Why Don't We Eat Carnivores?
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Humans eat a lot of different animals, but almost none of them are carnivores - why?
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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Biomagnification: the process by which substances (usually harmful ones) in the natural environment gradually increase in concentration along the food chain
- Trophic level: A level or position in a food chain, a food web, or an ecological pyramid.
- Herbivore: an organism that mostly feeds on plants
- Omnivore: an organism that feeds on plants and animals
- Carnivore: an organism that eats exclusively - or almost exclusively - animals.
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REFERENCES
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Han BA, Kramer AM, Drake JM. Global Patterns of Zoonotic Disease in Mammals. Trends Parasitol. 2016 Jul;32(7):565-577. doi: 10.1016/j.pt.2016.04.00
Leroy F, Smith NW, Adesogan AT, Beal T, Iannotti L, Moughan PJ, Mann N. The role of meat in the human diet: evolutionary aspects and nutritional value. Anim Front. 2023 Apr 15;13(2):11-18. doi: 10.1093/af/vfac093
Kim SW, Han SJ, Kim Y, Jun JW, Giri SS, Chi C, et al. (2019) Heavy metal accumulation in and food safety of shark meat from Jeju island, Republic of Korea. PLoS ONE 14(3): e0212410. doi: /10.1371/journal.pone.0212410
Koster JM, Hodgen JJ, Venegas MD et al. (2010) Is Meat Flavor a Factor in Hunters’ Prey Choice Decisions?. Hum Nat 21, 219-242. doi: 10.1007/s12110-010-9093-1 - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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I have a question for the team, did you use a text to speech gpt to do the ad read at the end ? It sounds different from the rest of the video?
@@GamerDuDimanche1456 hi! editor here. no AI was used - all Kate as always, just a different take edited differently than the main portion. Apologies for the uncanniness in the transition :)
Watch ordinary sausage too if you wanna see more
I've read that early American settlers would eat anything they could hunt. (The flavor varied greatly.) It's likely that most people living in wilderness areas throughout history did the same. But once most of the carnivores have been hunted, all that's left are the herbivores. (And with no predators, their population increases.) It's much easier to domesticate herbivores.
Now why not just eat the plants instead? The reason is that most livestock eat plants that humans can't eat.
3:53 - I would like to see a video on us eating the plants directly. That would be wonderful.
CGP Grey summarized it best: "Ten pounds of grass make a pound of cow, and ten pounds of cow make a pound of tiger. But cow and tiger have the same amount of calories, so you might as well just eat the cow."
Might as well eat dirt 🗣️🗣️🔥🔥🥶🥶🤢🤢
But Kate also made a good point--if humans just ate the grass (really grain/corn), it'd be even more efficient!
@@NickWrightDataYT good thing we are now cows
Hence why veganism would cost less if it weren't for the subsidies provided to the meat industry
And having 1/10 as much farmland would mean 1/10 as much chemical runoff, also fixing the problem of the Dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
@@NickWrightDataYTthe logic of veganism ...
We already use soy to grow cattles so why not eat soy ?
I could think of many things:
- their diet is too expensive
- you cannot herd them
- they might attack you
- they are probably territorial, no chance of having lots of them in a small area
❌ WRONG❌WRONG❌WRONG❌
People eat what easy to hunt & control🤷♀️ We would have eat each other if it easy to hunt humans, control them & eat them🤏
@@duran9664 they literally just said that they're not easy to hunt or control so how is it wrong
@@AiNaKait's a bot dawg
@@harthroth it does seem to be a bot, but it's a bit weird how its comment is tailored to the video
@harthroth Maybe not, it's related to the vid... probably just a person?
"We don't eat carnivores" *looks at my bowl of alligator gumbo*
It's probably more efficient to eat alligator compared to other carnivores because unlike warm blooded animals that turn only 10 percent of food into mass and the rest into heat and energy the alligator turns about 70 percent into mass and relays on the sun for heat
We are not in China
@@ahassan5 its also a delicacy in Australia i believe. They say it tastes like chicken and the tail has a pretty good texture
Edit: Turns out there are crocodiles in Australia, not alligators
Was just finna say that. Like- I'm definitely eating fried gator
Fried gator = Mmm
I've heard this quote from a hunting channel once.
"No meat you cook will taste bad as long as you cook it correct way and put in enough seasoning."
yeah any funky meat can be turned delicious by plenty of garlic, pepper, ginger, salt and onions.
It’s true. Just make sure you check for rabies after..
@@orangejacket4551 And lots of parasite species resistant to heat... So I say, no thanks! 🤣
That just further solidifies the point why carnivores never became popular - to make their meat tender you need to put in a lot of time and energy.
