ah...did you forget that I was the one that gave Reg the Theater 101 lesson a few years ago db? My intention was to get that reaction. I'm only sorry I missed the unedited version.

But as I suspected might happen, your emotions disallowed you to see my point and oddly you didn't see that I'm actually on your side.

A. "Tractors are more expensive than water buffalo" Not at all necessarily B. "They require gasoline" Or diesel, or ethanol, or even steam, but so does your Prius C. "they require spare parts" yes, but good maintenance helps D. "They're useless without B and C" True enough, but a dead animal is worthless too E. "Why don't you go harass a scared girl at an abortion clinic" lol, you also forgot that I am a pro choice moderate. F. "I apologize for my earlier response" You are certainly forgiven (shoulda let me read it first though)

Look, what the guy and his friends did was very noble, generous and respectable. Don't get wrong. And the video was extremely well done. But it reminded me of Sam Kinnison's old bit about film crews going out into Ethiopia and making those save the children commercials. And Sam say's you just know there's a film crew eating sandwiches off camera and the director is yelling "don't feed him yet!" His point was, why were these people in such a predicament in the first place? Did it not bother you that $250 was a years salary to these people when they live in the 3rd largest and certainly fastest growing economy on earth? What's really wrong with that picture? That's a failure of government, of culture or both.

Addressing the animal itself. While I understand that the Water Buffalo is a mainstay of chinese agriculture, you also have to remember that any animal requires good husbandry to be healthy and useful. I happen to own 5 draft horses and a mule, all of which require veterinary care, farrier work, room to move about and most importantly literally truckloads of feed and hay every year, not to mention a place to store it. That either has to be purchased or homegrown. You can trust me when I say that it isn't cheap either way.

That guy in the video probably got laughed at pretty good after he took the buffalo away for asking the question "how long would this last if butchered?" and the answer was 6 months. But he failed to understand the nature of the beast as it relates to that community. Those people don't have any way to preserve an animal of that size (1500lbs or so) and so the only option is to take it to market immediately upon butchering it to sell. Otherwise 99% of it went to waste. It was obviously going to be accepted only as a cultivator, because the Chinese much prefer pork to beef anyhow. So if they wanted to feed them, he should have bought hogs.

So my point, in the end, was don't address the symptom...address the cause.

And btw, I'm at the vanguard of trying to actually avoid a civil war in this country and neither party has a candidate capable of being particularly successful at assisting with that.