How many people eat them though?
In the list of unclean animals “every kind of crow,” - what do you think? Were you wrong?
Examples of herbivores that can’t be eaten doesn’t prove that generally people should avoid eating carnivores.
About tools and diet - it was someone’s thoughts off the top of their head. There are dozens of other points but you seem to just to be picking the worst arguments where it would be more convincing if you attacked the stronger arguments.
Well… yeah, actually.
Of course, it’s best to eat non-contaminated meat, meat without parasites that comes from healthy animals, but if the meat is fresh/not decayed and the animal was free of parasites and/or communicable diseases… sure. Perfectly OK to eat raw chicken or pork.
Freakin’ safer than eating, say, raw tapioca. Consider that while raw meat won’t kill you eating raw tapioca or raw red kidney beans could kill you. Lots of plants contain natural toxins, some of which need processing to be safe to eat.
Consider that the major protein sources of vegans - things like legumes, seitan (wheat protein), and the like require considerable processing to be digestible and/or safe to eat. Legumes require cooking to be safe to eat, meat does not. Seitan requires processing grain into flour then further processing beyond that. An all-fruit diet does not contain sufficient protein - that might be one reason our ancestors and animal cousins like chimps eat meat at least occasionally.
So any argument that because meat requires cooking and/or tools or processing to eat (which, in fact, it doesn’t) we shouldn’t eat it would also be an argument against eating legumes, nuts, and most other sources of plant protein.
Which is precisely the point.
If you want people to respond to the arguments on some webpege that you link to but are too lazy to even present, you need to find another message board. Ain’t happening here. In fact i have a vague inkling it’s against the rules.
In this forum of this board, you will find that people address the arguments that you present.
And they are stupid arguments.
So you have nothing to present and can’t defend you own position.
Great debate. :rolleyes:
Not interested in reading some random link. Interested in debating actual person. Rapidly losing interets in debating someone who admits they can’t defend their won position
More than it is completely fine to eat raw lettuce, yes.
No food is ever completely safe, but statistically meat is safer to eat raw than vegetables. Some meats, such as chicken, are riskier than other foods, such as cow or shellfish. Just as some plants, such as lettuce or tomato, are much riskier than other foods, such as coconut.
Once again, you startiung your argument with absolutist statements that *all *meats have to be cooked and *no *plants need cooking, and then when presented with evidence, start arguing that some meats don’t need cookig and some plants do.
Mate, if you make the ridiculous claim that dogs have three legs, you are just weaseling if you then ask people who flatten the assertion if *all *dogs *always *have four legs. And when you make the ridiculous claim that meat needs to be cooked to be safe, you are just weaseling if you then ask people who flatten the assertion if *all *meat is *always *safe to eat raw.
You are weaseling and everyone can see it. I have no idea if weasel is safe to eat raw.
And I pointed out how asking such a question is special pleading.
Do you still beat your wife?
Ok, I’m done with this nonsense.
In their native Amazon? Quite a few. They’re supposed to be quite tasty. Since they’re a readily available fish the natives eat them frequently. Why wouldn’t they?
As I noted, given the number of plant foods that require cooking/processing/tools it’s a crap argument against meat-eating.
Blake:
“or crows are perfectly kosher.”
You wrote long posts but conveniently forgot about the above part…
Good because I find your posts quite frustrating.
[QUOTE=JohnBlake]
Actually the article you quoted
http://www.geek.com/news/geek-answer…-cant-1593883/
said: “A vulture, for instance, eats almost exclusively rotting or semi-rotting food, and as a result has a stomach tuned to sterilizing such hazardous materials. Few parasites can survive the acid bath of a scavenger’s stomach, and the same is true to a lesser extent about most carnivores”
[/QUOTE]
Vultures (and hyenas, and lycaons, and marabouts etc…) are specifically carrion-eaters. They never hunt or kill, but thrive on eating animals that other carnivores have killed before (and not fully eaten) or that have died of natural causes, which in the wilds typically means disease. In order to fill that specific niche, they have evolved in a specific direction, i.e. by having a digestive system and immune systems that can process rotting meat, or those bits of meat that predators don’t find palatable.
Predatory obligate carnivores have less robust systems, because the meat they’ll eat will have relatively fewer parasites and toxins. But they still fall prey to some parasites, like flukes and tapeworms, that an otherwise healthy herbivore can carry.
Omnivores have even less robust systems (in that specific direction), because that also allows them to process plants. It’s a matter of relative specialization. Both evolutionary strategies (super specialization vs. jack-of-all-foods) have their advantages and drawbacks.
Yesteryear Inuit people lived primarily on whale, fish, caribou, seal and birds - because as it happens there’s precious little in the way of fleshy fruit in the subarctic. They gathered a little (seaweed, some berries and tubers, one or two specific grasses), but 75%+ of their diet is/was animal fat. They weren’t super healthy, but they thrived just fine.
The reason humans have spread all over the world, from the tropics to the subarctic, is that we can make do with just about any diet, climate or terrain. We adapt and overcome.
First of all no it doesn’t, second of all so what if it did ?
Cows, sure. Well, the killing part at least - the eating part is fine if you don’t mind getting dirty.
