#WhyDoHumansAvoidEatingPredators #PreyVsPredatorMeat #HumanDietaryChoices
Hey there! š Have you ever wondered why humans tend to avoid eating predator animals like bears, wolves, lions, cougars, and other fierce creatures, opting for prey animals instead? š¦ Let’s delve into this intriguing dietary preference and uncover the reasons behind it!
Understanding Human Dietary Preferences
1. **Evolutionary Factors:**
– Throughout history, humans have evolved to consume prey animals for sustenance.
– Prey animals are often easier to catch and contain more muscle mass, making them a more efficient food source.
2. **Safety Concerns:**
– Predator animals are higher on the food chain and may contain harmful toxins or parasites accumulated from their prey.
– Consuming predator meat can pose risks to human health due to these potential contaminants.
The Psychological Aspect
1. **Cultural Beliefs:**
– In many cultures, predator animals are revered or feared, making them taboo for consumption.
– The symbolic significance of predator animals as powerful beings can influence dietary choices.
Examples from Real Life
– **Bears:** Despite being omnivores, bears are often avoided for consumption due to their predatory nature and the potential risks associated with consuming their meat.
– **Lions:** In some cultures, consuming lion meat is considered taboo due to the animal’s status as the “king of the jungle.”
In Conclusion,
While there are various factors influencing why humans tend to avoid eating predator animals and prefer prey animals instead, the interplay of evolutionary, safety, and cultural factors all play a role in shaping our dietary preferences. š Next time you sit down for a meal, consider the journey of the food on your plate and the factors that influence your choices! š½ļø #FoodForThought
Prey animals are easier and safer to catch, kill and prepare for cooking
A chicken cannot maul you whereas the animals listed will
Have you tried to capture and kill a bear? Theyāre freakin scary lol
Imagine an industrial sized farm of bears
Easier to hunt, kill and domesticate enough.
Dude, imagine having to feed a family of domesticated farm bears, wtf are you gonna feed em? Which animals, animals that will need their own food?
The logistics make way less sense with carnivores.
Bear looks too much like humans when skinned. I’m not about that bad juju
There’s more fat and edible meat on prey. Predators are very lean.
Prey animals are easier to domesticate because first of all, they wonāt try to eat just for getting close to them, second of all because you can feed them stuff that you canāt eat (like grass, or kitchen scraps, or rotten vegetables) that isnāt overly expensive (like the amount of meat necessary to feed a large predator), and finally because prey animals tend to live in groups & have family bonds as a survival tactic, which we can exploit to make them trust us.
In short, an animal like a cow, horse, sheep, pig, chicken or goose is just objectively more easy to domesticate than any large predator.
The exceptions to the general rule are small with small diets, like cats (who are still independently minded enough to seek out their own food anyway), and dogs, which arenāt even obligate carnivores anyway so they donāt really break the rule at all.
Lots of people hunt bears, and did so historically. But less so wolves and big cats. Maybe they aren’t meaty enough, or are harder to catch.
Bears, at least, can carry a parasite or disease that can be fatal to humans. I was taught that you shouldn’t eat any animal that easts carrion like a possum or a raccoon either. I think that’s also because of the risk of disease. Although some people say they eat possum. I’ve eaten things like squirrel and groundhog along with the usual deer, elk, moose, rabbit, duck, turkey. I grew up in a hunting family. My father began hunting as a child during the depression. He had to help feed his family.
Lots of reasons like have already been mentioned.
One that hasn’t been mentioned is feeding them. If you want to farm an animal you have to feed it. If you’re going to farm something like lions or tigers, you need to feed them something like cows or pigs.
Just eat the cows and pigs, it’s way more efficient.
Because they taste better?
From what I hear, their meat tastes awful.
The cost of feeding carnivores would be astronomical and incredibly inefficient, the predator livestock would consume more meat than they produced
Because they will kill you.
Have bumped into bears four times in my life and never did i think i would try to make a steak out of them.
easier hunting for one. but also there is keeping the balance in the ecosystem. the predator’s keep the prey from disease and overpopulation. also meat quality. Herbivores tend to be tastier and easier to chew. predator’s tend to get a bit gamey or string in meat quality.
Because agriculture was the start of any sort of civilization and we didnāt have to hunt after that so if we can just use this new discovery to feed us and our meat itās much more effective
Idk why people are going on about danger as the main reason. Bulls and boars are hella dangerous. The main reason we like them is they eat just about anything and they provide a lot of food for the amount of food they consume.
Prey animals can be farmed more consistently. It’s safer and cheaper.
