Giant Stingray (or Manta Ray) Caught in Peru

a reply to: Snarl

Would you kill a chicken with an eight meter wingspan?

The reasons for not doing so are, ultimately, economic.

It requires a huge investment in energy — that is, food — to make a big animal. It also takes a long time for it to grow to maturity. If you were to kill an 8m-wingspan chicken before it has a chance to make more superchickens, all that investment would be down the drain.

If you killed it after it had passed the age of fertility, it would be quite all right, but the meat might be rather tough.

For obvious reasons, this calculus does not apply to wild animals, since Nature does the feeding and rearing for us. Hence the popularity of big-game hunting... until all the game had been hunted to extinction.

Personally, I feel bad about killing anything larger than a cockroach, but that doesn't stop me when I have to. And I am one of those who regards meat as a normal part of the human diet.