In short, waste. Not just time or ingredients but energy as well. Why make yourself suffer when you can achieve the same thing with lesser effort?
Conversely for seafood, we humans predominantly eat carnivorous fish, while we rarely eat herbivorous fish. Herbivore fish taste like the plants they eat. Which isn't good.
I think the reason why is because there aren’t that many of them and they aren’t very large either. Whereas Tuna, Salmon, etc can get pretty large, taste good and because we don’t farm them, we don’t have to pump resources into them
Oceanic food webs just operate on another level
It's not about taste. There just aren't very many, they're not particularly big, and they have a significant risk of being toxic. People eat them anyway, but it's not common because it's not efficient.
What about sardines and shrimp.
@@freerolll I think the specific species (plural) of shrimp are carnivorous, but you are right about sardines being omnivores.
i find it really funny you use an aligator in a farm as an example of "we don't farm carnivores" when infact we litterally have aligator farms for their meat in Louisiana
thats mostly for their skin right?
@@TrainerGoldAlt I've eaten gator on multiple occasions, in restaurants and otherwise. It's definitely a bit of an outlier here.
I noticed that but I don't think you can argue that it's common or makes up a significant portion of human eaten meat.
@@TrainerGoldAlt but the meat rather than ended in dump, better consumed by anyone who wants to taste it
@@TrainerGoldAlt for the skin and the meat, the meat is like a really good cross between fish and chicken
One straightforward reason related to efficiency is that there are significantly more herbivores in nature than carnivores.
I'm also 90% sure prey animals give birth more often and have larger litters of offspring. They likely even grow faster than carnivores
That's why we were hunter gatherers for most of our history.
Your reason explains more than the other proposed reasons.
And they're easier to hunt/catch, never mind farm!
I just found out about this channel and I noticed that the sponsor was at the end of the video
You've earned my respect for not ruining the flow of the video by putting the sponsor in the middle
People probably put it in the middle because people are less likely to watch it if it's at the end. You've already seen the entire video. It would be like sticking around for the credits. Most people aren't going to do that.
There's dofferent values for where they put the ad role. The middle is the most expensive and the beginning is the least.@@HappilyCarnivore
For most of human history, eating a carnivore would've just been HARD. Why fight a bear for it's meat when you could hunt a deer, where you'd be less likely to get injured and die? Then as a course, we'd never develop the taste/immune system/etc. for eating predators.
Also - there might be 20 or more deer for each wolf in the neighbourhood, so it's much easier to hunt the deer.
Actually hunting is the only reliable way to eat carmnivores and we have proof than ancient humans regurarly ate carnivores
Most bears are omnivores but the point is still valid.
I think the first part of what of what you said is correct. I don't know about the taste/ immune system part. It makes sense that herd animals would be the choice to hunt over more solitary animals, which is also why we eat fish that are predators, as they tend to swim in schools. It's about calories per effort. The Native Americans knew it was much more cost effective to herd a group of buffalo over a cliff than to hunt down solitary predators.
isotope analysis suggests that we ate other carnivores too
You are not even considering that hunting a deer is significantly easier than hunting a cougar
idk man, there's like 4 in my dms promising a weekly allowance of $1000, as long as I send my bank details first
Right alongside the idea that they would be less safe to eat this is what occurred to me first. When you hunt a deer, rabbit or whatnot, you are the predator, and they are the prey trying to get away from you. With a carnivore, you are both hunters, and it becomes a much more dangerous game.
I'm hunting cougars at the moment in Red Dead Redemption 2 and can confirm.
Especially when the cougar also considers hunting you just as much !
@@avu2888 LMAO😭😭😭😭
The casual occasionally Pokémon in your animations always make my day :)
I noticed Deerling, Ursaring, Magikarp, and maybe Lycanroc.
1:03 here
In Indonesia we eat snakes, crocodiles, monkeys, cats, dogs, bats, monitor lizards.
You wouldn't even believe how much Jakarta people consume dog meat per year
There's a saying in Vietnam as a joke. If it move, it's edible =)))
Asians even eat cockroaches as well. Sometimes when I think about it, it's like eating whatever is caught.
These diets are mainly in China and South East Asia.
In the South we eat alligator and rattlesnakes on occasion
And that folks is how we got covid
I'll add another possible reason: humans used to be hunter-gatherers, and hunting a carnivore probably was way too dangerous to be worth the effort
Yea. I assume if they killed it in defense, they might eat it but hunting to eat it? Dangerous
I wouldn't be so sure on that hypothesis as a discovery was made in Africa in Kenya or Tanzania that homo erectus regularly hunted carnivorous in that area for food
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw the thumbnail, but I'm appalled that an evolutionary perspective wasn't considered in the video.
