The great Texas emu bubble

THE SUN is a giant, gleaming emu egg in the sky, and if you gaze long enough at the Milky Way, you can see the long body of an emu formed from the stars. The world’s second largest bird after the ostrich, the emu is native to Australia and has long been a source of mythical inspiration—and sustenance—for Aboriginals. The big bird claims a place on Australia’s coat of arms, stamps and 50-cent coin. It even sparked a military deployment, the Great Emu War of 1932, when soldiers were sent to Western Australia to kill them and thereby save the farmers’ crops. The emus won.

From the 19th century, the three-toed bird started to spread its flightless wings and became a prized oddity in zoos worldwide. A century on, the emu was also seen as a potential source of red meat—a healthier version of beef. It was in this guise, as livestock, that the emu came to Texas in the 1980s. It did not end well for most of the emus, or most of their owners.

Enthusiasm and emu-friendly regulations saw the price of a breeding pair of emus, just a few hundred dollars in the late 1980s, rise to a whopping $28,000 by 1993. The next year it doubled again. The American Emu Association, an industry group, saw its membership rise 27-fold between 1988 and 1994, to 5,500 members, most of them in Texas.

The rationale for bringing the emu to Texas was that Americans wanted healthier meat, that the state has a long history of raising cattle for slaughter, and that, heck, it was the 1980s, and all sorts of weird stuff was happening. Some boosters also heralded the potential of ostriches, but emus won out over their ratite cousins. In its fundamentals, though, the Texas “emu bubble” of the 1990s was, like all investment bubbles, stoked by exuberance and greed. “Men, it has been well said, think in herds,” wrote the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay in 1841 in his book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. Had Mr Mackay travelled to Lubbock or Midland a century and a half later, he would have believed that men think in mobs, as groups of emus are sometimes known.

From flowers to feathers

As in all bubbles, from 17th-century Dutch “tulipmania” to 21st-century bitcoin, word of the wonders of the emu spread by all the social networks available, from word of mouth to small ads in local papers. Their boosters were keen to point out that there was more to emus than steak. They provided oil for lotions, skin for leather, feathers for clothes and enormous emerald eggs for four-person omelettes. Best of all, in terms of inflating a bubble, emus provided you with more emus, and thus an incentive to spread the word yet further and sell emus on to other would-be ratite-ranchers.

The state government also played a role in helping the emu market take flight. Between 1992 and 1995 the Texas department of agriculture reportedly gave out $400,000 in loans to encourage emu ranching. The state also offers tax breaks to people who use their land for agricultural purposes, which is enough of an incentive for some people to find animals to graze on their property even if they have no intention of farming; emus fitted the bill. And Texas law was, and is, extremely lax when it comes to the import of exotic animals. The state is believed to have more tigers living in captivity in backyards than exist in the wild worldwide.

The new emu owners were not experienced investors—or emu raisers. “We were clueless. We had never even raised chickens,” says Gina Taylor, who bought a pair of emus with her husband in 1995, soon after they moved from Dallas to a rural town called LaRue. They used a laundry basket with a heat lamp over it to incubate eggs in their kitchen.

Such a rough-and-ready approach seems quite appropriate for emus, which are somewhat scruffy beasts. But even if not sleek, they do have some redeeming features. They need much less land to graze than cows. They are quieter, too, except during the breeding season, when the females make booming noises and males grunt. Though this was not necessarily a selling point in Texas, the birds have a powerfully proto-feminist attitude to the patriarchy. Females choose males, rather than vice versa, sometimes going so far as to fight over them. Males take on the responsibility of incubating the eggs, refusing to leave the nest to eat or drink for weeks at a time, and then raising their chicks as single parents.

Divorced from the mob

However, those who anticipated a life of gentle emu-care and handsome profits found themselves disappointed. One challenge was that emus were not easy to handle. They are as tall as human beings, growing up to 190cm (6 feet 2 inches) and easily weighing 55kg (120lb). Being the only birds with calf muscles helps them sprint at up to 50kph (30mph), prompting some dramatic high-speed chases when they escaped. They can also kick. A young Hispanic man who had crossed one came into an emergency room in Austin in the mid-1990s with bad cuts and bruises shouting “Pollo gigante!” (Giant chicken!).

