Crows of Karachi | Hacker News Reader

Crows of Karachi

orionmagazine.org

77 pointsrenameme17 comments

Really enjoyed reading this article.

> The wedding was held outside, the food prepared out in the open air as it always is. The crows sat on their electric poles overlooking the venue as preparations were made. If an opportunity presented itself, they did not hesitate: a piece of meat for a skewer, a half-chopped onion, old bits of lettuce and tomato, all went one by one to the crows who commanded the territory.

Aware developing countries have lower work safety standards but didnt realize food safety also missing. street vendor food is all outside, yes..but Pakistani weddings i think would not be street vendor but catering service. To learn food prepared outside in 40+ Celsius heat shocks me.

> Pakistani weddings i think would not be street vendor but catering service

Largely depends on how rich you are. Middle-class and above tend to hire a Wedding Marquee, which basically means a hall and catering service along with decoration shenanigans. So, largely, yeah, food is catered.

However, poorer folks will not be able to afford such a thing. Therefore, food is going to be cooked the traditional way. Now, since weddings tend to be fairly big, huge events with over 300/400 people at the minimum. This means that you need big pots and pans to cook lots of food. Kitchen ovens are often smaller sized and difficult to cook on, so specially made massive pots for cooking are used on wood fire outside where cooking is done.

Although, I will say, I've eaten at a fair few weddings, and actually aided the cooking effort in two or three, none would ever allow any bird or any other sort of animal near it, and hygiene was as high as it could be. Food ingredients are kept covered with some sort of netting/clean cloths while pots and pans are always covered with a lid. More so, meat and other perishables that might be affected by the heat are basically brought directly out of fridge and into pot.

Crows and other birds getting some food is only when leftovers are thrown to the side somewhere, so this, hopefully, isn't a common thing.

In my own experience, food cooked directly at the time of service is significantly safer in most LDCs than food pre-cooked and re-heated.

I agree random predation on dropped food by crows isn't western standard OH&S but in context, I think this isn't the primary risk: leaving rice to get cold and re-heating would be more of a headache, literally and figuratively (one of the strong indicators you've eaten "off" rice is a splitting headache)

Pakistan is not an LDC, but its in the house next door (without seeking to insult any Pakistani here)

beautifully written

seconded

Just put out some wasabi coated peanuts... and have a good laugh when you see them with their open beaks trying to relieve the spiciness and cool down their mouths :DDDD.

And... they come back for more. Maybe they enjoy the ride.

And for extra laughs you can just poison them.

Please don’t torment animals.

I agree with your reaction. But for thoroughness, I accidentally left out a few cups of salsa a few years ago, intended for compost and I forgot to come back to them for a while, which attracted crows. I felt really awful that I might have left them something which could make them sick. Gratefully it was highly unlikely, as other comments mention they don’t react to capsaicin the way we do.

They’re still interested in leftovers and and general perceived offerings, so don’t leave stuff that you’re not certain are harmless. But spicy-to-you probably isn’t actually a torment.

And crows are smart. They just flew high enough to drop the accidental offerings on the ground and lose interest.

Anyway definitely don’t poison animals, but it’s also good to know when or whether you’re actually taking that risk.

Poison birds that are neck deep in the trashcan fishing for leftover food?

Unless of course you blind them and stuff them with liquor, or keep them in bird cages unable to move. Then it's a-okay.

Just please keep torture away from human eyes so that we can gore on the output of animal cruelty, guilt-free.

I don't know about wasabi, but birds in general are completely immune to capsaicin, the substance that makes hot peppers hot. I grow a variety of hot peppers here in Brazil and the sabiá (a Brazilian songbird) particularly likes the pimenta malagueta, a little chili equivalent to the ones used in Thai food... I've seen a single bird consume like 50 of these small and very hot peppers in 10 minutes.

> little chili equivalent to the ones used in Thai food

Birds-eye chillies, you mean?

Bonnie's Plants and others sell them as "Thai Hot Chilies" the colloqueal name for this particular subspecies varies wildly by region. I've also seen "thai pepper". Generally referring to long thin, thin-walled peppers full of seeds. I've never (personally) seen "birds-eye chilie" used in the wild.

In Singapore and Malaysia, they’re called chilli padi

There's actually an interesting reason for this! Capsaicin evolved primarily* to keep mammals from eating pepper seeds, since mammalian digestive systems destroy the seeds, but birds' systems do not. Birds use a different protein complex for detecting heat than mammals, so capsaicin binds to the mammalian protein complex and activates it, but does not bind to the avian complex.

* excuse the short hand anthropomorphizing of evolution here - I know.

Good to know, thanks.

I thought about this too, but I never seen this reaction from them, so I thought, maybe it was all about the spicyness. Who knows, anyway, since they are not stupid, they won't come back for more if it was somehow detrimental for them.

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