Yes, I thought of this, too. Especially since it also explains why we would have an exception for carnivorous fish: fish generally aren't as dangerous as carnivorous land animals.
This was my idea
I think you kinda missed what's imo the big one: we don't just eat herbivores, we specifically eat ruminants and fowl (and pork, which is also the most common meat, but I'll get back to that), which are animals that eat grass and seeds. Specifically, those are things that human derive little to no nutrition from, but are incredibly abundant. For most of human history (really, all of it prior to the Second Agricultural Revolution), we didn't grow food to feed animals, we just let them graze on otherwise unused grassland or hay, which is effectively a byproduct of the grains we actually eat. As such, they were basically a way of converting inedible plant matter into stuff we can actually eat.
Pigs are the big exception to that, in that they don't eat grasses primarily. However, they do eat anything. All of the waste and scraps that get produced by people can be fed to pigs, and they'll also happily find food in an otherwise barren field.
Basically, the reason we eat those animals primarily is just because those animals were effectively no-effort food sources at a time when food production was the vast majority of human labour.
This comment wins the question.
This should get pinned well said. It makes sense that we'd find the most efficient way to satisfy our need for food and what could be easier than eating animals that eat the stuff we don't eat or need makes perfect sense... imagine trying to catch antelope to feed to your leopard so you can eat it 😂😂
The pig is a tricky one though, if you only feed it trash, the meat will taste like trash, unless you fed it good quality food the last few months of it life, making its meat mid quality, but if you fed it with high quality food all its life, you end up with good quality meat (let's ignore for a moment the different breeds and how the environment can influence on the quality)
Yes, and this points out a very good reason why the religion hypothesis doesn't really hold up: both Judaism and Islam prohibit pork, and yet it is the most consumed meats on the planet. If that were a cultural factor, it would mean western cultures would not eat so much of it.
Since the 2nd Agricultural Revolution, we waste a huge amount of resources like land and fresh water to produce animal products.
Animal agriculture is the top cause of deforestation, and biodiversity loss.
It is also a major cause of climate change, water pollution, ocean dead zones, and the threat of zoonotic diseases, and antibiotic resistance.
It is long past the time to change to a plant based food production system!
I am vegan, does that mean I'm delicious? 😇
Jeffrey Dahmer aproved
no, sym
YES BRAV
Could be. Just gotta make sure the meat is well cooked to avoid the kuru. Almost makes me wanna carry some bbq sauce with me at all times. 🤪🤯
Yes!
This video had the most relevant sponsor I have seen on yt. Relevant in terms of the video content
Thank you for convincing me to not take up cannibalism.
XD
😂 i read somewhere that human meat not only smell bad and the texture a little strange however its close to pig at least that is good
@@aimliard2276speak for yourself. I hate pork
@@aimliard2276
That's why another term for cannibalism is "long pig."
Did you not watch the video? Typical humans would taste bad but grass-fed humans should be delicious.
A point about the inefficiency of cows, though, which I think is important to point out
Historically, raising cattle (not just cows but sheep and goats too) was done in areas where it was hard to grow crops, but where grass grew readily. Humans can't eat grass, so it was an easy way to turn inedible calories into edible ones. It didn't matter that it took 10000 calories of grass to make 1000 calories of cow because those 10000 calories of grass were useless to us. It wasn't that different from the fish example.
Then we started growing crops to feed the cattle tho, which kind of defeats the purpose of having the cattle in the first place. But originally at least, it made perfect sense.
another point is that our digestion systems are significantly less adapted for grass than a cow is, so regardless of how many calories exist in grass we can't directly benefit from it without farming animals who do have digestion systems capable of digesting said grass.
Even now, it *sort* of does. Some percentage of a harvest of say, wheat is usually pretty poor quality, you might eat it if you were starving and it would be pretty horrible (it would probably be grits or porridge because the protein content is too low for bread or pasta), but in an otherwise abundant food environment, it's going to go to waste. There are also fodder crops like alfalfa that grow more readily in poor soil but are also not very nutritious for humans. Finally there's waste products from the food industry like sugar beet pulp or molasses.
Not to say high quality human edible grains are not fed to cattle sometimes, especially in the US where it is extremely cheap to produce, but there's still a lot of sources of animal feed which could not be easily diverted for human use.
Just like you said.
Additionally, for millions of years of human history and teens of thousands of years of history, animals and land was plentiful until very very recently.
