Quote:
Originally Posted by Calianna
But that doesn't matter to the really hard core vegans who are determined that every human and every animal was really meant to be vegan.
The fact that some animals are more inclined to eat meat than vegetation is simply considered to be an inconceivable and violent aberration in the cosmically intended relationship between all creatures - one that they feel compelled to do their best to put a stop to, so that all animals and people can live in harmony and no creatures will ever be used for food again.
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They are wrong. Carnivores are a necessary part of the balance. Example:
The Marine Iguana of the Galápagos Islands. They are vegans. Like all iguanas, it's cold-blooded and will go into torpor if it gets too cold. If it says in torpor too long, it dies.
When the land iguana drifted to the Galápagos so many millennia ago, it found an island with plenty of plants to eat, and zero predators.
It ate and ate with no carnivores to control its numbers, until it completely stripped the island of everything it could digest. What now? No more food? We ate it all? Shall we starve now?
Solution: Seaweed.
But the water is cold, luckily the seaweed was close. We can just dip in a bit, gorge ourselves and get out before we go into torpor.
But before long it ate all the close to shore seaweed and had to dive deeper and deeper into the cold water to get a bite of seaweed.
Today, the iguana has to dive as deep as it can in one breath to get a single bite. No time for two bites, or it'll die of hypoxia before it reaches the surface again.
By the time it surfaces, it has to lay in the sun for a long time to get its body temperature back up so it can go back down for another bite.
If it can't dive deeper than the others, it starves to death.
If it goes into torpor in the cold water, it will drown.
If it takes too much time, it's hypoxia.
Only the strongest marine iguanas survive, and the weaker ones either starve or drown. So now, without predators, their access to food in a hostile environment controls their numbers.
If there were no carnivores on Earth, we wouldn't be here. The vegetarian animals would have stripped all the digestible food off the planet billions of years before man every came to be.
So, in a way, the vegans are doing absolutely the wrong thing, while they are thinking that they are doing the right thing. We have one of the smartest and dumbest brains in the animal kingdom - both at the same time.
Earth needs a balance of herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. If it doesn't get that balance, the system will break down, and that isn't good for any of them.
I have teeth of an omnivore, digestive enzymes of an omnivore, and an alimentary canal of an omnivore, so to do my part of both my body requirements and the balance, I need to eat both plants and animals.
Mother nature (or whoever you choose) designed me to have that role in the balance.