#文章首发挑战赛#
Text: Xiao Peng's brilliant notes
Editor|Xiao Peng's brilliant notes
[Preface]
In our China, there is an old saying called "the people take food as the sky", Chinese has always worked very eating, the food culture has a long history, and the catering industry has been very developed since ancient times.
Whether it is high-end dishes or street stalls, they all have their own characteristics, and one of the most popular is game.
In fact, in the primitive era, we mainly used game as the main food source, and after Zhang Qian's passage to the Western Regions, the food source was further expanded, but game meat is still one of people's favorites.
Up to now, the "game fever" has gradually expanded from Guangdong to the whole country, and with more and more types of game eaten by people, more and more people eat wild meat, and human beings are ushering in the endangerment or extinction of a large number of species.
There are even some animals that have invaded the mainland, which can be eaten by our people as endangered, and there are also four major game meats in the countryside, which used to be very common.
However, with the awakening of people's "foodie genes", these common wild animals have gradually disappeared, and some have even been directly classified as protected animals by the state.
Have you eaten all four of these game?
【Wild baby fish】
The first big game in the countryside is the wild baby fish, in Zhangjiajie, this species is also called the "guardian beast", the baby fish is almost the same generation as the dinosaurs, has survived for 200 years so far, so it is also called "swimming living fossils".
Its scientific name is giant salamander, and its body is flat and very large, and it can grow up to half a meter under normal circumstances, and it is said that it is called a baby fish because someone has heard its cry before, and it is very similar to the cry of a baby.
However, biologists later confirmed that this species does not have vocal cords, so it does not bark at all, and the so-called sound of hearing a baby crying is supposed to be the sound it makes when it swallows food.
Its ability to survive is very strong, and in the past mass extinctions, when the powerful species of dinosaurs could not escape extinction, the salamander successfully survived.
And this species can survive even if it doesn't eat or drink for several years, but no matter how strong its survival ability is, it can't escape the fate of being eaten as "endangered".
Because the meat is very delicious, it was widely welcomed by major foodies when it was first served on the table.
As more and more people eat baby fish, its value has also begun to skyrocket, and 30 years ago, it was almost sold for 2,000 yuan a catty, which was almost equivalent to two months' wages for ordinary people at that time.
However, even if the price is high, it is not sold in the market at all, and its price is even so high that it gradually turns from a wild delicacy into a symbol of power and wealth in the eyes of people.
The growing interest has gradually attracted countless people to catch the salamander, and everyone has begun to look for this species in the mountains, and the number of salamanders has decreased significantly, and even the trend of extinction has appeared.
At the same time, the construction of dikes around their living environment greatly destroys their living environment, and the salamander has requirements for water quality, temperature and other aspects.
Moreover, the migration ability of this species is not online at all, they are very dependent on the original ecological environment, which is why most of them exist in the deep mountains and old pools without pollution.
Because it almost suffered the catastrophe of extinction, in order to protect this species, the mainland listed the salamander as a national second-class protected animal, and also began to increase the technology and intensity of artificial breeding.
Nowadays, there are a large number of captive-bred salamanders, but the number of wild salamanders is still very scarce, because scientists have found that artificially farmed salamanders cannot be easily released, otherwise it is likely to lead to genetic changes in the real wild salamanders, which will accelerate their extinction.
[A hare that has been eaten as a national second-class protected animal]
Rabbit meat may not be uncommon now, and we have a lot of rabbits in our house, so in fact, few people know that hares are also second-class protected animals in the mainland.
Our habit of eating rabbit meat Chinese Xi started a long time ago, and in some ancient texts, there are even records of using hares to make food to entertain guests.
In the Qing Dynasty, it was recorded that rabbit meat had a grassy smell and the meat quality was a little bland, so it was not particularly popular, and people caught hares mainly for fur.
Later, the practice of Sichuan cuisine just perfectly covered up the shortcomings of rabbit meat, so the "rabbit meat style" began to become popular among folk families again, and even many novel practices appeared.
In 2016, statistics showed that a total of 300 million rabbits were eaten in Sichuan, and the local ones were not enough to eat, and they even needed to be imported from abroad.