Herbivores were pests in agricultural areas, especially after dangerous carnivore threats/competitors were eliminated. So hunting deer, elk, antelope, horse, rabbit, etc. became a necessity and it still is. And they are delicious and nutritious, and can be excellently paired with plants and drinks.
another point is food waste and bad crops and forage. Stuff we gathered that we can’t eat so we feed it to what we can eat
@@Croz89Yea forage cover crops with livestock can actually improve soils in degraded land reversing deserts. Every thing in nature has a purpose but people try demonize livestock ,When we caused more harm through industrial waste. But they wont focus on that part because of all the oil companies
You missed the basic point, carnivores usually reproduce at lower numbers and lower frequency than herbivores.
It is easier to extinct tigers than sheep.
putting the ad to the end is a W + nice vid overall, deserves a like
This is more “why we don’t farm carnivores” more so than “why we don’t eat carnivores”. We eat plenty of carnivores but farm very little of them.
Very good
True. We eat crocodile meat.
@@tinachristine4573yeah while watching this video I was thinking, I've had crocodile, everyone with me liked it and the meat was very soft
They are farmed ,but for their fur not their meat
Tuna too! @tinachristine4573
As CGPGray once said, “Thermodynamics”
Soooo long ago
"We are the top Chicken" -CGP
Ten pounds of grass make a pound of steak, and ten pounds of steak make a pound of tiger
Gd reference
@@hdrodic And we can't eat grass.
It feels wrong in a weird way, eating something not really intended to be eaten by anything
Hearing her say nasties is just so weird. Btw for reference the process she mention is called bio accumulation.
Other carnivores we eat include crustaceans, reptiles, terrapins, cetaceans, pinipeds, and amphibians.
Also cephalopods, and dogs and cats in some places
@@roseyuen6916Lol I never understand that as you might as well eat rabbits, at that point there more efficient but I guess poor starving people eat stray dogs and cats.
Fish
❌ WRONG❌WRONG❌WRONG❌
People eat what easy to hunt & control🤷♀️ We would have eat each other if it easy to hunt humans, control them & eat them🤏
@@duran9664 No we wouldnt do that Its psychopathic
My first thought was that when you decide what animal to go and eat, you're better off choosing one that's unlikely to pull an Uno reverse card on you.
Totally unrelated...but I cannot unsee the 2 humans, bunnies , smiley face and upside down piggy in the cow @3:40 lol
I've had lion burgers, bear jerky, grilled shark, and snake every way you can think to cook it.
Definitely the inefficiencies/cost for farming. Snakes, Alligator/Crocodile, Shark, Whale, Bear, Seals, are all eaten around the world, but often require hunting/catching in the wild.
Thank you, finally someone mentioning HUNTING in this topic...
Snake meat is amazing. Some of the best $50 or so a pound I've ever bought on the extremely rare occasion it is available.,
Snake and Gator/Croc are an exception due to their methods of digestion/cold blooded factor. A snake only requires you give it a mouse once a week (I'm generalizing a theory, some snake owner can clarrify) while the gator/croc has an entire season where their metabolism basically shuts off. It is therefore cost efficienct to raise these for meat even though you'll be feeding them meat.
@@bigmoe9856
Do reptiles grow fast for economic efficiency ?
@@MarianLuca-rz5kk compared to herbivores, no, this will be an investment on time. But they do have multplie offspring so you'll be working with batches
3:33 That cow has two people going for a kiss on its back!
side*
@@dryzalizer No, it's a chalice!
Well spotted!
What
They painted a cow with a Rorschach painting, very cool
3:54 we can't digest grass and we feed live stock mostly things we can't diegest and byproducts of stuff we grow/make like we eat corn but the stalks are used for live stock instead of leaving it to waste
That one episode from JoJo's Golden Wind where mista discusses cannibalism:
The "nasties" idea also applies to fish. Some species of fish are considered less "clean" because of their levels of heavy metals, PCB and other nasties.
Ah yes I love me some fish with a motherboard (PCB) in it /s
and some societies dont like fish or even people cant eat fish
like thuna
@@fraizie6815frr, capacitors are just so 🤤
South East Asians: what are you talking about?
We eat anything have 4 legs, unless it’s a chair lol
They're not afraid of danger
you mean chinese
Or anyone who has eaten alligators, snakes, or many types of ocean creatures.
@@GhostRiley-zs8zb they be snacking too
yeah, the effectiveness aspect just puts the cabosh on this whole idea. I reckon there're very few companies out there willing to try and raise, say, tigers to sell the meat, simply because their food is expensive by default. the rest is probably debatable, there ARE a handful of carnivores we can eat (including gators, btw), but it's just not broadly cost-effective in the current economy (or any economy, I guess), to the point eating farm-raised lions would be considered comically decadent, even if made viable
The answer is scarcity and food type competition. Predator populations are much smaller than non-predators. By orders of magnitude. Fish are the exception because their predator populations are still large enough even being magnitudes smaller. We still eat predators. In fact your gator example is terrible because we do actually farm gators.
