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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

As an Australian from this perspective the scam shouldn't have even passed the smell test.

Due to changes in land management from traditional times we have had literal plagues of emu and kangaroos. They are of least concern in terms of population. With all other species in decline these two are really taking over.

We fought a war against them to keep their numbers down (and lost!). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

If emu meat was going to take off in the USA it would have happened already long ago from imports from Australia. Yet somehow people bought into the idea that emu's are worth a lot of money and you should breed them!?

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As an entirely irrelevant aside:

There's a Youtube channel from Australia I watch of a guy who does heavy machining and welding in service of construction equipment. In the most recent episode (working on the boom of a crane) at one point a cute little brown snake crawls out from some metal and aggressively chases him, eventually crawling under another pile.

He calmly tells us this thing (an eastern brown snake) is the second most venomous snake species in the world, and he wonders if the much bigger mother is around somewhere.

This felt like peak Australia to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DalniFq6WHI (around 29:50)

Ah good ol' Curtis! Definitely a good watch if you like watching engineering with large machines (and Homeless!).

I believe it's Kurtis with a "K".

> and aggressively chases him

It's definitely not aggressively chasing him. Snakes are way less aggressive than the average person realizes. The problem is that we are huge to snakes. So while we're thinking, "Oh, shit! This snakes is chasing me!" The snake is thinking, "I gotta hide! Quick to these two big rocks right near me. Wait! The rocks keep lifting and moving away! I gotta get to them!"

90% of the time when someone thinks they're being chased by a snake, it's either:

1. You are between the snake and where it knows shelter is (water, cover, hole, etc.).

2. There is no visible shelter nearby and the snake thinks your legs are a place to hide.

I've spent a lot more time around snakes than most, including many venomous ones in the wild, and I've never been "chased". Snakes are small animals with very limited energy budgets. To them, you are a giant monster running on high octane fuel. All they want is to get away from you as easily as possible so they can go back to running in low power mode until prey comes along. They don't have the inclination or energy to tussle with you.

Had a brown snake cross my front yard just last week. First one I've seen on my property in the nearly-20 years I've been there, and only the second live, wild snake I've seen in my life.

Neighbours apparently see them fairly regularly.

Brown snakes generally move in the opposite direction to "where there are people", so despite being highly dangerous, paths don't cross closely unless quite unlucky (for either human or snake).

I think there's kind of an easy fallacy to slip into with any sort of growing or breeding, where you see it as unique and different from other businesses because they're self propagating - it's "free" money!

It's almost like the money equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, except that it sort of does work sometimes, just not typically for a random given layman, and it's not usually worth it compared to literally any other way of making money.

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