- Do they chew their cud?
B. Do they have cloven hoofs?
From the wiki page on alpacas: “Alpacas are pseudoruminants and, like other camelids, have a three-chambered stomach; combined with chewing cud, this three-chambered system allows maximum extraction of nutrients from low-quality forages.”
From the wiki page on camelids linked from the alpaca page: “They do not have hooves, rather they have two-toed feet with toenails and soft foot pads.”
1.- Yes, they’re ruminants.
2.- They’re artiodactyls. Whether that counts as “having hooves” or not apparently depends on language, in Spanish they’re considered as having a pair of hooves (not a hoof with a “slit”). It’s the same arrangement as for pigs.
All camelids fall in both categories.
You know, I’m reasonably sure we got “artiodactyl” sometime in my Bio Sciences classes, but I sure didn’t remember it.
Rats! :mad:
Thanks anyway, Pasta.
Did you have a potion you wanted to cook up, but alpaca blood isn’t going to work because of their foot type?
I’m going to guess that he’s a Jew in South America, who wants to try out a local dish.
Ah, of course. I’m not too quick on the draw with my kashrut.
ETA: …which is to say, I was wholly ignorant of the fact that the restriction on pork was actually a more general prohibition defined in this way.
Well, someone over on FB posted a photo of 3 very young alpaca with a caption saying the internet was getting overloaded with kittens, so here are some alpacas. And frankly, they look so cute you could just eat them up.
So…
I was just wondering if they were kosher. It turns out that a quick and dirty method to tell if a land animal is kosher is to look for horns. If it’s kosher, it has 2 horns coming out of it’s head. Besides the cud and the cloven hoof part, that is. Rhinos don’t count, their horns come out of their face, not their head.
I don’t think it’s that pork is more repellent than anything else on the land animal forbidden list as much as it’s the most popular critter on the tref list that is commonly eaten. On the other hand, it’s forbidden to touch pig skin, so that might be moreso than other tref animals. I mean, we can still ride horses and pet dogs and cats, we just can’t eat them.
You know, this admonition against touching pig skin could explain why you see so few Jewish quarterbacks, centers, running backs, or receivers in the NCAA or pros. :rolleyes:
At leas you didn’t pose the question on a Friday night.
Hey… Don’t we have a rule on this site about alpaca pics? 
Ok now I have to ask, are rhinos kosher?
Maybe. They have hooves, but they’re three-toed. I think the “cloven hoof” prohibition is a reference to even-toed ungulates like pigs and camels (but I am not Jewish and certainly not an expert on Talmudic law, and maybe G_d uses a different system of taxonomy.)
Rhinos are not kosher. They do not have cloven hooves, and they don’t chew their cud.
The only mammals that are kosher are ruminant artiodactyls. This might include camelids, however the ancient Israelites weren’t scientific taxonomists, and declared that camels did not have cloven hooves.
Obviously they didn’t take a close look at a camel’s toe.
Strangely enough, a Google image search on “camel toe” does not show a single photo of an actual camel’s toe.
A camel’s foot is divided, but the hooves themselves don’t touch one another. In a cloven hoof, the hoof itself appears to be split.
Rhinos don’t have horns at all, it either a bad hair life, or a horrible manicure
(BTW, this was intended as a joke. There are other components to the Rhino protuberance that aren’t found in human hair or nails.)
But are they good to eat? Are they kosher?