meat, meat, meat, meat.
i can't believe this thread is still on the first page.

honestly, there are far greater ethical concerns plaguing the universe than how my food was treated prior to me eating it. i know this little slice of evil is something that is actually within an individual's control, but if you really want to save the world, then use your energies elsewhere. remember, the very fact that you can choose what you eat is a luxury that many people in this world will never know...

I'm not fond of this bubu fella, and not just because he blatantly ripped off my username.

:laughing:
I was wondering when you'd say something about that.

If you say "bubu" then "booboo" out loud "bubu" sounds kind of like a homosexual dual personality.

(No I'm not calling him or you gay.)

http://catcows.files.wordpress.com/2...g-on-plate.jpg

Even that doesn't put you off?! You heartless cow.

(I'm the same, if needs be I'd eat that dog.)

On a related note, I quite liked this one when I first saw it :

http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a2...POSTERcopy.jpg

It's not actually pro vegetarian though, but rather a parody of "save the baby seals" posters/arguments .. :p:

If I didn't prepare it ;)

I hate vegetarian propaganda so much

Why? It's amusing for the most part.

But aren't the little animals on the stickers stuck in the stalls of every highschool bath room cute?

what sort of advice is this? you admit in the preceding clause that this is something within our control, why should someone who wants to make a difference devote their energy elsewhere? and what are these far greater ethical concerns? the way humans treat the living beings with whom we share this planet seems like a rather large, valid concern. sure there are others, perhaps a few you might consider "greater" but i don't see how that means we should divert attention from this issue.

http://cn1.kaboodle.com/hi/img/2/0/0...AAAAAD2SNw.jpg

This is my favourite. I have it on my guitar case.

i recall a discussion i had with my vegetarian cousin last year. she was shoe shopping, and was adamant about not buying anything made from animal products. it was a major driving force that completely shaped the shopping event.

once she chose a pair, i asked her if she was also concerned about the possibility that the non-leather designer shoes she was about to buy were produced in sweat shops by children. she hadn't thought of that...

as we spoke about it, i realized her behavior was a trend. she always stopped to check the ingredients of the food stuffs she bought, but never once thought about who was picking her Starbucks coffee beans.

my point is that vegetarians are a so passionate about their little fight, but they are often oblivious to other, more pressing issues.

I disagree, looks like a tasty nugget to me.

Also what kind of guitar do you have?

Meh. I'm not big on beans at all.

I already don't like you.

Everyone has seen these videos and no one is oblivious to what meat industries do. But for you to think anyone can be swayed to your point of view from watching a PETA video is incredibly insulting.

If you don't support the meat industry solely because of their treatment of animals, then you could easily look for organic meat products, which is what I'd recommend to anyone who only has a problem with meat because of the treatment of animals and issues like steroids and so on.

A f*cking PETA video isn't gonna convince anyone that ALL meat eating is bad under any circumstances, if you were swayed into believing that, you're easily swayable.

I agree with you, Tore, that compassion for non-human animals is mostly an evolutionary byproduct of our ability to have compassion (for certain) people. My observation is that humans have the innate ability to feel empathy and caring for others, both human and non-human animals, but environment has a big hand in shaping whom we include within the circle of compassion.

Evidence that whom we care about, and don't want to eat, is primarily learned rather than inherited:

(1) Some people truly love their pets, wanting these individual animals to have full, long and happy lives for the pets' sake, and they would adamantly refuse to eat their pets. This shows that people, even meat-eaters, *can* feel great compassion for animals. If people can feel compassion for one animal, two animals, three animals, etc., then they have the capacity to feel it for more.

(2) People who are meat-eaters sometimes convert to vegetarianism for emotional, ethical reasons: they begin to feel regret about killing and eating an animal...just like you would feel regret about killing and eating a human. People's emotions toward animals can change and are *not* fixed.

(3) People's compassion for other humans is *very* much shaped by their environment/culture...and so it is logical to conclude that the degree to which they value animals' lives is also greatly affected by experiences/culture.

If you have not done so, I recommend you read some Holocaust concentration camp survivors' accounts of people's brutality and callousness toward other humans, for example Ana Novac's The Beautiful Days of My Youth, or Schoschana Rabinovici's Thanks to My Mother. Also, observe the development of genocides (common around the world) and the policies that exacerbated them. For example, the U.S. intentionally limited the number of Jewish people who could come here during WWII, even after the U.S. government knew of the Holocaust and what such limitations would cause: more deaths.