Bioaccumulation. The higher up in the food chain something is, the more concentrated toxins become bc they have accumulated up the chain
LOL, for the same reasons predator animals prefer to eat prey animals: They taste better and they’re WAY easier to kill.
Like everyone already stated,why bother going for something that easily kill you when you go can for something safer & easier to manage?
Any meat you eat has its flavor determined by what they eat. Omnivores and meat eaters taste awful,but a deer feeding on corn is delicious
Because you can farm them, lol
Because the cost-benefit ratio is lower.
Bears, wolves, lions, cougars and etc. are much more dangerous as a rule than whatever they prey on. There’s probably one Robert Muldoon for every three hundred to a thousand hunters who wait by freshwater for an antelope or deer because either of those put the flight in fight or flight, then if you’re those awesome people it’s “just” a matter of running it down under the African sun. And there’s a good chance Muldoon gets eaten anyway.
Would you like a marathon you can train for, or to roll the dice on Liam Neeson’s The Grey?
Then there’s a good chance they’re smarter and can hold grudges too: there was one dude who shot a tiger in Eastern Russia (Molag Amur region?) and the thing found his winter hut, broke in, tore everything with his scent on it to *shreds,* and then dragged his mattress out under some neighboring brush to wait the couple days it took for him to return.
The book I read about it made it even more spooky: he returned home in the moonlight, doom twisted in his gut, and looked up to his hut’s entrance to see a silhouette blocking his door. Without a sound besides a low growl it tore across the distance between them and-
Curtains. If you hunt predator species, you come correct.
Usually taste bad.
Also more likely to be endangered, but usually it’s just taste.
Surely it’s the fat content?
Prey animals are safer, obviously, and they also taste better. Predators are extremely lean compared to say cows or chickens.
I think I looked this up once and they said predators are more likely to have parasites and stuff
harder to domesticate
Predator animals are difficult to make into consistent prey, also they don’t tend to fatten up as nicely as prey animals.
If you’re developing a nutritional strategy for eating animals, you want to eat ones that reproduce quickly and easily, mature fast, and eat something really plentiful like grass. If you’re going to eat lions it requires that the lions are well fed eating other animals, and they tend to be very muscular and sinewy. Its extraordinarily inefficient and they’d be hunted into such small numbers you’d need to eat something else fast.
It’s not that humans avoid eating predator species. It’s that we don’t go out of our way to follow their populations around, nor do we cultivate them as livestock.
The reason we do with herbivores is that we don’t eat the same food.
An herbivorous prey population can expand to any size and never threaten human food needs, whereas with a predator you are directly competing for calories most of the time.
There’s a loss of energy for each teir of producer and consumer. Producers like photosynthetic plants have the most energy captured from the sun (humans cannot digest cellulose so it’s a lot wasted energy) but herbivores like prey animals can and do make use of that energy.
This is just an example but imagine 100lb of plants captured energy from the sun. A prey animal can eat 100lbs of plants and only make 10lbs of meat. Now a predator eats 10lb of prey meat and only makes 1lb of predator meat. That 1lb of predator meat took 100lbs of plants to produce. But meat is meat so that 10lbs of prey meat is the same as that 1lb of predator meat, you just wasted resources producing the same thing. In a ecosystem there’s always more producers and prey/primary consumers. This also doesn’t account for the difficulty in catching predators evolved to killing.
Herbivores are more plentiful, less dangerous, and lower on the trophic ladder, and so carry less parasites and concentrations of heavy metals or toxins than other animals.
The rule is eat the herbivores, not the carnivores. Eat as close to the energy source (the sun) in the food chain.
Carnivores carry within them what they have eaten; parasites, pathogens, viruses, bacteria, etc. of their prey.
You wont eat a cow that died from natural causes. Dont eat a bear that eats animals from whatever causes and have been lying in the ground for 5+ hours.
Livestock always eat more than they produce, so the idea is to feed them things we canāt/wonāt eat (like grass and crop byproducts) and get a lesser quantity of food we can eat, like milk, eggs, and meat. Carnivores eat meat, which we can also eat, so they donāt work as food animals.
Edit: another factor is social dynamics. Herd animals can be kept in high numbers, and follow a herd leader, which makes handling the whole herd as easy as handling the leader. Bears do not live in herds.
Parasites. Mostly. Animals that eat other animals in raw form usually carry nasty parasites that are transferable, sometimes even when cooked. Its just safer to eat Herbivores.
Thermodynamics
Hunter here.
Prey animals are less likely to contain disease in the meat as they are generally vegetarian. Bear can contain diseases, but also the taste is very different. I eat what I kill, and Iām not a huge fan of bear meat. Same with sharks. Predators are very important to the ecosystem and their numbers will always be smaller than prey.