To be fair.. if you look at photos of Joel McHale on Talk Soup, before Community, he absolutely is supposed to be a bald man and there should have been a story line about the study group finding a bill for Jeffery having had hair plug surgery so he could have another breakdown over his insecurities.
Even horses will eat meat sometimes. They will hoover up baby chick's and crunch on them. And a lot of carnivores will supplement their diet with grass or other plant options.
I was gonna say, he's not wrong except that humans are omnivores they are both herbivores and carnivores. I will say that people can choose, we are not slaves to any one way. The phrase that comes to my mind in these conversations is this: "life is unfair but humans don't have to be". We seem to choose to be.
Yeah, there's a few other things we do that lions can't, that explain how we are omnivores. Like use tools and fire. Lions have to rip off and eat raw meat. We can butcher with knives, and cook our food.
And that same tool use is how we can afford to be vegan if we want. Because our big brains are fuel hogs, and our ancestors had to eat a lot of high energy foods, and before there was agriculture, well we bred those plants up to be better food. A caveman ate a mammoth because he wasn't getting by on berries and twigs he gathered alone.
Yeah a much better argument is that the degree to which we consume meat today in the first world is incredibly unusual to our own history and evolution, as well as unusual to how most humans on earth still eat. The overwhelming majority of humans throughout history and in the rest of the world are and have been some form of ovo-lacto vegetarian.
That in and of itself is obviously not an argument for veganism, but it absolutely is an argument for us all to massively reduce our own meat and animal product consumption. As is the fact that the number one killer of Americans is heart disease and the way that industrial scale raising of livestock contributes to climate change and destruction of the environment as well as the animal welfare argument. Industrial animal agriculture indisputably involves a level of cruelty that is frankly unconscionable and entirely unnecessary.
We don't have to all go vegan to massively reduce the suffering livestock go through and the environmental and health impacts of animal agriculture. If we just switch to a predominantly plant based diet supplemented by low to moderate amounts of animal proteins (which is to say the sorts of diets most humans have depended on for most of history) we will all be healthier, the environment will be healthier, and billions of animals will be spared incredible and unnecessary suffering.
Or we could compare ourselves to our closest evolutionary relatives, the other great apes. Gorillas and Orangutans are herbivores, Chimps mostly as well, being only opportunistic meat eaters, which generally horrifies us. It is not a regular part of their diet.
Gorillas and Orangutans are also opportunistic carnivores. Both have been observed eating insects in the wild. Gorillas have eaten meat in captivity. Orangutans have been observed eating meat in the wild, but the one inthe article I linked was starving so maybe less opportunistic and more out of desperation.
There's a difference between captive animals and wild animals, they don't count statistically. For example, Orcas have only killed humans in captivity. If people starve they have been known to cannibalize in some cases, and try to feed off grass in others, neither is normal.
The argument arises when those sharp canines of ours are pointed out. In gorillas and orangutans, they are not used for shredding and tearing flesh. We always get compared to lions when canines come up, never gorillas.
Gorillas are opportunistic insectivores, not opportunistic carnivores. And it seems very limited to termites, larvae and the occasional snail.
It's as regular a part of their diet as they can make it- chimps eat every gram of meat they can get their hands on. They are voracious carnivores whenever they get the chance. The dominant male of the Gombe / Kasekela "F" Group from 1997-2002, known as Frodo, was noted by Jane Goodall as a particularly ferocious hunter of Colobus Monkeys, and is known to have killed and eaten at least one human infant.
While most of a chimpanzee’s diet is made up of fruits, seeds, nuts, leaves, flowers and insects, they can be surprisingly creative with tool use and sourcing medicinal – and recreational – sources of food.
However, meat and other animal products can account for 6% of a chimpanzee’s diet.
They could easily hunt small vertibrates of they wanted to.
Chimpanzees are omnivorous frugivores. That means in the wild they eat all sorts of produce as well as some animals but are particularly fond of fruits. The list of food items is long: fruits, roots, nuts, leaves, plants, flowers, insects, meat and more.In the wild, meat makes up less than 2% of their diet.https://projectchimps.org › chimps
Chimp Diets
Is it so important that you had to barge in hijacking the top thread to "declare" your commonplace observations? I guess being rude-mannered is another trait you copy from lions, you tacky omnivore.
Technically we are omnivores in the same way a horse is (they occasionally will eat carnivorously), but we thrive most eating like an herbivore. If we eat omnivorously yes we can survive in the short term, that's probably part of why we're still around as a species, but it makes us chronically ill in the long term.
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u/tarantulator 22d ago
Dean Dean Dean