fun fact: cows are carnivores. CW: baby chicken being eaten alive
Removed by modNSFW
Removed by modNSFW
fun fact: cows are carnivores. CW: baby chicken being eaten alive
Removed by modNSFWThe video is to prove a point really fast, but, cows actually do only eat proteins. They have three stomachs that they use to feed grass to bacterial colonies, which they then pull into their fourth stomach to eat, with any of the grass that's left un-eaten by the bacteria being shit straight out without being processed any further. They don't eat the grass, the grass is there to feed what they do eat, which is supplemented by eating any large animal small enough to fit in their mouth. I read a study once that almost all cows when dissected had at least 1 animal in their digestive system at a time.
The notion that cows are good peaceful harmless herbivores who eat nothing but grass is nonsense. Here's a video of a cow eating the corpse of a donkey. Of note: there's grass right next to the body. And it isn't just a result of cows being fucked up by human domestication, wild deer (who you cannot blame on humans malnourishing it or contaminating its feed or whatever) do it too.
constructing an elaborate worldview out of a kindergarten level understanding of biology and then getting extremely smug about it annoys me relentlessly. Cows would eat you if they had the chance
The food chain is made up by humans for humans to justify our mistreatment of animals. It's anthropocentrism dressed up as science.
Herbivores sometimes eat meat, carnivores eat plants from time to time.
Humans are in the unique position to not only be aware of the suffering that killing causes but have the means to avoid it and therefore have a moral obligation to at least minimise it.
Science is at a fundamental level going to be anthropocentric.
true but the point of science is to at least try to be as objective as possible
It certainly likes to pretend that.
Not really. It doesn't work like that. Of course science is gonna be anthropocentric, we're humans and we're doing human science. Why would we waste as much time thinking about the behavioral science and social structures of groundhogs as we do for humans?
Because science is the study of reality and groundhogs are a part of that reality.
A lot of amazing shit has been discovered from scientists 'wasting time' on things unlikely to centre around humans.
So? Science is not just "study of reality". Science is systematic study of interesting or useful parts of reality. If scientists spent as much time studying animal behavior, social structures and physiology as they did for humans we'd be fucked now. Studying all aspects of reality is literally impossible, shit's just too wealthy.
You can stumble upon something amazing while fooling around but if you mainly just fool around you'll find 3 amazing things and nothing else.
lol no it isn't.
Are you kidding? We spend a fuck ton of time studying animal behaviour, social structures and psychology and actually found out more about our own by doing this.
I'll tell you what would really fuck us over, only studying a narrow part of our existence. We are products of a very complex environment and almost every part of it impacts us in some way.
Yes, it is. Scientists don't study the optimal physiological features for spitting out watermelon seeds as far as possible.
Do we spend as much time studying that as we do studying animal behavior, social structures and physiology? Do I have to show you the budgets for the respective fields???
lol you'd be surprised at some of the weird stuff people study.
I was saying that everything is studied and all fields contribute to each other in unlikely ways. I don't give a shit what studies our capitalist society prioritises for profit. I'm talking about what science finds important, not the general public. To the scientific community, It's all interesting and it's all worth studying.
People do study some weird stuff. But they don't get many citations, and they don't get funding if it's something no one else cares about.
It's not lol I'm not sure what you think the scientific community is. Ideally everything would be studied but there's not an infinite amount of time or resources to do that. If we didn't live under capitalism we could allocate resources better, but again, some areas of study wouldn't get as much attention because it's just a fact that you have to be mindful of where you allocate your resources.
I don't know what you think the scientific community is. It must be different to the ones I've experienced lol. It's not that big a deal to me anyway tbh so lets just forget about it. I'm sleepy.
Time zones are a fuck.
The purpose of a food chain is to understand how energy circulates between animals. That some cat ate a plant once and some cow ate part of a corpse doesn't change what it is. I don't understand denying the food chain, it's weird.
Because it doesn't accurately describe what's happening and overly simplifies things.
It causes the same kind of misinterpretations that 'survival of the fittest' does.
It doesn't "overly" simplify things, but it does simplify things because that's the point of pretty much any model. Maybe somehow it made you think that herbivores will never ever eat meat for any reason or carnivores will never ever eat plant matter for any reason, but that is your misinterpretation, it's not the fault of the model which accurately demonstrates the main relations.
That's the problem, it isn't accurate.
How is it not accurate lmao do you agree with the weirdo op who seems to think meat is a significant component of a cow's diet?
Do you think 'herbivore eats nothing but plants' is accurate and a useful tool when herbivores don't, in fact, eat only plants?
"Herbivore eats nothing but plants" is not something the food chain model says about herbivores. The food chain model is about how energy is macroscopically transferred from one level to the other.
Herbivores are called herbivores because they are adapted to eating plants and by far the bulk of their diet is, well, plants. If a cow opportunistically eats a dead bird or something or if a dog eats a plant, that's not "haha food chain OWNED" because it's not important macroscopically. This the "men experience reverse sexism" of biology.
It really isn't and I think you're reading to far into what I'm trying to say. Lol. I'm not trying to say that cows aren't herbivores or adapted to eat mostly plants. I'm just saying it's more complex then the model implies. Thats all.
That's true for pretty much every scientific model ever, because it's pretty much impossible to discuss something in its full complexity at all times. If plants in one ecosystem start dying, the entire ecosystem is fucked. If herbivores start dying en masse, the carnivores are fucked because while maybe some of them can eat some grass every now and then, they can't survive on that. That's what the food chain tells you. Energy transfer happens through levels and if one breaks then everyone above is fucked.
Yeah, I'll give you that. I guess I just hate things that skimp on the details because the whole, complex picture can be so damn interesting sometimes.
I'm not trying to defend the op btw. I have no idea what they're trying to say. If they're shitting on vegans though they can fuck off.
I think it's a weird attempt to say "cows would eat you so why do you like them lol". I don't really understand.