Killing Bambi Is Good For You
Link via Drudge.
AP reports that a New York couple who had their baby girl on a strict vegetarian diet have been charged with child endangerment. The 16-month-old girl weighed only ten pounds.
I have to go on a very old rant of mine now.
Forget that god fellow and his orders that we lord it over the animals. Please. Theological debate is a lot like masturbation — fun but useless. Instead, let’s look at the basic design of the human animal.
Our eyes are both in the front of our head, giving us stereoscopic vision. This is a feature found in predators — animals who hunt and kill. Vegetarians, like cows, have eyes on the sides of their heads to give them a wider view, in order to better spot creatures like us coming.
Our teeth include incisors and canines designed for tearing flesh. And just listen to the name “canine.” Ever seen a pack of dogs hunting carrots? Furthermore, we don’t have the thick enamal you find on herbivore teeth; all that fiber chewing requires it.
One does not need opposable thumbs to munch flowers. One needs opposable thumbs to make and wield a spear.
Our digestive systems don’t deal very well with nothing but vegetable matter. If you’re sitting next to someone eating a Beans & Grass Burrito, I suggest you sit upwind.
“Oh, but it’s cruel to the animals.” Yeah, and the animals are cruel to each other. I’ll give up steak just as soon as Lucy Lion gives up gazelles. Lucy is made for killing, and so am I.
“We have pills to replace what we miss not eating meat.” You’ll disdain the science of nutrition if it has fur, but not if it has a lab coat? If you’re going to rely on science, then rely on science. And science damn well proves that we’re omnivores.
Herbs are for flavor — meat is the meal.
As Dennis Leary once said: “Something all you vegetarians have to accept: Eggplant tastes like eggplant. But meat tastes like murder, and murder tastes pretty G-d damned good.”
If Momma Nature did want us to eat animals, she shouldn’t have made them outta MEAT!
Humans rule the world here, last I checked. But there are many folks out there who think humans don’t belong on this earth. Hell, lets eat them too…
“Save a cow, eat a vegetarian!”
Isn’t it “upwind” (MW – “the direction from which the wind is blowing”)? I don’t think you are really recommending downwind.
But I could be wrong…
Apparently the parents rejected breat milk, baby formula, and baby food as well as meat.
There’s a reason those things exist, they help babies grow up healthy.
The article doesn’t say so, but I’m going to take a wild stab and say that the couple also rejected things like doctor visits and traditional medical care.
Not to beat a dead horse cow, but if God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them so tasty.
First of all, welcome back Stevie. We missed you.
Secondly, I speak not as a vegetarian, but as someone who thinks that “murder tastes pretty goddamn good.” But if our ancestors were herbivores, we might have evolved differently. I don’t know if it is safe to say that our evolution leads us to being carnivores, as much as it is safe to say that our having been carnivores led us to evolve in the manner that we did.
All of that having been said, I can’t stand vegetarians, can’t stand PETA, can’t stand the “Meat is Murder” crowd, and I am going for a good Persian kebab meal this evening.
This is a horrible outrage. I encourage people to go vegetarian, but they must keep proper nutrition in mind.
I mean, for God’s sake, when the comet hits, I don’t want a herd of emaciated hippys on my hands. It’s that light marbeling of fat, after all, that’ll give ‘em a perfect flavor.
Speciation, it’s what’s for dinner…
Our digestive system would seem to indicate that most of our food should come from non-meat sources, with a smattering of meat here and there. A carnivore’s digestive system is relatively simple and small. It’s just there to process the nutrients from the meat before being shat out. Our intestines are more complex and are quite a bit longer, which would indicate that we are built to process large amounts of flora and small amounts of meat.
Unlike pure carnivores, we won’t die if we don’t eat meat. Thanks to our wonderfully built digestive system, we can adapt to changing food patterns, although the high amount of fat in modern western diets seems to be a bit too much for a body designed to roam the Serengheti.
So I think you’ve got it backwards. Plants are the staple. The meat’s a treat.
Yeah, John, we can live on an all-veggie diet, unlike carnivores. However, we can *also* live on an all-meat diet. Like carnivores.