Next you have to consider what herbivores we do eat. Ruminants. They can eat the food we can't. It's only more efficient to eat plants when they're edible plants. My understanding is that the majority of grazing ground are not suitable for cultivating edible plants. Turning extremely plentiful and essentially "useless" land into something that is extremely useful.
I think a big note is hunted meat vs farmed meat. Farmed meat we don't do predators on because of the conversion ratio among other things. As for hunted meat, a lot of people are not hunters. Also in theory it may have to do with availiability. Like if you have to eat multiple animals to keep yourself alive that in theory implies that there must be more of those things. If there was more predators then prey then the predators would end up starving themselves. So if you treat hunting as a random draw you are more likely to get something lower on the peaking order then something higher on the peaking order. You could target those rarer creatures but that would in effect just be drawing more cards/spending more effort.
For the ADHD kids scrolling through, here is the tl;dr version: _"The population math doesn't add up"_ 👈 You're welcome 😊
This is probably the biggest answer and also why fish are the "exception".
"We don't eat carnivores"
Fish: am I a joke to you?
she mentions them in the vid
2:43
she mentions that in the vid broski
I want eat a white shark!
@@GabrielMoura-qe3il all the power to you
Basically, it's cost and because it's just harder to hunt...
But people do eat carnivores... Crocs are a delicacy and people do enjoy bear and wolves...
And let's be real, it's safer to hunt deer than it is to hunt bears....
That efficiency argument speaks to me. If you're going to farm, you're going to end up growing things you don't want to eat. That's where it's handy to have livestock that can turn the stuff you don't want into fertilizer and meat.
I love how this video just ignored alligator farms in Southern US states. They are farmed to be slaughtered for their meat.
They had pictures of them. They are not common though.
Just as immoral as eating cows and pigs
@@alexgrissom3513believing that is tantamount to believing human existence is immoral,or/and any other carnivores as well.
@@hawoaliahmed6996 nope. You’re arguing what’s called an appeal to nature logical fallacy.
@@alexgrissom3513 how is it a fallacy? you cant just claim that. You have to explain WHY it's immoral. Say, because eating meat is bad for the environment, and choosing to eat it over more sustainable options is morally wrong because of the negative impact on the environment. Otherwise they're not wrong - there is nothing morally wrong about the concept of eating other animals. It's a fact of survival
In Zimbabwe we eat crocodile tail which is a by product from crocodile farms that produce leather for the fashion industry but like the video said it's not that readily available and is very seasonal but tastes great
Louisiana,Texas, and Florida does this
@@jalenwatson4261 more so alligator not croc
You can get it anywhere in the US.
We do the same in South Africa. It's expensive and more of a novelty item, but it tastes very similar to chicken.
@@marcusmoonstein242 it does. Have you tried it grilled with mixed potato and sweet potato chips. Heavenly.
If youre not vegan you cant say you love animals.
You love pets. And your own convenience. Not animals.
Here's another factor: for every carnivore, there are often hundreds of herbivores. Also, carnivores tend to be territorial and dangerous while herbivores are easier to catch, relatively. Plus, nowadays, a lot of carnivores are endangered.
That being said, I have heard stories of people eating snakes.
People do eat bear, crocs, frogs, snakes, shark. They're mostly hunted rather than farmed of course.
Bear are omnivores (except polar bears and they aren't generally eaten) the rest are cold blooded and therefore have a much higher efficiency of turning food into meat around 3-4 times better than mammals.
People eat cetaceans (whales and such) too. Snapping turtles, sea birds, cats, dogs, seals, spiders, crustaceans
I always assumed it was because predators are hard to domesticate. The exception is dogs and cats and they are eaten in certain parts of the world, but they're used in other ways regardless.
The dogs they eat in Korea that are raised on farms are fed plant based foods. I was stationed there and there was a dog farm just off base. They are fed basically the same thing pigs are fed. Lots of soybeans etc.
@@PeterSedesse Huh! Well, TIL… thanks!
Dogs are omnivores, only cats are carnivores
Ok so here’s the very simple answer I indirectly got from ecology class:
Plants = A ton of nutrients.
Herbivores = only get like 1% of plants nutrients.
Carnivores = only get like 1% of herbivores nutrients.
So on and so forth. Therefore, the higher the animal is on the food chain, the less nutrients we get from that animal.
But if we fed a tiger the diet of a farm cow, how would it go ? Would he survive ? And if we did with like a bigger version of cat food, what would it taste like ? A mix of what’s in the giant cat food ?
