THE YEAR WAS 2003, and Mark Siddall was in South Africa a-hunting the elusive hippo butt leech. This was a good place to look, after all, on account of all the hippos, and on account of all those hippos having rectums—the flesh this particular leech, Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi, fancies. Happily, a local game officer had gotten wind of the American’s quest, and was more than willing to help.
“He knew that these crazy Americans were in the area trying to get a hippo ass leech,” says Siddall, the curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History. “And they had to cull [a hippo] because it was hanging out in a community of people. So he had the presence of mind to cut its butt out.”
Related:
This pallet of delicious pork rectums was spotted outside of a dumpling shop in Taipei, Taiwan. Please note that it is a product of the great republic. Despite complaints to the contary, American workers can still produce goods sought across world.
It appears that pork rectums must be properly deboned and inverted before they become sellable. These can be
made into dumplings.
Much more on inverted pork rectums (recta?) at
Neatorama, including the mathematics of how many of them would fit into a box/pallet. Short version: "That gives a grand total of between 560,000 to 610,000 rectums per year sailing across the high seas on their way to Korea."
