SUZHOU (CHINA) - When Han Jiali's beloved cat Dabai was taken from her Shanghai home last year, she embarked on a hunt for her pet that took her deep into the bowels of China's underground feline meat trade.
Bobcats and house cats are obligate carnivores. Even if people doubt that you actually ate bobcat, I pretty much guarantee that it would be gross.
Outside of fish, where there are additional trophic levels, there are two reasons that we don’t eat carnivores.
First, there are fewer carnivores. The common figure is that in nature if you want 1 pound of animal, you need 10 pounds of animal food (I’m simplifying). So 100 pounds of herbivore food makes 10 pounds of herbivore which makes 1 pound of carnivore. And if you want to farm an animal it can’t be competing with you for food. It needs to, in general, eat stuff you don’t want to eat. Like grass or table scraps or bugs. We can eat herbivore meat. We love it so much that whenever we showed up, we ate everything to extinction.
Cats are separate. They kinda domesticated themselves because when we started storing grain lots of rodents showed up. They just ate them, doing both of us a favor.
Second, they taste nasty. We’ve got poultry. They eat “bugs” those are more like the plankton type trophic level. When they can catch things like snakes or mice, they go absolutely nuts, but they do so more rarely than obligate carnivores.
Then, there’s pigs. They have a similar enough diet as poultry, but we do feed them meat scraps. I can guess about why this is, but I can’t be as confident as I am about my other statements.
Finally, humans are alleged to taste like pig. Maybe that’s it.
I ate bobcat once, it was nasty.
Lemmy is so toxic. Why down vote this?
Bobcats and house cats are obligate carnivores. Even if people doubt that you actually ate bobcat, I pretty much guarantee that it would be gross.
Outside of fish, where there are additional trophic levels, there are two reasons that we don’t eat carnivores.
First, there are fewer carnivores. The common figure is that in nature if you want 1 pound of animal, you need 10 pounds of animal food (I’m simplifying). So 100 pounds of herbivore food makes 10 pounds of herbivore which makes 1 pound of carnivore. And if you want to farm an animal it can’t be competing with you for food. It needs to, in general, eat stuff you don’t want to eat. Like grass or table scraps or bugs. We can eat herbivore meat. We love it so much that whenever we showed up, we ate everything to extinction.
Cats are separate. They kinda domesticated themselves because when we started storing grain lots of rodents showed up. They just ate them, doing both of us a favor.
Second, they taste nasty. We’ve got poultry. They eat “bugs” those are more like the plankton type trophic level. When they can catch things like snakes or mice, they go absolutely nuts, but they do so more rarely than obligate carnivores.
Then, there’s pigs. They have a similar enough diet as poultry, but we do feed them meat scraps. I can guess about why this is, but I can’t be as confident as I am about my other statements.
Finally, humans are alleged to taste like pig. Maybe that’s it.