History and the present show that people are very capable of feeling other humans' lives have little or no value, just as people are capable of feeling animals' lives are of little or no value.

I agree with you that people are not meat-eating machines: many thoughts are involved in the process by which people learn to feel that some other individual, whether human or non-human animal, has no inherent worth and is expendable. However, I feel people do sometimes end up as meat-eating machines, lacking feelings and thoughts as they eat animals as if those animals were no different than oranges. Remorseless. Unperturbed. Unable to comprehend or be affected by the fact that the victim's life had value to her.

Because people feed massive quantities of grain to livestock animals, removing meat from the human diet would in fact free up more food (protein, carbohydrates, vitamins) as grain, vegetables, and beans to feed to people...and it would reduce the use of resources such as fresh water and petroleum, which are guzzled by the animal industry.

If humanity right now tried to raise all livestock "free-range," the quantity of meat that people could consume would plummet...either that, or the human population would have to be severely reduced to maintain (or achieve) the current per capita level of meat consumption.

I agree with you, Freebase, that my vegan wishes are far from the values of most humans. I am not trying to get compromise by asking just for compromise; I am trying to show that people can go farther than compromise, and that the benefits of doing so outweigh the negatives some feel exist.

I agree with you that people are naive when they believe this easy-get developed, industrialized life (in the developed world) is forever. Eventually, when petroleum and coal runs out (in the not-to-distant future), our standard of living by some measures will decrease. Hopefully during that time we will work to help raise the standards of living of the billions of people living on a few dollars a day...and not decimate what remains of natural ecosystems through direct destruction and climate change.

I do not "look to nature" to support humans eating meat because (1) people do not require meat in their diets to live healthful lives, (2) efficiency in nature can be cruel and undesirable.

Freebase, do you feel justified in feeling any set of values is better than another, or do you follow relativism?

I feel the Nazi ideal of killing Jewish people was wrong, and assume you do, too. I feel it was wrong when the U.S. military exploded women and a child in Iraq to capture al-Zaqawi USATODAY.com - Military says bomb killed Zarqawi. (I wrote the newspapers about my horror at this "U.S. success.") I assume you also dislike it when the U.S. accepts killing people as "collateral damage" to achieve goals. Finally, I feel it is wrong to raise animals to kill them and "harvest" their parts, even though doing so has some benefits for people.

All my moral stands have the same basis: I have the ideal that it is good to let sentient beings live and enjoy their lives, and I feel this is a better ideal than wanting to kill others and take pleasure from their deaths. I do not feel I am "better" overall than you, Freebase (I know you know I quite like you despite...or maybe because of ;)...our chafing) but I do feel my ideal for how people should treat animals is kinder than yours.

DeathBreath, I think many people who feel eating animals is acceptable simply don't *feel* empathy for animals, and so such movies don't stir them...as you can see from responses in this thread. When people feel another individual's life is of little value (not worth saving, for that individual's sake), then the movies that affect you and me will not have an effect on them.

Here's a short movie I'd like people to watch so they can share their reactions: a young man and some friends surround a frightened lamb (they call it "Jumpy"), preparing to decapitate it, and the movie shows the "hilarious" decapitation. I am revolted by their lack of concern for this animal...they reduce its life and death to a joke. My guess is DeathBreath and other vegetarians feel the same. I wonder what most meat-eaters feel when they watch this movie and hear the giddy laughter of the videographer?
Lamb Slaughter: the decapitation

Hahaha it does NOT look like a tasty nugget! xD
I have a Jasmine Takamine, lemme find it.

I doesn't look like much, in the picture.
But I liked that it didn't have a glossy finish like a lot of acoustic guitars do.

http://www.cheapguitaronsale.com/ima...Natural%29.bmp

Also, I meant I have it on my guitar case, I don't keep stickers on my guitar. Hehe.
I have a bunch of stickers on it, and all of the vegan and vegetarian ones were from some concert., you know how they hand those out, I'm sure.
Most of them are bands and such, though.

I think I should've written that edit a bit better perhaps. I didn't mean to say your compassion for non-humans is completely wired.

