From the questionnaire and answer in wolf's links:
Question:
Quote:
|
6) Regarding a vegetarian diet, do you believe that humans are naturally vegetarians even though many human biological traits point toward a varied diet? For example, our teeth structure, enzyme make-up, enlarged brain (which is not really needed for grazing), and muscle ratio.
|
Answer:
Quote:
|
6) “John” should brush up on human anatomy. Human bodies are better suited for a vegetarian diet than a meat-based one. Carnivorous animals have claws, a short digestive tract, and long, curved fangs. In contrast, humans have flat, flexible nails, a long digestive tract, flat molars, and two tiny canine teeth that are better suited for biting into fruits than tearing through tough hides.
|
It seems Heather Moore needs to brush up too, so she can see past where her mindset let's her. She's basically correct with what she's saying, but she's coming to the wrong conclusions. It's true the human has tracts that allow him to partially digest and process vegetable matter. The human's molars are pretty flat and better suited to grinding than shearing. And compared to carnivores, the canines are pretty tiny and don't grip well. However, the fact remains that:
1) the human stomach and its workings can process fleshy matter more efficiently on the whole than vegetable matter, which at best gets partially processed,
2) the human canine is tiny, but they aren't made for biting fruit, that's what the human incisors are for, human canines are there to help maintain a grip when pulling, be it pulling meat of a bone or pulling that chunk of apple off the core,
3) while the human animal alone is not very well suited for bringing down an animal, the brain that comes standard with the model is capable for out-thinking potential prey instead of outrunning/overpowering it, if our ancestors had solely relied on being about to sneak up on and jump onto, say, a healthy deer and try and bite its throat out or wrestle it to the ground, we frankly wouldn't be here,
4) the PETA mentality appears to totally forget that there are creatures known as omnivores, that possess traits of both carnivores AND herbivores, meaning they can and should eat some of BOTH types of foods to maintain the body,
5) the human animal is an opportunistic eater by nature, if there is a substance available that the human knows he can eat without getting sick, he'll eat it, be it that interesting tuber he found growing nearby or that whale he and his tribe harpooned and brought back to shore,
Yes, humans have mechanics and history for planteating and humans have mechanics and history for flesheating. It's rather silly to deny one in favor of the other for ideological reasons. And I wonder where she gets off saying that having meat in your diet at all makes it 'meat-based'. That would mean the diet is mostly meat with a vegetable here or there. Yet, to follow a vegetarian diet, there should be no meat period, right? My diet, for example, consists of about 80% grainbased stuff (pasta, breads, rice, et al) and 20% meat. My diet is hardly based on meat but I would still be met with the same scrutiny for that 20%. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems a PETA diehard's concept of meatbased means any diet with more than 0% meat in it. If it doesn't, where are the standards set? Why so aribitrary? Easier to shout at people passing by, I guess.
Regarding the questionairre answers though, I really would like to hear the Heather's PETA brand answer for #14, if she could get off her high (well-treated, oat-and-apple-fed, loved-like-a-brother) horse long enough to answer it.