What would the legal status of a being from another world if they came to Earth. Could someone hunt and eat them?

Could be that they’d be the very definition of illegal aliens. Wouldn’t want to feast on the buggers though, they may have come from uranus! :¬(

The U.N. is considering draft protocols for first contact. No individual nation could legislate something like this and expect that other nations would allow the law to have relevance.

But regarding the obliteration – I think you’re missing the point. The alien’s people obliterate us because we killed one of them. Whether or not we thought it was or was not legal, or whether we were wrong or right about that doesn’t matter a lick.

It wouldn’t be a shame at all, because even if we’d end up sitting in some afterworld slapping our foreheads and crying “aww, it WAS legal to do that” – we couldn’t really turn back time and not be obliterated unless we, you know, also stopped the killing despite the fact it was legal.

What an unusual and interesting article.

…and more importantly, would they taste like chickenoids?

These are not the chickenoids that you are looking for…

How do we know this hasn’t happened already? Maybe some crazy alien animal lands here, some hunter is out one day in some backwoods part of the world and thinks the alien looks a lot like a local animal. Bam! There’s supper, alien kebabs.

I imagine that some roadkill might resemble an alien…

We can’t eat beings who are capable of building spaceships.