When it comes to human social interactions (like cannibalism), my point was more that as a highly social species, I think we favour strategies that are likely to result in peaceful interactions with other people. I don't think most of us extend that sort of concern to animals. Basically, at some level there is a difference between humans and other animals that is important which has nothing to do with intelligence or capacity for pain. At some point, I think most of us have more concern for humans than other species animals simply because they are humans. This is what I think is wired as in it's been a general adaptive trait in our evolutionary history.

Culture can of course turn everything upside down and play havoc with what I just wrote, for example by the way it defines the "us" and "them" as you point out. This is something I of course am well aware of but chose to disregard as I don't think it falsifies my original assumption that we in general tend to elevate humans over other animals when it comes to moral considerations. I think holocaust and so on are examples that took place despite this capacity.

The whole point of my edit was really just to suggest that to humans in general, other humans are not simply animals like a cow or pig. Although it can be explained by culture, I think it's also part explained by our biology. If you accept that, using logic as a way to say we could just as well eat humans as non-human animals then fails (we're not machines, we're humans!).

edit :

I'm talking about general trends here - averages - which I tend to assume is a given! Certainly there are cultures who treat certain people "worse" than animals and cultures that eat other humans, though I'm not sure in the latter if the role of humans in the diet is normally explained by them being regarded as food. There may be other cultural reasons why people want to be cannibals.

I'd say that at the heart of matters I adhere to variants of relativism with personal caveats. But for practicality, I'm far more flexible.

Ultimately, I don't think anything is sacred at all, but there are many reasons why one should believe the opposite. Civilization depends on it. But stripping away all the societal obligations, the illusion of unity for anything other than survival, the technology, the politics, the religion, the morality, the ideals and the "intelligence" to understand it all.. we're just animals like the rest of nature's beasts.
But since we are who we are, my accepted man-made morality includes only the simple rule of regarding other human life like you would your own.
If I were an animal out in nature with no better sense, I'd generally be doing the same.

I pretty much agree with your whole post, Tore. I think, though, that I feel people have a greater ability than you think to see other humans as useful, exploitable beings rather than as beings with inherent worth.

I've read that tribal humans (during our hunter-gatherer phase) would meet a person from another tribe, sit down and figure out if they were distant relatives, and, if not, try to kill (and eat) each other. I think humans generally care most strongly about close family...and sometimes even that breaks down.

People like to eat. Sometimes that just seems to be more important to them than almost all other concerns. The Neandertals' bones have a lot of cut marks in them...suggesting humans ate them, regardless of how similar they were to our human ancestors. I often think that if people could bring back the dinosaurs, people would just eat them, too.

Sometimes I feel we humans can be very selfish and self-centered and that bothers me when the result of our self-centered actions is to cause others to suffer.

Everything you said, Freebase, is almost exactly what I would say about myself. I also don't think anything, ultimately, is sacred, but I have many reasons for my self-created morality. I do feel very much that I'm just an animal like the rest of nature's beasts. And I do try to treat other human life as I would my own. Thanks for answering!

I agree it is healthy to try to understand people's views and motives. At the very least, it lets us know each other better.

The reason vegetarianism vs. eating animals is a tricky issue, I feel, is that choosing what or whom one eats *isn't* a personal choice: it directly affects other beings.

The best non-meat analogy I could give would be circumcision. Some people feel that whether or not a parent decides to have the genitals of a child cut "is the parent's personal choice." Yet it is obvious that parental choice over circumcision isn't a *personal* choice, because the child is the one affected and cut against its will.

Similarly, eating meat destroys the whole body of an animal against its will, so deciding to eat an animal isn't solely a personal choice.

Technically meat eating isn't natural. The only reason humans began to eat meat in the first place is out of desperation. We originated in areas that were optimal for growing vegetables.

But anyway, a lot of vegans aren't technically against the whole concept of meat eating, even though it does more bad than good. It's more about factory farming and the amount of environment pollution it's contributing to. Plus, the treatment of animals in these factories is one of the most sickening things you will ever witness.

As for me, becoming a vegan has been one of the best things I've ever done. I'm healthier than ever and I've learned a lot about sustainable living.

Riloux Gartier! Greetings from a fellow vegan! There aren't many of us on here (or anywhere in the world), so I am interested in learning more about your views and your journey to them.

I feel that eating animals is natural in the sense that we evolved the ability to digest them and many people *do* eat animals (so it definitely happens "in nature" and thus is "natural"). People even eat pennies...so even that could be argued to be "natural," of course. Whether eating animals is ethical behavior toward animals or good for you or the planet are the questions that interest me.

