Tastes like chicken.
Via Miami Herald:
Biology student Luis Sibira stumbled across the first set of gory remains last November: eight pink flamingos, their breasts and torsos sliced out, leaving their heads, spindly legs and vivid feathers scattered across the marshy ground at Las Peonias Lagoon in western Venezuela.
Flamingo hunting is both illegal and unusual at the lagoon, less than 200 miles from the Colombian border. Sibera, who had been studying the pink birds that nest there for years, had never seen anything remotely like that before.
Since then, though, he’s seen at least 20 similar cases, most recently in January, when he found several carcasses hidden under shrubs, with a shotgun shell nearby.
But this isn’t simple poaching, he said. Sibira and other investigators from Zulia University, a public university in Maracaibo, are convinced that the protected birds have become the latest victims of Venezuela’s growing hunger crisis. People have become so desperate, he said, that they are butchering and eating flamingos.
There are other signs that food shortages have led to the slaughtering of animals not generally considered meat: giant anteaters, for one. The university investigators — biologists and biology students — say they have kept records to show that dozens of the slow-moving creatures, classified as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, also have been killed for food.
In the city’s dump, more evidence of hunger-driven desperation: dismembered dogs, cats, donkeys, horses and pigeons have been found since last year, all skinned or plucked, with signs of having been eaten, according to the city’s garbage teams.
“Sometimes we only find the animal’s heads, guts and legs. We used to see this very little in the past, but this practice is now out of control and on the rise,” said Robert Linares, who works in waste disposal at the dump for the city.
A day earlier, he said, he’d found the remains of a dog, skinned and dismembered on the streets of Santa Lucia.
The ‘Maduro diet’
Under President Nicolas Maduro, the once-wealthy country has been plagued with the worst inflation rate in the world, close to 700 per cent last year, according to International Monetary Fund. A survey by three universities in Caracas found that 87 percent of Venezuelans in 2015 didn’t have enough money to buy sufficient food for their families. Not having enough to eat has become so common it even has a nickname: “the Maduro diet.”
Ricardo Boscan, the head of Maracaibo’s waste collection department, said that six out of every 10 garbage bags or trash cans are being looted by hungry people.
“The situation has gotten worse since 2015,” he said. “It’s happening because hunger is rising to a massive scale.”
But resorting to flamingos is something new.
In Los Olivitos’ marsh, a 125-square-mile refuge close to Las Peonias, at least 10,000 flamingos live, one of the only three such spots in Venezuela. While locals were known to feed on their eggs, killing them for food was unheard of. The indigenous people in the area, mainly Wayuu families, have denied killing the birds.
“Venezuelan Indians never ate this kind of animals, not even in times of the [Spanish] conquest,” said Angel Viloria, a biologist and the head of Venezuela’s Scientific Studies Institute. “This new behavior comes out of the pressure to eat.”
In years past, the country’s culinary habits in rural areas have sometimes included deer, iguanas and wild birds — but not exotic birds such as flamingos.
HT: Brock