Availability, should be a hypothesis. Somethings don't catch up because not enough ppl try them or can try them
I think there's also an evolutionary reason, hunting a carnivore is much more difficult and dangerous then hunting a herbivore, so we probably adapted to prefer herbivore meat over carnivore meat. I assume that's why most carnivores mostly feast on herbivores.
Also fishing a carnivorous fish is as easy as fishing a herbivore fish so that can explain why we like carnivorous fish too.
Gator meat is a bit of an exception, maybe it is the transition from aquatic to terrestrial animals.
Some Japan eat bear meat
For farming sure. That's it though. Talk to a real hunter and that changes a lot. People eat all sorts of carnivores
We eat snakes, dogs, cats, and all other kinds of animals
Some tribes in Brazil eat Spiders. Spiders are carnivores.
I've always said I'm a vegan by proxy. I only eat animals that eat plants.
You mean you've never eaten alligator meat? I highly recommend it. Almost just like chicken.
Frog legs too, but closer to the texture of fish.
I've had alligator jerky. It was good!
Just remember to be responsible while hunting!
alligator or crocodile tastes like turkey but with the texture of beef. very strange, but tasty experience
Alligator is absolutely delicious one of my favorite foods especially that tail😋.
Interesting fun fact: sharks don’t think we taste very well. However, there are some people that think sharkfin soup is delicious.
I think it's important to mention we often DO eat carnivores, it's just that said carnivores are also not apex predators due to the way calorie distribution and resource scarcity increases higher up the food chain. Many cultures eat carnivorous insects such as spiders, and even upper-mid level carnivores like dogs or bats.
3:54 We basically just can't eat most things that cows, pigs, sheep, ect. can eat. We can't eat grass, we can't eat the stock of a bean, corn or tomato, we can't eat the leafs of carrots, turnips or potatoes. Instead of spending even more time and energy to make them edible as well, it's just easier to give them to the animals, who can also safely feed off of moldy bread.
Making land to feed animals is one of the biggest causes of deforestation. A lot of that land is used to grow crops to feed to animals.
@@evilduck1000 have you thought about the fact that some soils are just unfit to grow crops for us to eat, and that a pound of beef is much more nutritious than a pound of wheat or rice?
@@evilduck1000Most of that land is used for oil palm, Livestock agriculture is only about 20% of habitable land.
That makes sense. In the modern world, it would actually be rather nice if farm animals were fed more or less only parts of edible plants that we don't eat (and/or other [for them] edible waste [edit:] or other things that can be grown in soils unsuitable for edible crops, like grass). It's just too bad this isn't really the case on the large scale
I literally just saw my local Safeway grocery store selling literal yard grass to eat, by the lettuce lol. 😂
Its the most easy explanation that hunting a herbivore is easier than a carnivore for the risk of getting hunted down and the difference in numbers too. Thousands of herbivores vs few carnivores vs even lesser humans. Also Ockham's razor is a factor.
also when you pick an animal to keep against its will to breed and domesticate the choice is made for you by nature XD
Of course any reasoning is a mess. You're lumping together mammals, reptile, birds, arthropods, and fish. They don't work alike, so they don't taste alike, and they automatically cancel out reasons for each other, like carnivorous fish are preferred the way mammalian herbivores are. Make this all about mammals, and you lose most of your exceptions.
The inefficiency theory does explain why alligator meat is more common in the South: Since they're cold-blooded, they don't have as much energy and thus they don't eat as much as warm-blooded animals. Basically, what could feed one lion would easily feed 10 alligators. Thus, alligator farms are more efficient than raising any other predator.
Loved the Pokémon and the Gravity Falls references! Subtle, but well done.
I like how alligators were shown several times as an example of a predator we don’t eat or farm.
But throughout the south they are eaten and farmed. And hunted. It’s super tasty meat.
No thanks
@@AndrewManooki would like to taste them
You forgot horse at the beginning. I once saw horse meat 🍖 at a local store. I was shocked !!
I've eaten gator tail before in Florida.
It's very chewy but tastes pretty good.
By population size there's lots of plants, many plant-eaters, and few plant-eater-eaters. Hunting at the bigger buffet means you'll get more food
I feel that an additional detail is that for most of our history, carnivores weren't remotely practical to hunt. Putting aside the sheer danger, they produce far less meat than an equally-dangerous herbivore-ex. a mammoth. Furthermore, predators are much more likely to be able to sneak up on your compared to a herbivore, and conversely would find it easier to hide from us as well. It's not like dangerous creature weren't hunted, but they were not hunted FOR FOOD- for glory or profit usually. If you just need to eat and don't care about such things it's so much safer to jus stalk a gazelle, and even big prey would lack interest unless you have a tribe to feed.