I think you and I, as vegans, are very aware that a well-planned vegan diet is just as good as an animal-base diet, and has definite health advantages over diets containing animal products, since vegan diets usually include more healthful plant compounds and less saturated fat (and of course no cholesterol). It is very difficult, for example, to die from heart disease when one is vegan.

I agree with you that becoming vegetarian and then vegan was for me one of the best choices I made in my life and one of the ones that I am happiest about. And I'm aware of all the sustainability benefits of vegan diets!

Now, this is interesting that you say "a lot of vegans aren't technically against the whole concept of meat eating, even though it does more bad than good." My general impression is that most vegans are against the concept of humans eating meat and any animal product (as well as using materials made from animals).

However, I mentioned earlier in a thread that a vegan I knew gave her dogs fresh steaks from cows people killed after raising the cows on pasture. So, she was trying to give her dogs the best care. I'm not sure how she rationalized over the intentional human slaughter of one sentient being to feed it to another sentient being...especially when dogs *are* omnivores and vegetarian dog food exists!

When a meat diet has been a tremendously important part of our evolutionary history with consequences for our whole biology which includes stuff like brain size and the shape of our bodies, how can you say it's unnatural? And you say we come from places "optimal for growing vegetables". Meat in our diet happened a long, long time before agriculture. It's a matter of a diet change measurable in millions of years ago (meat eating) compared to something that first happened some thousands of years ago (agriculture).

Vegetarianism was not an option for the average healthy human not long ago. In most places on our planet, such a diet would lack essential nutrients. Being a vegetarian is feasible in modern societies today because you can have vegetables grown on every continent on your plate to fulfill your nutritional needs. Needless to say, it's not long ago that most couldn't. In Norway (where I'm from), that would've been a real problem up until not very long ago at all, probably easily measurable by decades.

I think you should reconsider what you think of as natural or not. ;)

Maybe the dog didn't want to be vegetarian.

I thought this was supposed to be about animal rights not imposing your own opinions on others.

All that you say is correct, Tore, based on my understanding of human history and modern society. It will be interesting to hear Riloux's response.

You chilly grassland people in Norway wouldn't have fared well without some sort of animals in the diet. And even if early Norwegians had just raised cattle and used cow's milk, I don't think people have bred cows yet who can give milk without being pregnant and giving birth...and so one always ends up with a growing cow population. This, of course, leads people to want to kill and eat some of the cows (or calves).

A big disincentive to following vegetarianism in countries that have grassy hills that aren't suitable for cultivation is financial, since people's options for earning a living would be severely decreased if they couldn't base their livelihood on raising animals and killing them. I assume Norway doesn't have much arable land? I think I recall you said it didn't.

Well, Urban, I think if you asked a dog if she minded being vegetarian, she might say, "Woof," and then salivate all over the vegetarian kibbles, so you could take that as a no. ;)

The real test would be to offer a juicy bloody steak in one bowl, and some prime veggie kibble in the next bowl, and see what happens. My guess is the dog would eat both (though prefer the steak)!

But you are right...one does have to consider what is best for a pet and what the pet would like. The basic conflict for a vegan is this: if you are someone who values animals' rights (to life, to choice, etc.), then how can you feel right about killing one animal to feed to another? I think many vegans probably try to avoid such killing as much as possible.

So here's a question, since you point out veganism is about animals rights: Would the pet want to be a pet in the first place? When I see dogs with their owners, the dogs look happy. But when I see dogs meet up with another dog on the street...WHOA!!! Those dogs go ape-shit with joy! They are excited! They pull on the chain! They can't wait to sniff each other's butt! They want to play and romp! Even more than they want to do this with humans.

I really think dogs prefer to be with other dogs. So, should we be keeping them in our homes and in kennels when we're gone? Should we limit their access to their own species, just so we have someone to pet? After all...we have each other to pet...isn't that enough? ;)

i would be very interested in seeing some archaeological evidence to support these unusual claims.

Does arable mean land suitable for growing vegetables? :p: I've never seen that word before, but from context, it seems a likely assumption.

Not much of Norway is suitable for growing vegetables. I did check up on some numbers, but that was a long time ago. Without modern fertilizers, I guess it must've been even harder. We have a lot of rocky mountainsides and the like where certain sheep and cows do well, but where it's very hard to grow veggies.

