Amazon Sells Whale Bacon?

Ewwwww......
And it is, of course, on Amazon's Japan website.

Henry Rollins to Host Weird New Show on National Geographic

This sounds to me like it's glorifying the use and misuse of exotic animals. I'm not particularly thrilled about it, even though they are claiming that they are not into encouraging the activities.

Anything for ratings I guess...

Excerpted from Reuters...

Rollins will host "Animal Underworld," which features people who own exotic animals as well as those who eat them. He visits Arizona's Road Kill Cafe, where the menu features not-so-exotic fare. And he meets people who consume things you would not find on the menu even at the Road Kill, like frog smoothies and tarantulas -- the former because it supposedly increases virility and the latter for medicinal purposes.

If "Animal Underworld" sounds a little edgy for the august National Geographic brand -- which has a standards and practices department that vets everything for accuracy -- senior vp Geoff Daniels assures it is in keeping with Nat Geo's mission of exploration and investigation.

"It's really an investigation into our relationship with animals," he says. "It's covering the full range from the off-beat and quirky to the potentially illicit. And our approach to (the latter) is to make sure that we're obviously not encouraging that behavior."

Demand for Wildlife Products on the Rise in China

The Chinese want them for exotic foods and for medicine.

From the China Daily...

The trade in TCM {Traditional Chinese Medicine} products has also been growing at an annual rate of 10 percent, which has seriously impacted medicinal plant and animal populations, though more than half of plants and animals being used by TCM are from artificial propagation or captive breeding. Up to 20 percent of these are now considered threatened.

Eating wild animals is also a traditional practice in southern China. The consumption of wild animals, which slowed amid the SARS epidemic in 2003, has once again gained popularity, a WWF survey has found.

Profit from illegal trade can be up to 10 times the cost, with restaurant operators offering the exotic dishes usually aware of the violation but lured by the gains, Xu {Hongfa, director of the World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) TRAFFIC East Asia China Program} said.

Illegal trade in tiger meat and bones is also alive, continuing to threaten the extinction of an already depleted species, he said.