Rejectgrungerocker, I’m not going to argue with you about whether it’s a good idea to be a vegetarian – there are lots of very good reasons for being one. But your ignorance is beginning to get on my nerves. You do your cause no good at all by talking pseudo-scientific nonsense.
We and our ancestors have certainly evolved as omnivores. Our remote ancestors were insect-eaters; apes are to some extent fruit-eaters, but they supplement their diet with lots of other things, including meat when they can get it. Our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, hunt monkeys and eat them with great pleasure and without being harmed by it. They don’t have fangs and claws either; they tear their prey to pieces. Not pretty, but true.
We have almost certainly eaten meat when we could get it for millions of years (not the hundreds you talk about – what on earth do you mean?). There is plenty of archaeological evidence for hunting and meat-eating going back to when we first started to evolve into human beings. Hunter-gatherers, who live as close to a natural life as is possible today, all eat and prize meat. You make a lot of the fact that we can’t kill and eat a cow with our bare hands, but there is plenty of easier meat available that our ancestors would have eaten – small mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, molluscs, all sorts of creepy-crawlies. We only started hunting big animals when we developed tools, but that’s hundreds of thousands of years ago. And before that we ate the prey that the big carnivores had caught, after chasing them away from their prey. Ever heard of the Lascaux cave paintings? 25,000 years old, and full of hunting scenes.
And human canines are not for eating meat! We only have four in our mouth.
Yes, we only have four. So have lions, tigers and cheetahs; cats and dogs – how many did you think they had? Our teeth are quite unlike those of a cow, for instance.
Meat is bad for the human body. It's gives us so much cholesterol and fat.
Only if we eat very fatty meats, the kind of meat that we have developed for flavour rather than health. Game has little cholesterol or fat. And cholesterol is not bad for us; it’s saturated fat that is, and you find that in vegetable fat as well – in chocolate, in palmkernel oil, in coconut oil. All eaten by vegetarians. Even worse for us is trans fat, found in plant-based margarine.
the colon is the large intestine, the one that comes first during digesting.
No. The order is this: mouth, oesophagus, stomach, duodenum, small intestine (the really long one), colon, rectum, anus. So one of the last. And as Snowfall says, no real digestion takes place there. By the time food reaches it, it’s been digested and only waste products are left, apart from water and salts which are absorbed there.
Carnivores, and even real omnivores all have much shorter intestines to better digest rapidly decaying meat
No – in fact, the contrary is the case. They have short intestines, and the result is they are poor at digesting anything, including meat. Their digestive system is very inefficient, wasting a lot. The reason they have short intestines is to save weight, bulk, so they can hunt more efficiently. And compared with herbivores we have rather short, uncomplicated systems. Plant food is less digestible than meat. Plant cells have walls unlike animal cells, making them harder to digest.
Finally, I trust you realise that unless you are a vegan, you are still complicit in the killing of animals. Milk and egg production has male animals as byproduct. They are reared and killed for meat. They are also the industries that cause the greatest cruelty to animals; far worse than killing and eating them.
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Dragon_Kisses
18 years ago
Now who's preaching, eh? I'm not ignorant. I just see things from a perspective that most materialistic humans overlook. Meat is bad for us. End of story.
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pegmeg
18 years ago
In your opinion ... i agree with pfne10838. If you are a vegetaran/vegan fine. But dont try to say others are wrong for not being one.
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pfne10838
18 years ago
Rejectgrungerocker,
Now who's preaching, eh?
When have I accused you of preaching? And since when has correcting factual errors constituted preaching?
For heaven’s sake, go and get yourself some good books. Anthropology, biology, nutrition are all subjects you need to learn much more about. Read them; then come back in a couple of years when you have grown up a bit and learnt to argue on the basis of fact rather than personal prejudice and wishful thinking, as revealed in your last sentences.
To get you started, I’ve found a couple of very good web sites. The first is a paper by Dr. Craig B. Stanford, Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California entitled The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees. He has studied chimpanzees in the wild, with a view to deducing what early hominids (our ancestors) might have eaten in the way of meat. I quote a few passages from it, but you should read it all:
At Gombe, we now know that chimpanzees may kill and eat more than 150 small and medium sized animals such as monkeys, wild pigs and small antelopes each year.
William McGrew (1992) has shown that those female Gombe chimps who receive generous shares of meat after a kill have more surviving offspring, indicating a reproductive benefit tied to meat-eating.
One of the most important and intriguing questions in human evolution is when meat became an important part of the diet of our ancestors…. The presence of primitive stone tools in the fossil record tells us that 2.5 million years ago early hominids were using stone implements to cut the flesh off the bones of large animals that they had either hunted or whose carcasses they had scavenged.
In spite of lacking the large canine teeth and tree-climbing adaptations that chimpanzees possess, early hominids probably ate a large number of small and medium sized animals, including monkeys. Large canine teeth are not necessarily important for carnivory; chimpanzees do not use their canine teeth to capture adult colobus; rather, they grab the prey and flail it to death on the ground or against a tree limb.
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~stanford/chimphunt.html
Next a page from The Vegetarian Resource Group, entitled Humans are Omnivores, adapted from a talk by John McArdle, Ph.D., who is a vegetarian and currently scientific advisor to The American Anti-Vivisection Society. He is an anatomist and a primatologist. A few selected passages – there’s plenty more you should read.
There are a number of popular myths about vegetarianism that have no scientific basis in fact. One of these myths is that man is naturally a vegetarian because our bodies resemble plant eaters, not carnivores. In fact we are omnivores
Our closest relatives among the apes are the chimpanzees (i.e., anatomically, behaviorally, genetically, and evolutionarily), who frequently kill and eat other mammals (including other primates).