Yep, Tore, arable land would be suitable for growing vegetables. "Arable" sounds like something you'd do with a bull. Actually, that isn't far off, because early agriculturalists eventually often used livestock to pull plows...though to this day some agriculture depends only on human labor.

Wikipedia says:

I'd say your rocky Norwegian mountainsides are *not* arable! Probably pretty hard to plow up there. Or on the tundra where the mites thrive.;)

People have been putting up videos and such so maybe I could come with a recommendation as well :p: This guy here is Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall :

http://i.thisislondon.co.uk/i/pix/20...fw_415x275.jpg

In 1999, his series Escape to River Cottage aired in England. In the series, he's fed up with his urban life and so he moves to the Dorset countryside to become a smallholder. The series is about him building up his new life as a smallholder which includes caring for the animals he gets and doing activities like pressing cider, baking or fishing with other locals.

Anyways, he's a chef by trade so there's quite a bit of cooking involved and he's put some effort into food awareness. There's a spin-off series called the River Cottage Treatment where urbans with pretty horrible diets come to live the river cottage lifestyle and pick up some knowledge about the food we eat. During their stay, they also visit abbatoirs and chicken farms and the like so that the people gain some knowledge about the food they eat .. and some of them turn vegetarians after that.

The show itself is not pro-vegetarian, but rather about awareness about where animal products come from and how animals are treated. Hugh himself keeps and kills his own animals, a power which I believe comes with responsibility and he knows it, does it well and promotes that kind of thinking. That's the kind of meat eating I feel I can support 100% and whether you agree or not, I think the show would appeal to both vegetarians and meat eaters.

River Cottage Treatment is not as good as his regular series, though. Warmly recommended to anyone who's ever dreamed of living in the country. :D

The human brain began to grow when humans had to deal with increased social interaction. That social interaction tends to follow hunting, since unlike with gathering, huge ammounts of calories could be ingested in what were occasional bonanzas of meat. This led to an increase in the complexity of social behaviors, including finding how to rise in rank with procurement of meat and other animal products, which were rare, and a luxury... since meat was not nessesary for growth or development; but it was a rare case of having large ammounts of fats+protein calories for the group. It was the gatherings that resulted from harvests (of veggies) and finding meat that led to increased brain complexity, not the item being eaten. By that logic lions would be the most intelligent (at things like math and reading of all) animal on earth.

Health is relative to the time period. It changes with the advent of new Knowledge/technology/education The average "Healthy" human in the 1800s would very rarely live to see 50.

Riloux Gartier, I am confused by your quote above, which seems to point out that you feel hunting animals inspired social interactions that triggered increased human intellect, yet meat-eating wasn't so important since the social interaction itself was the key factor in the evolution of our human intellect.

If it were true that meat-eating partly encouraged the social interactions that were an important force in human evolution (which is under debate), then it sounds as if you are stating exactly what Tore stated: that meat-eating had an important evolutonary role.

You suggest that meat-eating may not have been of primary importance in the development of traits we associate with Homo sapiens that distinguish us from our ancestors, such as smaller teeth, and this is true. Some scientists hypothesize that the ability of early hominids to control fire and use it to cook tubers may have selected for many of the traits that distinguish humans from earlier ancestors (australopithecines). After all, human ancestors were hunting animals and eating meat for millions of years without developing the extent of social, intellectual, and physical traits humans have, suggesting that meat-eating was not by itself a driving force in development of these traits:

So, it is very possible that meat-eating was not a key factor in the development of human traits such as pair-bonding and smaller teeth and even cleverer, social brains. However, simply because carnivores like lions, whom you mention, are not as intellectual as we are does not mean that meat-eating did not play an important role in human evolution during the past.

Homo sapiens and our hominid ancestors, Homo erectus and before them, australopithecines, naturally do/did have the ability to digest meat; therefore, I view the ability to digest meat as "natural" and as being an adaptive, beneficial trait that conferred reproductive advantages on those who possessed it. This is the reason humans are still biologically omnivores.

Here's an article in the journal Human Evolution that points out that humans have the capacity to eat mostly plant-based diets or mostly meat-based diets.

If the ability to digest meat were a neutral trait (rather than a beneficial trait that increases reproductive fitness), then we would expect to see among humans some who have lost the ability to digest meat (making them obligate herbivores). Since this is not the case, I conclude that the ability to digest meat has been an important trait among humans during evolutionary history; those who lacked this ability would have been less likely to "exploit their environment" and produce as many children as those of our ancestors who ate whomever they could catch while also gathering edible plant material.