Be easy to kill a dog, though, f’r’instance. And dogs are eaten in large swathes of the world. As are rodents, birds and poultry, sheep and goats, insects of all shapes and sizes, many many many species of fish, etc… All of which you can catch, kill and eat without any tools, if you really have to.
It’s just easier and more efficient with than without.
Yeah, you seem to be :). Well, allow me to elucidate then : no it doesn’t. Plenty of ethnic groups don’t wear shoes, they’re doing fine. Walker monkeys (like gorillas) seem to be doing a’ight, too.
Since the OP has indicated that he doesn’t wish to actually debate the topic…
Off to IMHO.
If the first cite for your argument is “veganforum.com,” then you’ve already lost. What the fuck else do you expect them to say.
The conundrum, as pointed out upthread, is that it’s natural for humans to be unnatural. Probably beginning with cooked food. Yes, even meat can be eaten raw, but there’s reason to believe that modern humans were able to evolve brains larger than our ancestors because of the increased nutrition released by cooking food; not just meat but tubers and other plants that when raw are nearly worthless nutritionally. We even have smaller weaker jaws than our evolutionary ancestors, almost certainly the result of eating softer (cooked) food.
So unless you define “herbivore” to include something that lives primarily off cooked grains, no we’re not.
If you haven’t bothered to read your own link, why should anyone else? You’ve been given plenty of evidence that humans are not meant to be herbivores, and to continue saying that the evidence given does not address the arguments in the link you haven’t read is, umm . . . disingenuous.
I came in to say this. Humans didn’t invent cooking, we evolved in an environment where cooked food already existed, and it’s likely that cooking was a prerequisite for our brains to be able to get as big as they are. I’m pretty sure meat is calorie-dense for the effort involved in getting it, making it a good choice for hunter-gatherers.
Also, humans have evolved a gene at least 4 times to be able to digest milk as adults, meaning we’re literally designed to drink cow milk. At least some of us are (sorry Asians)
I say this as a vegetarian. I think people should eat a lot less meat, but claims that we’re not designed to eat meat are just silly.
Meat “needs” to be cooked properly the same way you “need” to wear your seatbelt. It is not essential for everything to function properly, but it is a low cost way of removing a potential threat to your health, so it is wasteful not to use it.
I don’t know about the others, but that statement is not true for hyenas.
JohnClay’s bodybuilder diet thread followed the exact same pattern. He will start a discussion with absurdly biased cites that go against all accepted facts, and then when people point this out he will then find some outlier example online which he thinks negates overwhelming evidence in some weird form of GOTCHA!. It is almost like he wants others to argue with him.
He also doesn’t seem to be able to critically evaluate sources of info, like pointing out pictures of buff dudes on the website of a company selling a fad diet book as proof it works.
I’m not trying to attack him here, just giving a heads up. I think he often has an interesting discussion, but goes about it wrong.
You weren’t around for a thread he had on a magician’s act, where he could not accept that the only plant needed was the one who was “randomly” chosen to perform the actual trick. He seems fundamentally incapable of understanding that people will often lie or exaggerate in entertainment or advertising, or that the parsimonious solution is sometimes that the person making an unusual claim is, in fact, honestly mistaken.
Added: If it were not for the fact that he has been consistent in this regard for fourteen years here I would tend to doubt his sincerity.
The Master Speaks: Are humans meat eaters or vegetarians by nature?
[QUOTE=Cecil Adams]
There are some intelligent arguments for vegetarianism, but claiming that man is “naturally” herbivorous isn’t one of them. The settled judgment of science is that man is an omnivore, capable of eating both meat and vegetables
[/QUOTE]
I don’t get the eyes argument. You have forward facing eyes if you benefit more from stereoscopic vision than you would from wide field vision. Monkeys have forward facing eyes to help judge which branches to grab when cruising through the jungle canopy. Cats have forward facing eyes to judge how far they need to leap to catch a mouse. Chimpanzees use their forward facing eyes to both climb trees AND ruin the day for some red colobus monkey when they catch and eat it. Likewise, baboons will hunt and eat animals with their forward facing eyes that see the same color range as us. All it really says is that your lifestyle found stereoscopic vision useful enough that it became a trait.
As a biologist, I’ve seen this argument going around the internet for a while, and I can tell you that it inevitably relies on a bizarre twisting and misinterpretation of biological facts, if not outright lies. The biology is absolutely clear - we’re adapted for an omnivorous lifestyle. These people are like creationists, with cherry-picking and lies standard practice.
Which is weird to me, because who cares? You want to be vegan? Go ahead. No one’s stopping you. Why this insistence on “proving” that it’s “natural”? Which is a completely meaningless term anyway.
However, given that this is a JohnClay thread, there’s absolutely no point in getting into the details.
(wiki) Some animals, particularly ruminants and termites, can digest cellulose with the help of symbiotic micro-organisms that live in their guts, such as Trichonympha.
Even the Eskimo will eat some fruits and stomach contents. I cant think of any peoples that eat just meat and nothing but- some diets are pretty well 99% meat.
All in all, a excellent post.
For a certain definition of "creatures’. Some "vegan’ foods have B12 thru fermenting, and Blue-green algae and spirulina has some. But I dunno if you could call Blue-green algae and spirulina = “food”- they are only consumed as supplements.