Ostrich Industry Lays An Egg

Ostrich Industryu Lays An Egg LIVESTOCK Exotic Animals The bubble has burst for ostrich and emu farmers in North America according to several recently published reports Auction prices collapsed in the past year from thousands of dollars down to less than a few hundred dollars In some cases no buyer can be found at any price Thousands of emus are roaming the Texas countryside set free by ranchers unwilling to spend another dime on feed the Los Angeles Times recently reported Hundreds of others have been allowed to starve to death their emaciated re-mains found in breeding pens that once drew eager investors In a Fort Worth suburb this summer police caught two physician brothers Stephen and Russell Vinson putting their flock to sleep with an aluminum baseball bat after trying to sell - or even give away - the exotic birds In Alberta Canada one big bird rancher goes around showing off what he calls his $40 000 boots That s how much he originally paid for an ostrich that he later turned into shoe leather All that s a far cry from a few years ago when breeding pairs were bringing up to $60 000 and unhatched chicks up to $4 000 So what happened? The problem with the industry is apparently a basic one: the meat never caught on at the supermarket Only a handful of restaurants and specialty stores carry it and so far it s proved too expensive and exotic for mainstream tastes In the current shakedown the get-rich-quick schemers are being weeded out from the true believers One of the latter is Gary Nastiff a Denton Texas -based businessman who sells a line of products made with emu oil He s found a market for his products even though the market value of the birds has plummeted Another source of optimism is the Canadian Emu Cooperative Inc CEMU in Ontario which predicts a shortage of birds in Canada within less than a year due to the number of producers getting out However for most producers the recent collapse of the industry seems to show that industry promotion was just an-other pyramid scheme that paid off only for people who got in early The only way anyone made money in the business was by selling birds from one rancher to another concluded the Times Indeed it was not in the short-term interests of the industry to even think about moving to a consumer market as long as the goose could still lay the golden egg for new investors

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