Guardian emus ferocious with locusts and foxes, but make great pets

October 21, 2022 4:30 AM

Guardian emus ferocious with locusts and foxes, but make great pets. They may have a toenail like a can-opener that can kill foxes, but these pet emus also love a cuddle and a selfie. [Text-based news article with photographs and optional youtube video that does not autoplay.]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (24 comments total)

I'm concerned about there being a can opener that can kill foxes. Shouldn't someone write the manufacturer?
posted by mittens at 4:41 AM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

This guy seems awfully comfortable with his cuddly death-dinosaurs. I hope the emus can reliably tell the difference between a "stompin' fox" and everything that it shouldn't be stomping to death with can-opener feet.
posted by Optamystic at 4:54 AM on October 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

Earlier this year I was in a car near Lightning Ridge, driving towards the Queensland border. There’s been a lot of rain this year so as well as flooding there’s huge growth, and all the birds are doing well. A memory I’ll have is being followed by a flock of emus, me in my hire car, them just keeping pace with me, at highway speed, for fun. Their fun. Playing.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:54 AM on October 21, 2022 [27 favorites]

I'm concerned about there being a can opener that can kill foxes. Shouldn't someone write the manufacturer?

This came to light when another division of the company found its fox traps were superb at opening cans. Someone in shipping apparently transposed two digits in a part number; this is why quality control is important.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:45 AM on October 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

Guardian emus ferocious with locusts and foxes, but make great pets

Am I the only one who parsed this post title as a strange riff on Lorem Ipsum?

Now to the article about death dinosaurs...
posted by abulafa at 5:49 AM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Then there is the great Emu War of 1932 — a conflict waged by returned WWI soldiers armed with machine guns against some 20,000 emus that had assembled near Campion.

This paragraph manages to be both tragic and ridiculous.
posted by heyitsgogi at 5:54 AM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Wait—Why does The Guardian have emus?
posted by Mister Moofoo at 6:14 AM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

[sadoldjoke] They hunt down spellcheckers. [/sadoldjoke]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:18 AM on October 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

Fox Emus

We report. You deride.
posted by chavenet at 6:38 AM on October 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

The key here is that they were hand raised from chicks. God help you if you try to cuddle a wild emu. The ABC should have been careful to remind people of this. Don't come away with the idea that you can cuddle emus. Stay away from them.

For that matter, a red kangaroo can kick your head off. Don't go up to them! Australia's pretty great, come and have a look. Just ... try not to touch anything.
posted by adept256 at 6:58 AM on October 21, 2022 [7 favorites]

eponystabbical
posted by lalochezia at 7:07 AM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

My uncle, whose fluffy grey hair, big coke-bottle glasses, and large nose all gave him a frightening resemblance to an emu, used to attend their county fair each year specifically to visit the emu in the petting zoo. It seemed to love him, too, and would snuggle its head on his shoulder in a very cuddly manner. It's possible.
posted by dlugoczaj at 7:26 AM on October 21, 2022 [11 favorites]

I never wanted emus. Emus were not on the bucket list. To be completely honest, I only had the vaguest idea of what an emu was until two years ago, when Lucy and Ricky were evacuated to my farm from the CZU fire in Santa Cruz county, CA.

Even though I was initially terrified of them, I am in love with these ridiculous dino birds now. They are beautiful, silly, and shockingly cuddly
posted by birdsongster at 9:36 AM on October 21, 2022 [15 favorites]

People often ask me if emus are hard to care for. They are not. You can order emu food (properly called ratite feed) in 50 lb bags on Chewy :)
posted by birdsongster at 9:54 AM on October 21, 2022 [6 favorites]

This seems like a good place to repeat my old advice on emu communication:

The way to engage an emu in conversation is to belch, preferably loudly. If you're lucky, the emu will answer with a soft basso profundo rumble from deep within its chest. If you're unlucky, the emu will just eyeball you skeptically and other zoo visitors will not be so subtle in their disdain.

posted by Pallas Athena at 10:21 AM on October 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

I hope this tendency can help repurpose the remaining American emus for their owners. Emus were gonna be "the meat of the future" in the South when I was young. I remember going on a camping trip up in the Ozarks and stopping first at an outfitter with a yard full of emus and an entire wall of emu products, from a refrigerator case full of meat to candles made from open eggshells (which were pretty, to be fair). There was quickly a glut in this market,* to the point that a fact pattern I answered a question about in law school turned on a contract for a shipment of emus and who could get out of paying what for them. Some Texan who'd sunk too much into them culled his with a baseball bat, and sadly did not go to jail for it.

----
* I think for a hot second someone tried to sell kangaroo in American meat departments, and that it actually turned up on a Kroger shelf in Mississippi. I may be wrong about this.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:09 AM on October 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

"mowing their lawns with guinea pigs"

Are Australian guinea pigs the size of groundhogs?!
posted by jointhedance at 11:14 AM on October 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

"mowing their lawns with guinea pigs"

Are Australian guinea pigs the size of groundhogs?!

jointhedance, they're regular sized guinea pigs, but he has a lot of them.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:38 AM on October 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Now I'm picturing something like a nanotech swarm of cavies roiling and twisting across a lawn leaving neatly shorn grass and poops in its wake.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:40 PM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

My emu story:

When I was about twelve, I went with my mother on a midweek trip to Albuquerque. It was a work thing for her. (She was a lawyer-- IIRC, she had to talk to someone who was in jail.) We lived in a tiny town in southern Colorado, so Albuquerque was a place of thrills, glamour, and magic for me. Weird Al has no idea.

Our last day there was a rainy Wednesday, and I managed to convince my mother that we could squeeze in a trip to the zoo before we drove home. We got there just as it opened. There couldn't have been more than a dozen other visitors. This meant that some animals who would normally be doing their best to ignore the crowds were, instead, relaxed, and maybe even a little bored.

This included the emu.

The emu was standing by his fence, like a neighbor waiting to chat. The first thing he did was (literally) size me up. He stretched his neck up as high as possible, apparently trying to assure himself that he was taller than me. Once I figured out what he was doing, I stretched my neck too, and stood on tiptoe, but he still won.

Then he started to dash along the fence. I thought he was running away from me, and I was disheartened for a second, but then he turned back and looked at me like, "Are you coming or not?" so I raced to catch up with him.

At first, he was utterly smoking me. (I was a very uncoordinated kid, though I don't think even a track star could keep up with an emu.) But once he understood how slow I actually was, he throttled way down, and stayed just a little ahead.

We ran about four lengths of his fence together. It was the only time exercise was fun for me that entire year. If I could have cuddled him, I absolutely would have.

He was a very, very good emu.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 1:56 PM on October 21, 2022 [28 favorites]

I’m still shivering about the Cassowary. These Emus look very sweet.
posted by waving at 4:17 PM on October 21, 2022

So there are several emu related articles linked at the bottom of the posted article and I CLICKED ON THEM ALL y'all.

My favorite is "Emus have been banned from this establishment for bad behaviour". I also enjoyed "Old man emu approaching 60 years, living stress free in eastern Victoria."
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:55 PM on October 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting. I really needed to read something positive and this hit the spot.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 10:24 PM on October 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Then there is the great Emu War of 1932 — a conflict waged by returned WWI soldiers armed with machine guns against some 20,000 emus that had assembled near Campion.

This paragraph manages to be both tragic and ridiculous.

The ridiculous bit is that the emus won.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:47 PM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]