I’m vegetarian because I feel physically better that way…nothing ethical about it…but I didn’t put my infant on a vegetarian diet, for G*d’s sake!
Besides, these folks are clearly not interested in vegetarian issues. At 10 pounds, the kid was starving to death. These are just ‘garden-variety’ child abusers/attempted murderers.
Sarge is right to a degree; meat was traditionally a rare treat for our ancestors (depending on which ancestors and how far back you look). It’s also important to remember that with the level of crapulance pre-technological humanity existed in, high-caloric plant material wasn’t so easy to come buy either.
We’ve had bread, the staple of most diets, for at most 15,000 years. before that, it’s pretty much eat whatever you can get your grubby hands on, plant, animal, or mud.
In chimps, meat is an exceptional treat. Males can get sex by giving a half-rotten spider monkey corpse to their favorite female. If only it was that easy for humans.
Evolution would appear to be a double edged sword, Captain Mojo.
We got the frontal lobe, but gave up the easy sex for half-rotten spider monkey corpses. Of course, little pieces of fiat currency substitute for animal carcasses. The chimps don’t get arrested for it, though.
“Vegetables aren’t food.
Vegetables are what food eats.”
“However, we can *also* live on an all-meat diet. Like carnivores.”? Wrongo. On an all meat diet scurvy would set in in a couple of months. As the symptons of scurvy include rotting gums and tooth loss you would find your mighty canines and incisors are quite useless when sitting in your
dresser drawer. As the planet currently includes about 1,000,000,000 vegetarians, of whom I am not one, who are otherwise healthy, and exactly 0 pure human carnivores we should note that this poor child is not a victim of vegetarianism, but starvation.
Wow, you’ve counted them?
Me, I’m all for the occasional nice, juicy steak. Cows are tasty.
Actually, the scurvy and other vitamin deficiencies are caused by exclusively eating muscle meat – if you include all organ meats (liver, stomach, intestine, brain, lungs, etc.. – not me, yuck!), you will get more of the necessary nutrients. As full-time carnivores do. But yes, we are ommivores and ideally should have a balanced diet – we have a medium-sized digestive tract, longer than a carnivore’s, and shorter than a herbivore’s. Plus, there is no fiber in meat – and life without fiber is not fun….
But the absolute tip-off of the utter stupidity and knee-jerk ideological vegetarian orientation of these people is the refusal to breast-feed the baby. Beacuse these idiots are against drinking milk, they refuse to give the one food that is designed by evolution to feed a baby better than any other, being used for the purpose it was intended (cow’s milk is meant for calves, which is why it can cause problems for humans, sometimes). If they had just done that one thing (and kept it up – babies should and used to be breast fed for a lot longer than they generally are nowadays), the baby would probably have been OK, as long as the mother was very, very careful with her diet.
They didn’t even have to breast-feed her. Formula would have done just as well (well, maybe not *just* as well, but better than what they apparently gave her – vegetables, fruit, and grains, from the reports I’ve seen).
As it is, if this went on for sixteen months before it was discovered, I suspect that baby now has neurological deficits that she will never, ever recover from. You can’t starve a baby of protein without permanent repercussions.
As regards the all-meat diet, arctic peoples survive most of their lives on what they can hunt. Or at least they did until they got snow-mobiles, general stores, and Jenifer Lopez videos. Also interesting to note obesity rates for these people once they get access to dense carbohydrates, like bread and twinkies.
Liver is a life-saver, and when these folks kill an animal, they cut it out and eat it right there on the spot.
1) Predatory animals do not get Vitamin C from their diets,
they manufacture it internally.
2) Eskimos, (An Algonquin word for “Eaters of raw flesh”), eat the stomach contents of their prey as part of their “all meat” diet, doesn’t sound too unappetizing once you’ve tried the great Chinese delicacy Birds Nest Soup. As regards the consumption of livers, eating that of a polar bear is the only known way of dying of a Vitamin A overdose, that of a seal is not only OK, it’s something I’d like to try.
3) Among vegetarians the disorders of haemerrhoids, constipation, gout, hiatial hernias, obesity and diverticulitis among others, are virtually unknown. The only disorder I know of from too many veggies is that the overconsumption of squash will turn your skin orange.