h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

he was farming beaver so they would be cheaper than importing beaver pelts from canada and the US, possibly avoiding yankee anti british beaver tax

Beaver pelts. -5


"Turmoil has engulfed the
Galactic Republic. The taxation
of trade routes to outlying star
systems is in dispute."


That should be a klaxonable as a crime against cinema, and if you see George Lucas you can tell him I said so.

if in doubt fall back to monty python and re group

he wanted to produce venezuallan beaver cheese!!!!

SHUT UP THAT BLOODY BAZOOKY!!!!!

venezuallan beaver cheese

Well these were pedigree scottish beavers and no, but I'll give you a DGI +1 for you may yet discern his true motive.

Put it another way.... he was doing this for and on behalf of a group calling themselves The Acclimatisation Society - what do you think is their stated aim and purpose and how does it connect to his Lordship's proclivity for Scottish beaver?

Was the Acclimatisation Soc. to do with readying people to go to Canada? A lot of the early Hudson Bay Co. people were Scottish because they were the nearest thing the Empire had to people who were used to the cold.

He used the Beaver to cut down all the trees to create a highly lucrative Grouse Moor!


GT

Managed migration.

This wasn't about money but philanthropy (of a kind)

Who tripped?

Me or hd???


GT

Right, might as well go for the hat-trick. Introducing (or re-introducing) animals to Scotland for alternative food sources. For when they ran out of sheep cheese.

It was Hd, but they redeem themselves. Acclimatisation Societys in general were responsible for moving animals across the empire often without fear or thought of the repercussions (rabbits in Austraila, most of the non-indigenous life on New Zealand etc) but the one to which Lord Bute belonged was dedicated to the pursuit of new sources of food.

I'll explain more in the write up.


+3

Well done.

Bugger it!

He turned the island to a grouse moor.

Grouse, Pheasant and Partridge are silent on the ground.......

Somewhat like Skylark!!!


GT

I was sure that was going to be another klaxon. Anyone (apart from Clive) got any ideas what the title means, coz I haven't?

Francis Trevelyan Buckland. Writer, nautralist and experimental zoophage. (1826 - 1888)

In 1860, Buckland was visted by Ms Priestly of World Magazine as part of a series called "celebrities at home"

After describing the monkeys, jaguar, jackass, tame mice, cats and the parrot that kept shouting for cabs from the window, Mrs Priestly turned her attention to the kitchen:


"Quaint and original must be many of the dishes which issue from Mr Buckland's kitchen. The long-suffering cook. were she free to speak, might tell of strange tales of young crocodiles boiled down for stock, of food misapplied, and of diets given to the wrong animals."

What Ms Priestly is alluding to is a branch of zoological research that Buckland pioneered and contributed his most original research towards - namely the gastronomy of the subject.

As a boy he had experimented with squirrel pie, mice cooked in butter, hedgehogs, fogs and garden snails. At Oxford, he feasted on a panther sent to him from the Surrey Zoological Gardens. "It had been buried for two days, but I got them to dig it up. It was not very good."

Mr Barlett of London Zoo supplied him with many delicacies: elephant trunk, which he made into soup ("rubbery"), Rhinoceros which he baked into a huge pie ("like very tough beef") porpoise which tasted like "broiled lamb wick" and Giraffe - which ahd been cooked on the hoof, the result of a fire in the Giraffe Enclosure.

Buckland's attempts to institutionalise Zoophagy began with the celebrated Eland Dinner, held in 1859 in the London Tavern. ON this occasion the countries most celebrated naturalists (including Richard Owen - who built the Natural History Museum) assembled to decide whether or not Eland (A Savannah Antelope) should be introduces to the national diet.

In 1860, Buckland initiated The Acclimatisation Society to further the search for new food with the Marquess of Breadalbane as President.
The Society flourished and produced annual reports for a decade. Lord Breadalbane raised Yak and American Bison on his Taymouth estate; Lord Bute stocked his Scottish islands with Beavers and thereby killed and the nearby trees for miles around. Buckland urged anyone who would listen to turn over their parks and gardens to Kangaroos.

The Grandmother of the famous naturalist John Napier, as a girl, had visited Buckland's residence; descending a staircase in the dark, she tripped over something large and soft and fell down several flights. It turned out to be a dead Hippopotamus. Frank Buckland himself picked her up to her feet and scaled the young girl for her carelessness.

"Hippopotamuses don't grow on trees you know!"

© William Donaldson. (fair use citation)
------------------------

Too far back on the beef - I originally was going to call this thread "Hight on the Hog" - a phrase intended to convey the living the high life of the rich and well-off: a diet of the finest cut of meat. To get across the culinary theme that was, in fact, the subject of this QI.

The phrase is actually very young, 20th century is the earliest trace of it being written down.

So thinking that might be a little too obvious, I did some digging and in turned out "Too far back on the beef" was a common variant of the same idea from the same period, that has dropped from popular usage but it's meaning is the same. To live too far back on the beef is to dine regularly on the t-bone, porterhouse and flanks of the animal for the corresponding cost of doing so.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/high-on-the-hog.html

So that was Charles Buckland -a man ruled by his stomach - by contrast the Marquis was all heart, speaking of which - for points - where is that now?

Great one Clive. I really thought it was going to be about some mad animal collector. Which I guess it was, kind of. My suggestion of food was inspired by your use of the word 'philanthropy'. I was thinking in terms of re-introducing animals to the wild, and you brought me up short. In what way, especially to a Victorian, would that be 'philanthropic' - for the good of man - and I made the leap to providing food.

But where is the Marquis of Bute's heart?. I'm tempted to say inside the descendants of all the Acclimitisation Society people that it was fed to. Instead I'll go for the fact that Taff provided early on, and say "in Cardiff".

And you know what they say about temptation.

Charles Buckland ate it.

Not in Cardiff.

wasn't expecting that one.

I don't actually know anything about the Marquis of Bute, but isn't it weird, by today's standards, that people would happily have various bits of their body shuffled off all over the place after they died. Nowadays we expect them to all end up in roughly the same place, but up until fairly recently, you'd happily have your heart in Poet's Corner, your skull lodged in St Bart's, and your liver propping up the wobbly table in the Dragon and Horses.

St Barts

...or that one.



'tis a very ancient practice apparently to disinter one's organ for special treatment.

I've been cruel enough (honestly I only have 4 klaxons for this bit, you've mentioned two in succession!) so I'll give thee a helpful hint, there's a strong religious motivation, though I myself don't see the connection.