Why Don't We Eat Carnivores?

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Humans eat a lot of different animals, but almost none of them are carnivores - why?

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Biomagnification: the process by which substances (usually harmful ones) in the natural environment gradually increase in concentration along the food chain
- Trophic level: A level or position in a food chain, a food web, or an ecological pyramid.
- Herbivore: an organism that mostly feeds on plants
- Omnivore: an organism that feeds on plants and animals
- Carnivore: an organism that eats exclusively - or almost exclusively - animals.

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REFERENCES
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Leroy F, Smith NW, Adesogan AT, Beal T, Iannotti L, Moughan PJ, Mann N. The role of meat in the human diet: evolutionary aspects and nutritional value. Anim Front. 2023 Apr 15;13(2):11-18. doi: 10.1093/af/vfac093

Koster JM, Hodgen JJ, Venegas MD et al. (2010) Is Meat Flavor a Factor in Hunters’ Prey Choice Decisions?. Hum Nat 21, 219–242. doi: 10.1007/s12110-010-9093-1

[imveryangryitsnotbutter]

CGP Grey summarized it best: "Ten pounds of grass make a pound of cow, and ten pounds of cow make a pound of tiger. But cow and tiger have the same amount of calories, so you might as well just eat the cow."

[lonelyPorterCH]

I could think of many things:
- their diet is too expensive
- you cannot herd them
- they might attack you
- they are probably territorial, no chance of having lots of them in a small area

[ommin]

For most of human history, eating a carnivore would've just been HARD. Why fight a bear for it's meat when you could hunt a deer, where you'd be less likely to get injured and die? Then as a course, we'd never develop the taste/immune system/etc. for eating predators.

[mantellim]

Carnivores dont primarily eat carnivores either, with the exception of fish

[AM-ukjv]

Conversely for seafood, we humans predominantly eat carnivorous fish, while we rarely eat herbivorous fish. Herbivore fish taste like the plants they eat. Which isn't good.

[JanSenCheng]

I think you kinda missed what's imo the big one: we don't just eat herbivores, we specifically eat ruminants and fowl (and pork, which is also the most common meat, but I'll get back to that), which are animals that eat grass and seeds. Specifically, those are things that human derive little to no nutrition from, but are incredibly abundant. For most of human history (really, all of it prior to the Second Agricultural Revolution), we didn't grow food to feed animals, we just let them graze on otherwise unused grassland or hay, which is effectively a byproduct of the grains we actually eat. As such, they were basically a way of converting inedible plant matter into stuff we can actually eat.

Pigs are the big exception to that, in that they don't eat grasses primarily. However, they do eat anything. All of the waste and scraps that get produced by people can be fed to pigs, and they'll also happily find food in an otherwise barren field.

Basically, the reason we eat those animals primarily is just because those animals were effectively no-effort food sources at a time when food production was the vast majority of human labour.

[RustedCrown]

i find it really funny you use an aligator in a farm as an example of "we don't farm carnivores" when infact we litterally have aligator farms for their meat in Louisiana

[atech]

More prey species than predators in the wild. Eating predators would simply drive many species into extinction. Many Apex predators are on conservation list.

I'll add another possible reason: humans used to be hunter-gatherers, and hunting a carnivore probably was way too dangerous to be worth the effort

[peacefulinvasion]

The real reason is that once we started farming our food, we went for the meat that was easy to raise. That cow is huge, takes less resources to produce, and won't turn you to food.

Lions are big enough to feed a village, however theyre expensive to feed and would gladly have you for supper.

[prak]

You missed the basic point, carnivores usually reproduce at lower numbers and lower frequency than herbivores.
It is easier to extinct tigers than sheep.

[zsarke]

Australia markets croc meat. Both grain fed and meat fed. Croc meat changes colour, texture and flavour depending on what it was fed

[fabiobeka]

I'm no expert but hunting or herding tigers seems a lot harder then hunting or herding rabbits.

[Krypto]

A point about the inefficiency of cows, though, which I think is important to point out

Historically, raising cattle (not just cows but sheep and goats too) was done in areas where it was hard to grow crops, but where grass grew readily. Humans can't eat grass, so it was an easy way to turn inedible calories into edible ones. It didn't matter that it took 10000 calories of grass to make 1000 calories of cow because those 10000 calories of grass were useless to us. It wasn't that different from the fish example.

Then we started growing crops to feed the cattle tho, which kind of defeats the purpose of having the cattle in the first place. But originally at least, it made perfect sense.

[Rafael-cc]

You are not even considering that hunting a deer is significantly easier than hunting a cougar

[timothynguyen]

Isn’t that pig 2:13 from Gravity Falls?

[maheshwarannarayanan]

Back in the old days, carnivores were harder to hunt and the reward to risk ratio was not worth it, in the present times, it is very difficult and inefficient to grow carnivores for food, so it is highly practical to eat herbivores

[copium]

my theory is back in the days we had animals at farms. Its easier to find grass for a cow than there is to find 800 rabbits for a wolf...

[robertmcauslan]

This is more “why we don’t farm carnivores” more so than “why we don’t eat carnivores”. We eat plenty of carnivores but farm very little of them.

[brianedwards]

I read this morning of a croc that was shot because it was stalking people and eating dogs. The body was donated to the local aboriginal community who held a feast.