Absolutely ridiculous--
--Did you REALLY THINK
you could get away with a Deerling, Ursaring, Magikarp, & Lycanroc,
and I WOULDN'T NOTICE???
I like the pokemon refrence at 1:03 :)
you forgot a few other reason:
back when we were hunter gatherer, hunting a gazelle is less risky then hunting a tiger. If you fail the gazelle simply run away. The tiger might turn around and eat you instead.
Once we started to raise our livestock, it's much easier and safer to control a herd of cow rather then a pack of wolf.
Then similarly, the problem we have with spiders, most carnivores are solitary creatures or lives in small family structures and require a huge piece of land. So on your farm you could raise 1 tiger or a whole herd of cow (and less chance the herd of cow will attack the farmer then the tiger)
Finally, numbers. most big predators are on the list of animals in danger of extinction. Because as mention earlier most of then live in small groups or solitary on huge vast of land, they often have a slow reproduction cycle making them way harder to farm.
We don't have a good explanation? You literally gave one really good reason, efficiency. Prey animals are easy to domesticate and they have infinite food souce.
second, cows, rabbits, goats, etc. have multichambered stomachs for digesting it and some of them eat the same food after it goes out the back end.
That's important because even animals that have evolved to eat it, don't get all the nutrients and cows have to eat a lot.
Our stomachs don't work nearly as well and they can eat things that we can't. We're taking advantage of that trait, let them get their energy from stuff we can't really eat and we just harvest it from them.
Which leaves me to the last point, they taste good, grass doesn't.
biomagnification
Plus all the excess estrogen in soy throws off your hormones. The evidence for the health of a plant based diet is inconclusive at BEST.
Remember selective breeding, it would be hard to do it with carnivores.
Still, in some places people eat dogs, they were carnivores that were domesticated through selective breeding
Nothing is vegetarian or non vegetarian on this world.
Something to note. Fish such as salmon are indeed carnivores. However, they are not at the top of the ocean food web. That title belongs to sharkes, dolphins, and whales, which we generally tend to avoid. I think this is important to know because the "nasty stuff" that they have are considerably higher levels of mercury.
My 7+ kg of ground whale meat in the freezer:
Do you think we don't eat tuna and swordfish?
@eljanrimsa5843 Tuna and Swordfish are not on top of the food web.
@@alvinvaldes5034 Only orcas are on top of the food web in the ocean, but 15-foot tuna and swordfish are pretty high up there. And they have the mercury load to prove it. We eat them.
@eljanrimsa5843 With Swordfish, it is generally not recommended to eat them. Tuna, however, there are many safe species to consume. Sharkes are a level higher above them.
Alligators are delicious and there are even alligator farms, like fish farms, meant to supply meat to various places all along the Gulf Coast. We totally eat carnivores lol
But it depends on the species.
I assume those farms let the alligators hunt themselves as they be expensive to feed
What do they feed the alligators
theres a reason this is rare and essentially only occurs in one location
Too expensive to raise carnivores on a farm. The only time it makes sense to eat carnivores is if you hunt them in the wild. You can't do that on a large scale due to conservation efforts.
We eat shark and crocodile… I always assumed that generally speaking, most carnivores are difficult to farm.
It's also usually a lot easier to hunt the herbivores. They're either fairly harmless like rabbits, or herd together making bigger targets for spears and bows, like bison, cows, or sheep. On the other hand, a lot harder to hunt something that's probably already hunting you. Something with dangerous claws and teeth as well as incredible speed and stealth.
top-chain predators really do condense things like parasites, heavy metals, and other bad stuff, which you covered here. thats probably one of the reasons we avoid them.
We avoid mammalian predators but we don't seem to have the same concern for eating predatory fish, which have the exact same problem of bioaccumulation. I think the main reason we eat tuna but not tigers simply comes down to tuna being far more numerous and easier to catch.
@@isaacbruner65Do those fish really have the same accumulation problem as carnivorous land animals? I assume not, since a quick look at your average consumable tuna and history of eating them just fine seems to indicate otherwise
@aereonexapprentice7205 tuna has a relatively high mercury contents than fishes on the lower foodchain such as herrings
@@aereonexapprentice7205 Also, even if they accumulated parasites( Let's ignore the heavy metals for now, as they are indeed an issue when fish and seafod is concerned), most of them might not be compatible with mammals because they evolved to infect fish. Meanwhile, tigers are a lot close to us genetically, so a tiger parasite of disease might infect us. I imagine that's why monkeys and rats are quite dangerous to eat, even if we created them in a lab.
