The emu "industry" is dead. So why are you promoting emu slaughter products? The American public does not want to eat dead emus in sandwiches or in stir fries. Still these loser-investors keep pushing on, trying to find places to dump their poor innocent birds. They want Americans to rub oil from slaughtered emus all over their skins as a miracle cure. Instead of snake oil, there's emu oil. But as the New York Times Magazine wrote about emu oil three years ago, on March 16, 1997: There's no convincing evidence that emu oil has medicinal value. "Imagine saying to your wife, 'Here, stick this bird fat on your body,'" says Jim Mjelde, a resource economist at Texas A&M University who has studied the emu industry. "People in the United States just don't do that. There's a cultural bias against putting animal fat on yourself."

Emus and ostriches are the oldest living birds on earth. Why can't we respect their antiquity and leave them alone? They produce beautiful eggs, which the father bird incubates. They are gentle birds with a surpassingly lovely balletic morning dance. Their health-giving properties are in their lives, not in their slaughtered remains.

Leave emus alone, Channel 4. Emu investors have bludgeoned and shot to death these friendly, peaceful birds with baseball bats and bullets because the birds didn't make them millionaires. Take a good look at the lot of them and ask yourself seriously whether emu oil has made a single one a more appealing, healthier, or younger-looking person. I doubt it. Please, Channel 4, stop promoting quackery and cruelty. The game is over. IF YOU KNEW THE EMU YOU'D QUIT. PLEASE CANCEL THE PROMOTION SCHEDULED FOR THIS EVENING. Thank you.

United Poultry Concerns. February 3, 2000

(Action Alert - NBC4 Should Not Promote Emu Slaughter Products)