I mean the real reason it didn't pan out was the same group physchology behind all fads - were fidget spinners fun to play with? Sure, but nowhere near enough to justify 40 billion of them being made in 18 months. And the manufacturers who hopped on last didn't do real great I'm thinking.

The meat was all right, and there's a limited market for feathers and leather. If you can find it, and if you can find a butcher who will process them.

But it was, and is, a tiny market. Americans were in no way ready to drop beef for emu. It's hard to market lamb and goat, let alone ostrich.

The ostrich/emu and alpaca fads are very similar because neither is really about harvesting anything but instead about breeding to satisfy growing demand. Which makes it a bubble, a fad, a craze, like Dutch Tulip Mania hundreds of years ago.

Most of the people raising them never wanted to kill them, they were hobby farmers and these were their cute pets. But they thought they could make big bucks setting everyone else up to grow cute pets too.

And that inherently has an end to its profitability.