In such a frenzy, the hare has gradually become one of the game that people are keen on, in the past all the way through the mountains, the hare set is almost everywhere, someone will eat and sell, so a large number, the scale of the systematic capture of the hare army began to rush towards the mountains.
The number of hares began to decline dramatically, and the hare plays a very important role in the biological chain, and if it becomes extinct, the species that feed on it will face the danger of extinction.
Moreover, among the nine species of wild rabbits in the mainland, several of them are unique to the mainland and have great scientific research value.
Therefore, the mainland has listed the hare as a national second-class protected animal, and it is forbidden to hunt hares, and if it exceeds a certain number, it is necessary to pay the due price for its own behavior.
【Wild field chickens that can't be bought】
Wild pheasant is also a unique delicacy in rural areas, because its meat is particularly delicate, and people have also found that it has the effect of clearing heat and detoxifying, cooling blood, so it has always been widely welcomed by farmers.
Of course, the field chicken is not a chicken, but a kind of frog, and people are keen to eat it mainly living in the rural fields, because the sound of their chirping is very similar to the rooster's song, so it is called the field chicken.
In the Tang Dynasty, eating frogs has become a daily Xi, and in the "Compendium of Materia Medica", frog meat is praised as "the most beautiful food".
In the long history, whether it was as a filling stomach at the beginning, or later as a delicacy, it has not been able to jump out of the coveted waters under the tongue of Chinese foodies.
And wild pheasants are deeply loved by people, with the frequency of frog meat on people's tables is getting higher and higher, and there are more and more people catching wild pheasants, wild resources will gradually fail to meet the needs of the market, and today's wild pheasants are even more difficult to find.
Nowadays, people can only buy field chickens from farms, because the number of wild field chickens is now very scarce, and most of them are now domesticated and farmed with wild meat.
In the 80s of the last century, the tiger frog has become a second-class protected animal in the mainland, and now many wild animal resources are also prohibited from being caught casually.
[National Class II Protected Animal: Sparrow]
The last rural delicacy is the sparrow, which is not considered to be as tasty as the first three, but it is one of the fastest representatives of the continent from the common animal to the critically endangered.
In the beginning, sparrows were treated as the "four pests", because they were overflowing and often stealing food, so they were caught by people, and the easiest way to eliminate sparrows was to eat them.
Although the meat of the sparrow is not so delicious, throughout the 20th century, the Guangdong area was still full of sparrow stores.
In 2013, the sparrow was listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and it has also become a Category II protected animal on the mainland, although the endangerment of this species is not all because it is served on the table.
Because sparrows often eat food, they are always hunted and killed, and as the range of human activities gradually increases and agricultural cultivation methods change, the number of sparrows begins to decrease dramatically.
The first is that because people have begun to spray pesticides on farmland to prevent pests, sparrows that feed on crops have lost their food source and are even poisoned.
Coupled with the acceleration of urbanization, the environment in which sparrows previously lived was destroyed, and they could not settle under the eaves like swallows, so they gradually became endangered.
[What other animals have been eaten to extinction?]
In fact, in addition to these wild games in the countryside, there are many animals that have been eaten by humans to extinction, among which the most representative is the passenger pigeon.
The passenger pigeon used to be the most abundant bird in the world, with a staggering number of 5 billion individuals at its peak.
However, because the meat of the passenger pigeon is very delicious, and the feathers can be made into a common warmth in people's lives, it has been hunted by humans in large quantities.
In 1949, the species was officially extinct, up from 5 billion to now, and there is a tombstone dedicated to the passenger pigeon in a zoo in the United States.
This is to remind mankind of the serious consequences of indiscriminate hunting and killing, which is not only a repentance for one's own actions, but also a warning to future generations.
There are also great puffins and dodos, which are killed in large numbers by people, served on the dinner table, and then gradually invade their living space and will become extinct.
The relationship between man and nature has never been one of conquest and conquest, and wild meat also has certain potential threats to human health to a certain extent.
By rejecting wild meat and protecting animals, we are not only protecting the biodiversity of this planet, but also protecting our own homes.
Links to previous issues
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