While defending President Trump’s use of “the Chinese virus” to describe the novel coronavirus, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) blamed China on Wednesday for the disease and several other viral epidemics from the past two decades.
“China is to blame because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that,” Cornyn told reporters. “These viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people, and that’s why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like SARS, like MERS, the swine flu, and now the coronavirus.”
Above (cropped for size): "Jackie Bibby a.k.a. “The Texas Snakeman,”
holds in his mouth 10 western diamondback rattlesnakes for 12.5 seconds
in 2006 to set a new Guinness World Record for Most Live Rattlesnakes
Held In Mouth." via the Longville (Tx) Courier-Journal.
Below: Screencap from video at Fox News showing a dead rattlesnake uncoiling on a Texas grill.
And I'm not going to get into the Appalachian snake-handling churches.
Addendum: Found an instructional video on how to grill a rattlesnake. This guy might be from Wisconsin.
Addendum: Found an instructional video on how to grill a rattlesnake. This guy might be from Wisconsin.
where is the coronavirus on those infected animals that then transmit it to humans? is it on their skin? is it within the meat?
ReplyDeletethe issue may not be 'what you eat', but 'how'? we eat pork meat, which can host parasites that are an 'inconvenience' to humans. inspection and proper hygiene while handling pork meat means we can eat it, safely.
I-)
There's a world of difference between this and the prevalence of wet markets in China.
ReplyDeletehttp://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-visit-to-wet-market-in-guangzhou-1986.html
DeleteWhat a second--are you saying that people in Minnesota don't eat rattlesnakes?
ReplyDeleteWhat's the matter with ya'll?!
I've eaten rattler. My father caught one when I was a kid... we ate it the next night. I was convinced they were joking with me and it was chicken nuggets. Apparently I loved it.
ReplyDeleteWhen he caught it he woke my older brother up after skinning it and held it up to show him.... apparently when he picked it up it began whipping around, without a head, or skin.... just muscle. My brother woke in the morning, telling my mom about "this crazy dream he had".... but alas, t'was no dream.
Couple of points. "They say" that midwestern Lutheran pastors had the highest rates of trichinosis etc. because they were obliged to taste the home-made sausage & pork-products of their parishioners.
ReplyDeleteI am half way through Robert Sapolsky's 700 page double-brick Behave; the biology of humans at our best and worst. The current chapter Us and Them is about our visceral response to identifiable strangers. We experience 'disgust' and the relevant part of our brain lights up when we contemplate their real or imagined dietary habits, etc. Othering is not limited to skin colour: think red-sox, white-sox.
Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the sheer population numbers, could it? Nah...
ReplyDelete*sarcasm intensify*