Crocodile meat is very delicious and a common food in some places. But taste good just if it is well seasoned, if not, the taste is too strong, not easy to eat.
There is simply not enough of them for us eat. I was never offered a piece of tiger
It's because it's easier for us to cultivate grains to feed them and graise animals than it is to feed meat eating animals to then eat.
And that's relatively new thing too. Chickens primarily only eat grain and so raising them was a bit more prestigious to have as a meal.
Now you can get a box of chicken nuggets from McDonald's for like five bucks
@@silkyz68Yea but steak taste alot better chickens actually eat the majority of grains grown in us and its subsidized by big corn.
❌ WRONG❌WRONG❌WRONG❌
People eat what easy to hunt & control🤷♀️ We would have eat each other if it easy to hunt humans, control them & eat them🤏
They are more docile
@@silkyz68chickens eat meat too, they eat insects and sometimes other chickens
I’d heard it was just because they were smelly, but there were another reasons! 😮
This video is pretty much total BS. It's just allegedly cheaper, even though it isn't.
I don't agree with the Taste Hypothesis became the reason is very simple.
Will the meat taste good without seasoning, spices and cooking?
Isn't it the seasoning and cooking process which creates taste?
MinuteEarth just told me to eat grass
It seems that most cultures have ancestral taboos against eating the animals sitting on top of the food chain.
3:55 - Don't eat grass. Humans don't have a digestive system which handles grass well :p
Lol
It also has Silica which is harmful to our teeth if im right
The human stomach isn't very fond of cellulose, which is the main component of standard grass. Humans only have one stomach, unfortunately, in order to digest grass properly one would need a couple of stomachs. But, who knows, maybe one day :p
@@TimRobertsen the farther we stray from nature the worst things get
@@TimRobertsen how about grass juice
To add to the ineffeciency topic, the ratio between herbivores and carnivores is always largely shifted towards the former. Much easier to to find deer to hunt, and they're a lot less dangerous than a tiger.
Inefficiency and high cost are the main reasons. If a beef steak need to sell for $20/lbs to make profit, a tiger steak might cost $2000/lbs
Even prior to domestication/in societies where hunting is more prominent, one would expect predators to make up a smaller proportion of diet, simply because there are far few predators per km2 than there are herbivores. They are also more dangerous/difficult to catch, especially relative to the amount of meat you get.
Ironically energy efficiency and bioaculmaltion were two themes I just went over on my bio exam from earlier today too lol
The system is flawless.
There's no inefficiency in the system. Each part of the system that you described is capable of different types of movement based upon the resources that they intake from the grass not being able to move at all to the cow being able to move slightly more than the grass and then the lion being able to basically pick up the cow.
A key factor not mentioned here is the immediate safety in hunting/fishing. In the past, it was more dangerous to hunt carnivores, whereas it was safer to hunt herbivores. If your "food" has an interest in eating you, it tends to be more risky.
This is also congruent with the observation that more carnivorous fish than land animals are eaten by humans, as fishing tends to be safer, especially when done with range weapons / nets from land.
Meanwhile in China = crocodile, python, dog, cat, bear, civet, mongoose, tiger etc on the menu.
not tigers or bears. There are almost no tigers or bears in China outside nature reserves.
🇨🇳+🦇=🦠
💀💀💀😭😭😭
@@appa609 there are thousands of captive bears on horrific bile farms in China and Southeast Asia. When they die, their paws are in demand to make traditional cuisine.
Do you want covids? Because that how you get covids.
With the exception of non-native crocodiles, dogs and cats. All the other animals mentioned have received significant protection status. Eating these class protected animals may attract the attention of Chinese police, more likely when you flex about it on social media.
Loved the nods to pokemon in one of the early drawings (deerling, ursaring, magikarp)
The wolf is shiny lycanroc
Me who's eaten bear and gator and find them both to be pretty good. I think we just don't eat them is because.... it's hard to farm them and feed the masses with them.
This question randomly came up my mind a few months ago and I finally got an answer
"Inefficiency" sums it nicely. Large carnivores are harder to catch then herbivores of similar or bigger size, and is much easier to raise grazing flock then anything else in low resorce society. In fact in old time people were eating fast growing sheep much more then slower growing cattle, which were kept primarily for milk and as draft animals.
1:06 LOVE the pokemon reference!
That ain’t magikarp that’s sorcerycod 💀
I’m playing Pokémon right now
How do you make the animation for your videos?
Medieval European people had no qualms about eating cats, hawks, falcons, etc. These species may have been lucky in that they were often pets or at least tolerated as useful for farming/around the house. Didn't stop some people from hunting the wild ones and eating them.