Why Don't We Eat Carnivores?

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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."

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

You missed the basic point, carnivores usually reproduce at lower numbers and lower frequency than herbivores. It is easier to extinct tigers than sheep.

Hearing her say nasties is just so weird. Btw for reference the process she mention is called bio accumulation.

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

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.

Back in the old days, carnivores were harder to hunt and the reward to risk ratio was not worth it, in the present times, it is very difficult and inefficient to grow carnivores for food, so it is highly practical to eat herbivores

That one episode from JoJo's Golden Wind where mista discusses cannibalism:

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.

You are not even considering that hunting a deer is significantly easier than hunting a cougar

I've had lion burgers, bear jerky, grilled shark, and snake every way you can think to cook it.

I'm no expert but hunting or herding tigers seems a lot harder then hunting or herding rabbits.

"We don't eat carnivores" looks at my bowl of alligator gumbo

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

putting the ad to the end is a W + nice vid overall, deserves a like

Great!! 👏 Always needed this kind of appropriate answer.

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.

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.

Because of how domesticated dogs and cats are we could probably farm them if we really wanted to.