Posted on 08/07/2002 1:07:50 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
SYDNEY (Reuters) - A fairytale goose may have laid a golden egg, but the tiny Australian town of Gunnedah hopes to make money from koala dung.
Gunnedah, self-styled "Koala Capital of the World," is packaging its bountiful koala droppings and selling them to tourists at A$1 (around 53 U.S. cents) a bag.
Tourism official Chris Frend said his little town in New South Wales state had begun packaging marsupial feces as "Koala Kitsch" six months ago.
"It's early days as far as marketing them is concerned and who knows, we might end up with gold ones, or something like that, as earrings or pendants," Frend told Reuters on Wednesday.
"The mind boggles as far as where we can go with it all."
The aim is to promote Gunnedah, about 480 km (300 miles) north of Sydney and with a population of 13,000, as a tourist destination because of its large, healthy koala population.
Hygiene is not a problem, Frend insisted.
"Well, they're in a plastic bag, a la natural," he said. "Obviously you don't encourage people to take them out of the bag or anything like that but they don't smell, they're just naturally dried."
The current main source of Koala Kitsch is a female marsupial who has taken up residence in a tree outside the tourist office.
Demand has not yet reached a point where officials have to put a bucket under the tree but, even if interest soared, it shouldn't cause too much of a problem.
"It's so renewable," Frend said.
But... I thought they all did that already??
Of course, Pat Buchanan will decry the importation of koala dung, saying it takes jobs away from Americans. /sarcasm
Willy, that is a stupid, asinine post against libertarians. Try to stick to issues, eh?
That's nothing. The NY Times has been selling manure for fifty cents a serving for years...
The Times is getting 75 cents for their excrement now.
Seems to me that the right to smoke koala dung is a libertarian issue, isn't it?
Afterall, it doesn't hurt anybody else.
In fact, it may prove to be less damageing to their brains than pot.
[Aside -- Every year in Palmer, AK, they have the Moose Dropping Festival, at which everyone gathers to display the latest moose nugget arts & crafts. A few years ago, some PETA-types heard about this Moose Dropping Festival and asked, "How high do you drop the moose from?" The organizers, thinking it was a crank call, laughed and said something like, "Oh, no more than 20, maybe 30 feet before they hit the net...." Much hilarity ensued....]
Willie, once again, why don't you stick to issues instead of making crap up?
So the quality of the excrement has gone down (or up, depending upon your point of view), and they charge more for it? For socialists, they shore do have some capitalist tendencies when it suits them...
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