Most importantly, I feel the exact role of meat-eating in human evolution is not important now for deciding whether people can or should be vegetarians, which I view to be a health and ethical issue.

In the not-too-distant past, before vitamin B-12 was synthesized by organic chemists, humans would not have had the ability to survive at all as vegans, since the concentration of this essential vitamin in free-living bacteria (upon leaves or in soil on plants that are eaten) is very low. In order to survive, our recent ancestors appear to have needed a more plentiful source of vitamin B-12 than soil or plant microbes provide. When humans moved into areas (such as Norway) where edible plant material was perhaps scarce but animals were plentiful, humans could only survive by eating diets heavy with animal parts.

Some animals (such as cows) are able to obtain sufficient vitamin B-12 through their gut bacteria. This is not the case for humans, nor for other primates:
I accept that natural selection has resulted in humans needing an exogenous source of vitamin B-12. I feel this has no bearing on whether or not we choose to be vegan, Riloux Gartier (assuming we have access to synthetic vitamin B-12).

Tore, thanks for the video documentary suggestion! I'll try to find it and view it. That sounds interesting!

Like Vegangelica mentioned, I think that what you write more supports what I wrote - that a meat diet has had tremendous importance to our evolution - than counter it. You write yourself that gatherings after hunting has promoted social interactions, although I would say the hunt itself must have promoted some as well. It takes a lot of cooperation from humans to hunt animals sometimes. To illustrate the point, it would take a lot of cooperation I'm sure to bring down a mammoth. Although I don't think our smartness is explained by any one thing, I think a lifestyle that involves hunting animals helps promote it more than one that has people gathering fruits and veggies.

Have you heard the argument that humans are highly undeveloped when born compared to an adult and that to become an adult, the brain has to go through much growth which requires a lot of B12 and other vitamins as well as proteins and fat? This is stuff you easily get from a meat diet, but not so easily from fruits and roots. The argument is that without meat and fat in our diets, we would be so contrained by our food that evolution to the current size of our brain wouldn't even be a likely possibility. It illustrates the importance of meat for eating in our evolution.

There's another point as well which relates more to behaviour which is that while our stomachs got smaller, our brains got bigger as we shifted from mainly plant diets to including more meat. When we were herbivores, we had to spend more time eating and more energy digesting as plants are tough to digest. Meat is more easily digestible, gives quick energy, gives you more time to do things other than think about the next meal and so on. A herbivore diet constraints animals in that they need to spend more time eating and digesting. Getting rid of this constraint allowed us to evolve other behaviours.

I can't say that all of this is true always and everywhere, but it seems logical to me and I'd like to see what others think about it.

I think people shouldn't eat meat as often as we do. It's not about animal cruelty, your own body tells you that you don't really need to eat too much meat.

I think meat is good if cooked and prepared well, though fish is the best meat to eat

bubu, what are some reasons you feel eating meat doesn't have to do with animal cruelty?

I read an interesting article in the Des Moines Register on May 2, 2010, in which an animal industry representative, David Martosko, shared his prepared response for activists who say killing livestock is murder: "Eating meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder."

I think his response shows the livestock industry recognizes that raising animals and killing them involves cruelty, but this doesn't matter to some in the animal industry because they feel the tastiness of meat is the most important reason for eating animals and trumps ethical concerns.

The article, "Ag industry defender criticizes humane group," is the last one on this page, in case you want to read the source of the quote: Green Fields: Vilsack says criticism is 'total nonsense' | desmoinesregister.com | The Des Moines Register)

Tore, I've actually read that it wasn't so much the meat in the diet that encouraged the increase in brain complexity and size (and shrinkage of gut length), but the cooking of food in general, which allows greater nutrient acquisition from a given quantity of food (both plant and animal), and also preserves the food (allowing storage and hoarding). However, are you talking about very early in hominid development, before the evolution of Homo sapiens?

Who gives a sh1t about little fury things that have no other fate but to be killed by something else for sustenance?

Boo hoo hoo

Living creatures. Boo hoo hoo.

Nature's a cold bitch.

btw

Loving the aftertaste of this nice, fat juicy steak I ate tonight.

If you're here just to piss people off, we can fix this real quick.