From the Now I’ve Heard Everything department. First it was polar bears, now it is sheep guts.
The Telegraph.co.uk
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent
Haggis is at risk of dying out due to of global warming.
The meat pudding is known to children as a rare tartan creature found only in the Highlands but the rise of the common parasite lung worm, which is thriving due to global warming, is putting it at risk.
Haggis is made from a sheep’s stomach, which is stuffed with oatmeal and minced intestines. But butchers are finding it more and more difficult to get hold of the principle ingredient of sheep’s lung, as so many are infected with lung worm.
Dr Sandy Clark, the vetinary centre manager at the Scottish Agricultural College in Thurso, said the parasite was thriving because it is able to survive in grazing all year round in the warmer climate.
Although lung worm will not necessarily show up in a healthy sheep or affect all the meat, it will make the lungs of the animal unfit for human consumption.
“Lung worm has been at a very low level and did not cause serious problems in sheep but with the changing climate and availability of the parasite it is becoming a problem,” he said.
He also said lung worm has increased because new technologies mean farmers are only medicating animals that are shown to have traces of other diseases, rather than treating all animals on a regular basis.
“The sad fact is that the disease is causing the lungs to be condemned for human consumption because of the lung worm damage,” he added.
Joe Findlay, owner of Findlay’s Butcher in Edinburgh, said it was a struggle to source lung from Scottish farms so butchers are turning to Ireland instead.
The award-winning butcher said that the growing demand for haggis across the world was because of the fashion for societies dedicated to Scottish poet Robert Burns and the fact that the Scottish diaspora was also making it more difficult to source the ingredients.
“It could well get worse, we are just keeping our fingers crossed,” he added.
The Vermont Pub and Brewery has not yet issued a statement indicating how they will deal with the issue during their annual Burns Night celebration, when they serve Haggis alongside a number of excellent single-malts.
My understanding is that domestic haggis is generally lighter in flavor and texture and less oily than the gamier and tougher wild haggis. But that is only from what I have read on the subject. I have not yet had the pleasure of devouring either beast, domestic or wild.
Re Peter Hearnden comments, specifically —
“Thus, I fail to see the problem with the story. I guess it feeds the need, a need so obvious here, to ridicule any and every story that dares, wrongly, on in this case rightly, to report a link between a problem and AGW.
This site can indeed be ridiculous at times.”
Evidently what you fail to see is that increases in the parasite populations could be due to a myriad of other factors, including how the treatment of the disease has changed (as the article mentions). Nevertheless, the story focuses on a single, popular, all encompassing cause celebre’– global warming.
Dr Sandy Clark states, “with the changing climate and availability of the parasite it is becoming a problem.” You and the general reader take this to mean that it is a problem. But that is the whole point.
You emphasize the statement, “Larvae are vulnerable to adverse weather conditions, but in warm, moist, shaded conditions may live for over a year.”
Read it closely. In warm, moist, shaded conditions (larvae) MAY live for over a year. This begs some questions. What, precisely. are the are warm and moist conditions, are such conditions actually present in Scotland and why use the word MAY except as cover in the event that actual rigorous field research shows that they may not?
Moreover, if global warming is the real culprit here (which the article intentionally leads you to believe) why is Ireland not having exactly the same problem?
So, as you may guess, some of us find such stories to be ridiculous. We also find it frustrating that they are so effective in convincing less critical and skeptical readers like yourself of suppositions (which are often disguised as fact) that could be misleading, inaccurate, or partially or entirely false
Who gives a rat’s ass about haggis! I want to know why my little bull calves didn’t have enough nuts hanging in the cold spring air to cut off! I want my rocky mountain oysters (fried in butter with four and cornmeal and with a brew and dipping sauce please)! They are like chicken gizzards (kind of chewy with a slight grittiness to the meat) only BETTER! But alas, when we snipped, the nuts were tucked up too far to get much more than fuzz! Damnable global warming.
“flour”
err….uh…..for those of you east of the rockies, rocky mountain oysters don’t have shells.
Pamela Gray (18:45:33) :
“err….uh…..for those of you east of the rockies, rocky mountain oysters don’t have shells.”
In Greece there is a special dish one can sometmes order in taverns:
“ameletita”. It means “not to be thought about”
We sure are lucky that global warming was not around when AIDS and the world wide scare appeared. Sure could have given a great boost to it.
Then there’s the TMI special.
OT, but the AIRs CO2 thread has moved off into the backwater.
new links?
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/story_archive/Measuring_CO2_from_Space/
OT
ThedAirs animation from 2003 to 2008 is lovely.
Maximum CO2 happens in spring. Maybe it is a positive feedback after all, the more CO2, the more plants thrive, the moreCO2 will come out. plants do breath out CO2 at night, No?
Otherwise it is strange. April is not a very hot month for getting extra CO2 from the oceans, and anyway the extra comes over the land masses.
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/
[…] permalink this scares me more Haggis at risk from global warming « Watts Up With That? […]
We are talking of Haggis when the total Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) – 107 Year Graph
http://www.forecast-chart.com/historical-dow-industrial.html
I wish I could show the plot.
is highly correlated with the rise of temperature? Even the recent stasis is there.
🙂 🙂 😉
Now we can discuss , is temperature driving the Dow or the Dow the temperature?
I’ll miss my Sunday morning Eggs Benedict a lot more than haggis. What will it be like without truffles?
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2008-02-25-europe-truffles_N.htm