And raising the birds was not cheap. People ploughed tens of thousands of dollars into it. The emus required fencing and feed. The most forward-thinking emu owners bought expensive equipment to microchip their flocks, because emu rustling became a problem as values rose. So did emu fraud. Some retirees and speculators put their savings into emus that were sold to them but never delivered, sparking lawsuits over avian Ponzi schemes.

A few dozen restaurants in Texas briefly added emu to their menus, including Dunston’s, a popular steak house in Dallas, but consumers were hard to win over. Emu claims lower cholesterol and fat, and higher iron, but it is more expensive than beef and less familiar. Small farmers never co-ordinated to get the distribution or quality control they needed to make it a profitable, large-scale enterprise. Even emu enthusiasts did not make the meat a staple of their diets. “We occasionally ate an emu burger, but never ate any of our own,” says Ms Taylor.

As the hoped-for demand failed to materialise, the supply continued to increase. Emus lay 5-15 eggs in each clutch and can keep doing so for more than 16 years. With 12 surviving chicks a year, a single breeding pair can spawn 133 breeding pairs within five years and nearly 36,000 within ten years. The population boomed at precisely the moment it was becoming clear that Americans had no appetite for a new red meat.

The bubble popped painfully. By 1998 emus were worthless. Rather than keep paying to feed them, many owners just abandoned them. Some farmers cut their own fences, hoping their emus would leave and become someone else’s problem. When Parker county, west of Fort Worth, auctioned off 211 birds it had rounded up in 1998, they fetched only $2-4 each. You can sometimes find emu-burgers at Twisted Root, a chain in Dallas, alongside elk-burgers. But not often.

One result is that there are mobs of feral emus in parts of Texas—farm survivors and their descendants. Occasionally they show up in small towns or nearly cause crashes as they cross country roads. Animal-control officers and police struggle to catch them. When they do, they often have no way to transport them, because they are too tall to fit into dog kennels.

Your correspondent went to visit a female emu that had been successfully corralled and now resides at the Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation, a non-profit centre outside of San Antonio. This one is probably descended from a farm emu hatched in the 1990s, but no one can be sure. Emus can live 30 years. She has been there for several years and spends her days walking the perimeter, like a watchman making constant rounds, although she is shy and does not want to come close, even for a treat of a sweet pumpkin offered freely through the fence. She seems to know that humans are fickle and untrustworthy.

The emus that were freed were the fortunate ones. Some despairing farmers simply stopped feeding them, starving them to death. Others shot them. Two brothers outside Fort Worth decided to eliminate their emus with baseball bats to the head. They had killed 22 of their 100-strong mob before the police came, summoned by appalled neighbours. Some lobbied to charge the brothers with animal cruelty, but no charges were ultimately filed. “Texas likes to think of itself as the wild, untamed West, where man can do what he wants to do, to hell with who he’s doing it to,” explains Lynn Cuny, founder of Wildlife Rescue & Rehabilitation. “Animals are viewed as property, which people can discard or destroy like old pieces of furniture.”

The emu was not the last species to fall foul of human greed. Since the 1990s, many Texans have pinned their hope for riches on new animals, such as white-tail deer and long-horn cattle. And just as Texans have not learned from their experience with emus, nor has the world. More recently India experienced its own emu boom, with farmers piling into raising the big birds. They made the same mistake Texans did by focusing on hatching new birds instead of creating demand for the meat. The market collapsed in 2013.

From the human point of view, this is a tale of never learning. From the emu’s, it is adaptation in action, every economic fiasco an evolutionary opportunity. From the plains of Texas to the streets of India, emus are flapping those tiny wings they do not really have and making the most of wherever it is they find themselves. Let the wild emus roam.

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