is very mild in sales.
It's very, very new,
but kangaroo has been around since the early 80s.
That's had a following.
it's such a lean free-range meat.
The tourists go nuts for it.
One of the biggest challenges for the kangaroo industry
is 'we're eating Skippy, eating our national emblem'.
It's a cringe factor
associated with eating the product,
and a lot of people are really put off by that.
But at the end of the day it's another meat product.
And some people are very comfortable with
not worrying about the type of animals they are eating.
Hi, just one camel burger please.
They're quite happy to go with the taste,
go with the adventure
and experience new tastes.
We've been exporting horse meat from Australia
for the last 45 years.
Okay? Legally, with the ghovernment's approval.
But we don't eat it here.
20 countries throughout the world
that have horse as part of their natural diet.
The only way they could get horse in this country
is to buy from a pet shop.
In 2010 a sympathetic minister
gave permission for a limited amount of product
to be made available.
Oh! Hello, you little beauty!
In the initial stages, I was getting about
4,000 emails a week,
of which maybe 500 were death threats.
This is genuine Australian horse meat.
In our store we like to call it Cavallo.
It's a softer name.
Not as confronting as the word 'horse'.
We now call ourselves the horse whisperers.
If you come into the shop, I never have it on display.
I don't have pigs' heads on display either
because they offend people.
We don't talk about where we are butchering it.
We don't want them having demonstrations
If they eat them without spices
the most that they would notice is that there's
a slightly sweet aftertaste,
but while they're eating it, it tastes like
lovely succulent beef.
It's noted for having a very very high iron content
and very much sought after.
It's not a product that is suppsoed to be making me rich,
but it has made me infamous.
Australians have a love affair with horse
but technically speaking, they treat them like dirt.
I think it's quite hideous.
that they will shoot then from a helicopter
and leave them lying on the ground.
They are a food source.
Why should they be wasted?
Because it's not as good
as farmed cattle or farmed sheep?
It doesn't mean that the meat is no good.
Ecocultinary activism is a term and a concept
that refers to using invasive animals
as a foodstuff
in a way where people will want to consume them
and therefore address ecological problems.
So in terms of invasives, cane toads are really the apex
in that they they procreate prodigiously
and spread across the nation.
But invasiveness can be turned around into an asset.
Cane toads, there's one!
I think there's a lady up in Darwin
that's trying to figure out how she can get
cane toad flesh into the marketplace.
Great idea!
Why shouldn't we start using that resource?
It's a pest!
And we should be eating pests!
So we're just going around the garden
and we're going to try and find some cane toads.
I think this time of year they're hanging out in crevices,
like, under the rocks in cool spots.
There's one.
They're prety easy to catch.
I work in conservation and land management
in the Top End, but I'm also very interested in local food
and one of the things we've been cooking is cane toads.
A lot of people that eat meat and other food products
and they don't really question where it comes from.
So I think eating a feral animal that you've got yourself,
you've seen how it's killed,
and you prepare it yourself is much less strange.
When we say we've tried eating cane toads
some people think it's pretty gross
and they wouldn't do it,
because it's poisonous
and because people have built up this relationship
where they really dislike them,
and try to get rid of them.
There's no size limits when it's a feral animal -
you want them all gone.
These big ones have got some juicy legs on them.
When we cook the cane toad,
we're only cooking their legs
and that's all we've tried because
we don't want to risk being near the poison gland.
I don't know anyone that got sick from eating them
and I certainly haven't.
But I can't say I eat them every single day.
Maybe there should be a disclaimer -
if you try it at home,
it not our fault.
Research is still needed on this,
because we know if you kill a cane toad quickly
and take the skin off you reduce the amount
of toxin that could possibly get in to it.
But there's still some evidence there's residual traces
at particular times.
Once we can ensure that,
there's a huge export market for it
because they're so productive
and there's a global shortage of frogs and toads.
In Indonesia for example,
they've eaten out a number of species.
We've got the cane toad legs ready to go,
and I'm just going to marinate them
with soy sauce, ginger, garlic, chilli,
Yep, they're done!
So we finished stir-frying them,
and it's garnished afterwards with a bit of
spring onion, garlic and sesame seeds.
And we've got some new people eating cane toad
to try it out.
A Queenslander eating cane toad?
They're nice.
Is there much meat on it?
Yeah, surprisingly - there's lots of little bones.
I can't believe I'm doing this.
It's good gear.
It's not chicken, hey.
There's nothing wrong with it.
KFC - kentucky fried cane toad.
I think it needs a new name.
You need to rebrand to give it a more glamourous name.
Maybe marine quail?
I think there is room for cane toads on the menu,
but it's not necessarily going to be a mass market.
Australians are becoming a lot more open-minded
to trying different things,
whether it be camel, whether it be horse,
maybe even cane toad.
I've never thought of eating cane toad.
and my immediate thought
would probably like other people eating cat.
Yuck.
But then, I think, wait a minute -
we eat oysters, and we eat snails
and we eat all sorts of stuff.
Meat is meat,
and if it's going to serve a purpose
of helping the environment
we should be eating all the cane toads we can.
My name is Kate,
I live in Alice Springs
and I'm an illustrator and writer.
I'm inspired by the country, basically.
The love of the country, and slowly becoming aware
over years the terrible danger feral animals are causing
to the Australian environment.
Not enough people actually do realise
what the feral cats are doing out in the bush.
It's a killer by instrict,
which it can't help, but that's what it is.
To make a point about the problem feral cats
are causing, right across Australia,
I cooked a catterole in the bush foods competition.
Aboriginal mob out in the bush
have eaten cat for a long time.
If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.
When I actually dealt with the first cat corpse
I thought as I skinned it
that is this sweet meat.
I'd describe it as a mix of chicken and goanna.
When I cooked the catterole,
a lot of flak arose.
It got into the major papers,
and it appeared overseas
and there were even veiled death threats
and they threatened to burn my books
outside the bookshops.
Yeah, people just have to get over their emotion.
They have to realise the critical danger
that these animals are causing.
And have a look at a tiny little lamb,
they're the cutest little things,
and we eat it and we don't think twice about it.
The cringeworthiness factor around eating cats
is going to be a phenomenal thing to overcome.
We've got an animal that we associate
with very different things other than eating them.
I think it's going to be a very long time
before we see cat on the menu in Australia.
We are carnivorous by nature
and as long as things are grown
with humane efforts,
as slaughtered totally humanely
I see nothing wrong with eating flesh
for us to survive as a species.
Until something organic
doesn't need to eat something organic to survive,
we're stuck with the system that exists.