February 4, 2012
Published: 12 Oct 09 14:46 CET | Double click on a word to get a translation
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/22610/20091012/
The bodies of thousands of rabbits culled every year from the parks in Stockholm’s Kungsholmen neighbourhood are being used to fuel a heating plant in central Sweden.
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fin
adjective
Fin means anyhting from sweet to proper. When someone says, Du är så fin it's quite a compliment.
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From the small amount of heat produced by 6000 bunnies take away
1. salary of bunny catches
2. Electricity to keep them frozen
3. cost of 500 km round trip to take them to Karlskoga
Net result a thumping big loss!
Yes, but:
1. The bunny catchers still need to be employed, as the bunnies are considered pests.
2 & 3. Presumably the bunnies would still need to be disposed of (incinerated?), possibly some distance from Stockholm and in an energy-intensive way. This way, at least the energy released by burning them is harnessed.
For one thing: if pet rabbits cost as much as puppies in Sweden no one would be getting them on a whim and then just releasing when they got tired of them...
Those options have already been considered. I say import wolves, make that daily jog MEAN something :)
Next, they will be burning human bodies to create energy. NAZIs watch out here come the EcoSwedes.
@craicen: I think it's a great idea to use them as food for zoo animals. What crocodile or lion wouldn't love a rabbit snack? But the comparison to the Nazis was hardly justified....
I once had a Swede seriously propose that corpses should be used for fertilizer on fields that it was the Eco friendly was to do and burying them was a burden on the environment. Talk about pushing up daisies.
All sorts of lunancy can result from Ecomania.
Jellied Rabbit
I HAVE TRYED THIS BUT I USED PIGS TROTTERS TO MAKE THE JELLY BIT.
HERE IS THE RECIPE:
1 Rabbit or a jointed of rabbit
1 Cow Heel
1 Onion
Salt and Pepper
AND THIS IS WHAT YOU DO.
Place the meats into a large saucepan, cover with water, bring to the boil,.
Add the onion and season to taste.
Cover and simmer gently for 4 hours, or until cooked and easily drops off the bones, skimming the surface as needed.
Remove any skin, bones or waste.
Season the liquid, pour into mould or basin.
Leave 12 hours to set.
Mixo (Myxomatosis) was introduced in the early 50s and when the rabbits built up a resistance to that, the Government research labs released the rabbit haemorraghic disease virus RHDV (also known as rabbit calicivirus) on the rabbit population in 1995.
As everyone knows Australians are the world record holders in screwing up when trying to control nature. No offence, but most initiatives taken in Australia have resulted in worse environmental hazards than the problem they were seeking to fix in the first place, which BTW, had been introduced by people to begin with...
Species were imported and introduced that had no business there in the first place, which just ended up unbalancing nature and others which were native were killed to extinction...
On one hand, maybe it is better to use them to produce energy, but, like someone said above, when you add in the costs of gas and keeping them frozen, is it worth it?
Can't we think of a better way to deal with the overpopulation besides killing them?
When we introduced Europeans to Australia it was a mistake - the country is far too good for them!
Funny... if we look at the situation from that perspective I suppose we could say that introducing humans on the planet was a mistake...
Mark the Texan and Askar
I think both of you have a point: animal populations control themselves based on food supply. When it dwindles, litters become smaller and smaller. Sweden is supplementing food for the Arctic Fox population to try to get their numbers up since the little rodents they eat in the region decline some years and thenso does the fox populaiton. However, for this rabbit problem to be controlled in this manner, it would require for them to eat almost the entire park first, then the lack of food would drive their numbers down eventually. I guess that saving the park is the main objective here.
I still think that using them would be better. If the pelts are not good enough for coats they could always make warm house slippers, or interior lining of snow boots. Who cares what the fur inside your boots looks like? The meat could be used for dog or cat food, if humans are afraid to eat it.
SO you love hockey....there are lots of rabits..... why not combine them and have a bash?
Corpses are unsuitable as burnable biomass. The energy required to evaporate the water in any Human/animal corpse and most plants (as long they are not yet dried as firewood is) far surpasses the energy gotten from burning the volatile elements of this biomass.
When a human body is cremated (where religion allows it) this energy is normally supplied as methane or oil. You cannot get energy out of this process, you have to put energy into to make it work.
In Waste to energy plants energy is derived from the burning of plastics and paper mainly, if biological waste is burned, it lowers the yield of the plant (witch is often used in older plants to cool the burning chamber, because the energy yield per volume of waste has skyrocketed in the last 30 jears because of the questionable success of plastic as disposable packaging. It's far better though to collect biomatter seperately and ferment it to produce biogas and new soil (as long we are speaking vegetables, rotting meat mainly produces toxic substances, thats why flesh is burned).
And since the hunted down bunnies are not from the woods but have dwelled in the city they might have eaten somehing toxic (as grass near a road) they cannot be eaten (which would be the best use of meat already produced) therefore they must rot somewhere (like six feet under) or be cremated.
You gain no energy from the cremation, it costs you energy, but you have to do it, since you cannot let the bunnies live, since they would eat the crops on the fields and die and rot on the streets in the winter. Better to cull and cremate them.
remember: the engineer is always right (italian proverb)
We may be headed that way here in the US. With "rationed" universal healthcare, the elderly, terminally ill, and others not "cost effective" to society will be killed and the bodies will start piling up. You could add all the murdered babies from partial-birth abortions. Through advances in technology, the corpses could be a great source of fuel for an energy starved nation. Or, as in Soylent Green, they could be turned into little green wafers for the rest of us to munch on. Heck, maybe they'll serve double duty, with certain "conditions" determining whether they're food or fuel. An added benefit will be "valuable" land not being wasted on any more cemeteries.
Shame on you!!!! You are a revolting backward country if you allow such horrible cruel acts of violence on innocent animals.
Perhaps I should suggest to the program makers that we could teach the children all about the importance of serious green issues by getting the teletubbies to club the rabbits to death and then throw them on a bonfire to keep warm, all on prime time TV!
To the serious side. We have existed with rabbits since the Roman army introduced them to the UK in th first century BC. Most people have tended to find that if you leave the wildlife alone that it quickly becomes a stable population, occaisonaly fluctuating due to changes in natural predation. Every time man takes a hand in the destiny of a species then nature will come straight back with a better solution to meet the specific problem at hand, hence super-bunnies in Australia.
What is so wrong with a natural population of very cute and harmless animals that require no maintenance. In fact the rabbits will reduce the cities use of petrochemicals by chomping the grass and other vegitation as oposed to using mowers, reducing the plants to valuable fertiliser in the process.
Wil you be burning Elk next? I believe they have a higher calorific content!