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Carnivore Confusion/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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(Import from TV Tropes TVT:Headscratchers.CarnivoreConfusion 2012-07-01, editor history TVTH:Headscratchers.CarnivoreConfusion, CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license) |
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* I once ate frog legs at a Malaysian restaurant, I thought it was chicken. :P
** In reality, the problem doesn't arise when dealing with species, but rather when the thing you're eating was sapient in life. In other words, going back to the picture on the main page, why are Donald and his nephews sapient while the turkey they're about to eat presumably was not?
* Why exactly is scavenging considered to be baser than outright predation? For one thing, it's a pretty sensible survival technique in most situations - takes less effort, gives an animal plenty of choices, and the corpses are (theoretically) widely available. For another thing, the scavengers aren't necessarily killers, whereas predators have to be killers by definition. I'm aware that scavenging and predation are not mutually exclusive, but even if we didn't allow that and assumed that lions were exclusively predators (they're not) and hyenas were exclusively scavengers (they're not), why does the mainstream perspective demonize hyenas but treat killer lions as 'nobler'? Is this [[What Measure Is a Non
** It probably comes from the idea that scavenging is somehow "cowardly" or "stealing" (and also kind of gross, but so are lots of things in nature). In the specific case of vultures and hyenas, vultures are seen as kind of ominous by many Westerners because when you see them circling you know something is either dead or about to be and hyenas have been known to eat human corpses (and attack living humans, for that matter). So it's more disgust than anything. Still doesn't make a lot of sense, but ... nothing about this trope makes a lot of sense anyway.
** There is one explanation that might make sense. Modern humans' digestive tracts are not fit for eating rotting meat, which is pretty much a must for eating carcasses - they are not guaranteed to be fresh. Since, say, a dog can eat a piece of stinking meat with no ill effect and a human will feel unwell at the very least, we are biologically repulsed from eating "suspicious" meat. The taboo against scavenging is just a social construct meant to rationalise an instinctive disgust. Basically, our stomachs can't handle it, so our culture says it's evil. It would not be the first instance where culture says it's bad when evolution/biology says it's a bad idea (e.g. taboo regarding incest).
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*** Moreover, our hominid ancestors probably ''did'' scavenge from moderately-fresh carcasses, as it's the most plausible way they could have found the necessary fatty acids for increasingly-large brains prior to the invention of fishing. Perhaps our present-day revulsion towards scavenging animals is based more on lingering ''rivalry'' towards onetime competitors than we choose to admit.
** If we don't allow for animals to be both predators and scavengers, then what you should do is assume that lions are exclusively scavengers and hyenas are exclusively predators, since lions scavenge much more than hyenas.
** It might have something to do with [[Due to
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Carnivore Confusion]]
[[Category:Headscratchers]]
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