cow hunting
You think I jest? I don’t. Hawaii has no indigineous land mammals (only bats). They have feral pigs that got loose from the Polynesians that first came to these islands thousands of years ago. They have rats that came on the ships with the European colonizers. They later brought mongoose to get rid of the rats (but of course forgot to consider that rats are nocturnal and mongoose aren’t… so the mongoose went after native species of birds instead 
). There are even some feral horses in the north part of the big island.
And feral cows. Apparently, a few dozen cow-generations ago, a bunch of cows given as a gift to a Hawaiian royal were allowed to roam free… and how have become feral and quite adapted to the tropical rain forests here (a bit more and a video in the continuation)
I learned about this from a friend at our cookout on Sunday. We were talking about introduced species. He traps shrimp in the river behind our house here and was saying there are two kind, Tahitian shrimp and Hawaiian shrimp. The former are larger and legal to trap and eat, the latter are small and endangered. We were eating some at the cookout he had caught that day…
anyway… we talked about introduced animals and said the funniest was feral cow. He said that he’d seen them and they are quite agile, smart, fast and act a bit like deer…
and difficult to hunt. Funny, because you don’t think of cows being agile, smart and fast, but these run through the forest like a deer and can be difficult to hunt.
Amazing what a few generations of natural selection can do. I wonder what they’d look like in a few hundred thousand years here…
well, here is a youtube video of a cow hunt (I’m not a hunter, but thought this was amazing). They encourage it here, the cows are destroying native vegetation…
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That is amazing. I never thought of cows as anything but domesticated food. In fact, I thought cows would be easily terminated in the wild because they aren’t smart enough to survive.
Guess I was wrong.
Reply to CV RickI thought about you guys as I saw this article online today: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/07/08/locks_of_controversy/ – about Angelina and Brad’s daughter Zahara’s hair. I know you guys originally had that “questioning” come up with Emma and thought you’d find that article an interesting read and sympathize totally. Everyone has an opinion!
Reply to Crystal