The short canines in humans are a functional consequence of the enlarged cranium and associated reduction of the size of the jaws. In primates, canines function as both defense weapons and visual threat devices. Interestingly, the primates with the largest canines (gorillas and gelada baboons) both have basically vegetarian diets.
Conclusion
Humans are classic examples of omnivores in all relevant anatomical traits. There is no basis in anatomy or physiology for the assumption that humans are pre-adapted to the vegetarian diet. For that reason, the best arguments in support of a meat-free diet remain ecological, ethical, and health concerns.
http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/omni.htm
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TaintedTruth
18 years ago
"Yes, we only have four. So have lions, tigers and cheetahs; cats and dogs – how many did you think they had? Our teeth are quite unlike those of a cow, for instance"
We do not have the correct teeth to eat an animal raw at all. Our so called "canine" teeth are actually used to rip things like leafs, spinach etc..not for meat. Have you ever seen how huge those lions teeth are? Now those are for tearing through bloody skin, organs, and flesh. Chimpanzee don't eat animlas on a daily basis, they have a "vegetarian" diet, and sometimes they eat meat by acident, and after they thow up. Also when you add season to meat, your just tasting the season. The added ingredeints are spices, and veggies. So there your not really tasting the meat your tasting the added spices and veggies. Look at these pics of real carnivores:
http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k188/xxVeganForLifexx/PROOF/untitled.jpg
http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k188/xxVeganForLifexx/PROOF/gg.jpg
And a picture of an omnivore, chimps have bigger fangs than humans, that's why their real omnivores:
http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k188/xxVeganForLifexx/PROOF/yy.jpg
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Jillywinkles
18 years ago
First you say "Chimpanzee don't eat animlas on a daily basis, they have a "vegetarian" diet, and sometimes they eat meat by acident, and after they thow up." (which isn't true)
Then you post a picture and say they are real omnivores.
"We do not have the correct teeth to eat an animal raw at all. Our so called "canine" teeth are actually used to rip things like leafs, spinach etc..not for meat."
What's the difference, raw or cooked? It's still meat. We are capable of eating raw meat (ever heard of sushi?), but we cook most meats to get rid of the harmful bacteria. I would totally eat raw meat if there was no risk.
Chimps and apes have bigger canines then we do because they needed to defend themselves. We evolved to have smaller canines when we started getting along socially.
"Also when you add season to meat, your just tasting the season. The added ingredeints are spices, and veggies. So there your not really tasting the meat your tasting the added spices and veggies."
How long has it been since you ate meat? I know that I don't taste just the seasoning when I eat meat. Also, most seasonings are some form of salt, which is not a vegetable at all.
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pfne10838
18 years ago
Twistedlivingdeadgirl,
First of all, you too should read my post above to Rejectgrungerocker, and have a look at the web pages I refer to.
Apart from that, I would suggest you read my first post again and try to take in what I’m saying, rather than what you assume I’m saying. What you say in your post has virtually no relevance to anything I’ve said, apart from your (erroneous) statement about chimpanzees and meat eating.
What you say about canine teeth is largely irrelevant, not only to what I have said, but to the whole question of meat eating. No one has argued that humans are carnivores; we lack one of the true distinguishing features of carnivores, which contrary to what you assume is not canines of any size (practically all mammals have canines, even cows), but carnassial teeth. We are omnivores.
From Wikipedia:
It is a common fallacy to describe canine teeth as being the hallmark of a carnivorous diet - the teeth associated with carnivory are the carnassial teeth. Carnassials are large teeth found in carnivorous mammals, designed for shearing flesh and bone in a scissor-like way. In the Carnivora, the carnassials are the modified last upper premolar and the first lower molar. Carnassials are the defining characteristic of the Carnivora order; that is, they are the one thing that all of the animals within the order have in common.
I don’t suppose you’ve ever tried raw meat. It may surprise you to hear, but it can in fact be softer and easier to chew than most cooked meat. I know – I have tried it when I was younger. It is sweet, soft and rather bland in flavour. Cooking, especially roasting and grilling, hardens and toughens meat, just as an egg gets hard when you boil it. Our teeth are eminently adapted to eating raw meat. Your trouble is, you seem incapable of thinking of anything other than the big food animals we eat now. You should think in terms of small ones. To take one example: how difficult do you think our ancestors would have found it to climb a tree and rob a nest of unfledged small birds? You’d pop them whole in your mouth and crunch them up. That too is meat. So are a lot of other things: fish, worms, maggots, snails, all of which are or have been eaten by humans.
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Semi-Mental
15 years ago
Actually you're wrong. Just wrong. I used to be a vegetarian but I never preached ignorance like you do. Chimpanzees don't throw up after eating meat, I don't know where you go that from. Chimpanzees actually go on hunts occasionally.
Also compare the teeth of a herbivore compared to our teeth, our teeth are omnivorous. Funny that cows/horses/giraffes etc. have no canine teeth because they don't eat meat. Even our molars are a slightly different shape for chomping meat AND vegetables/fruits than the molar of a cow. Canines serve no purpose for ripping leafs...I don't even know WHY you would think that. Also lions are NOT human and don't share anything like the same diet as a human. Their canines are also partially there to stab into the windpipe of prey and also to grip onto them during the chase.
I appreciate your choice to be vegetarian, however you need to also appreciate that other people eat meat. And don't be ignorant and stupid because you seem to know nothing about human physiology except what you've read on vegetarian websites. Do abitta research then come back and argue.
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amuser
15 years ago
Finally -- someone who is actually using factual knowledge rather than unending, condescending bias.
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