Reptile & Amphibian Forums

i ws just watching living with the kombai,a show about two brits who go to papua new gifwe and live wit a tribe.well they wen on a hunt for a pig but found a croc monitor instead.they shot this thing with three arrows,cut the tree down and squashed the head with bare hands while it squirmed.it seems surprising to me how doffrent things are viewed in diff places.i kinda felt like they were wasting somthing even thoug they ate it.thoughts o this or did you see this too

Havent seen the show. But in many of the countries monitors come from they are either considered food, bad luck, a nuisance, or evil by superstitious people.
They have different methods of dispatching food animals that dont always agree with western people. To them they are not being cruel, they are doing things the way they have for thousands of years. Consider that in their home countries the lizards we may think are a bit rare are most probably very commonly available.
Im sure they made use of ever single bit of that lizard among the local people.
Survival training, monitors can be very dangerous, therefore use a spear with a sharpened point to help stop the creature, then quickly dispatch it by smashing its head on a solid object. Monitors have very very strong necks with thick bones, its difficult to break their necks. Snakes are killed to be eaten in somewhat the same way, if you cannot spare a machete to remove the head quicker, smash the head, then cut a few inches of neck off with the head in the case of venomous species.
If I wasnt in need for food I would avoid snakes and monitors as food, but snakes are very good to eat if commonly available, the same with crocodilians, and turtle/torts.
To me they are too much like pets now.

what do you mean too much like pets ''now'',did you eat them before.im not against it in any way if they eat it its just the value to me is as a pet but its food to them.i just found it weird(the diffrence between cultures).

Ive eaten other lizards, not monitors in particular. I couldnt think of them as food unless I really needed to now, but then again Ive kept them as pets for over 16 years.
Snake is very good, I used to have a snake skin collection years ago from various places Ive captured, skinned, and eaten them. Most of them were stolen during a break-in at the baracks, all venomous.
Turtle is great in a soup, very sweet meat.
What I referred towas to say that a wild monitor in my mind would seem too much "like" a pet and would be more difficult to capture for food.

The kombai are, to be polite, very rudimentary in their lifestyle. They survive on what they can garnish from the land, and they arent terribly efficient in garnishing things from that land - they are very much a subsistence people.

While it would be nice to think that they used every part of the animal, that may not be the case. What is the case, however, is that the lizard was FOOD - meat, no less. Protein rich foods to peoples like the kombai can be very hard to come by - pigs are a main form of currency between tribes - and are greatly appreciated. Its the reality of the third world - when youre starving, you dont much care what you eat (let alone how it was killed).

BTW - I saw that episode and, if you look close, you can see the monstrous freakin teeth that croc monitor was packin. Cant say I wasnt hoping the monitor would give em a taste of their own medicine...