Obviously there’s cultures, religions, diets, and personal ideas, but why is it that meat that is available comes from herbivores? Any differences in nutritional quality?
It’s about energy. It takes a lot of energy to allow one animal to grow up.
Depending on the animal, if you want 1 kg of meat you have to grow something like 10 kg or hay (or whatever animal food).
But that’s for herbivores, if you want 1 kg of carnivore meat you first need 10 kg of herbivore meat to feed your carnivore, and suddenly you need 100 kg of hay for your 1 kg of meat.
On top of that harmful chemicals tend to concentrate when you do several steps in the food pyramid like this. It’s part of the reason why there’s so much heavy metal in certain types of fishes.
It’s because it’s pretty counter-intuitive. If one herbivore needs an acre to live and eat on, then a carnivore essentially needs one acre for every meal it has.
Livestock already uses the most land-per-calorie, iirc. Not to mention that carnivores were never really tamed without becoming companions. Cows are big and can be kill people, especially on accident, but they’re significantly more tamable than any carnivore that’s bigger than a dog. Essentially the only tamed animals like dogs and cats were tamed for their ability to hunt mice, kill rats, or be cheap guard labor for silos or chicken pens essentially.
So, we technically could, but it’s financially stupid, and predators have essentially been dangerous enough to only handle the smaller ones. So something like a tiger, lion, or mountain lion could just kill their handler once hormones kick in.
It’s the energy pyramid. For the amount of energy input, you get more energy out of herbivores than carnivores. One biome we do eat a lot of carnivores is the ocean. Many of the more popular fish, especially tuna and salmon are carnivores, with some tuna species even being apex predators. The big difference here is habitat size.
Imagine how much is would cost to feed a carnivore meat to get meat. Why not just feed grass or corn or whatever for meat, cuts out the expense and the middle ‘man’.
Also a lot of carnivores are naturally more ‘fiesty’ animals, they have to be to hunt. Imagine trying to farms lions for meat vs a cow 😂
That’s funny.
Cattle will actually eat meat. It was common to feed cattle scraps to cattle for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Mad cow disease was unheard of, though.
Pigs will eat anything, even other pigs. That’s why they often snip off their tails and ears. Other pigs will eat them. And when the blood starts flowing the cannibalism starts.
Chickens, like all birds, love meat. Try it. Feed some birds meat instead of bread. Just don’t be surprised when you then toss bread, and then they ignore it! Birds are smarter than some humans in that respect. Turkeys are similar. Both are known for frenzied cannibalism, which steps are taken to curtail that.
Pretty much all animals will eat meat, given the opportunity.
We eat a lot of omnivores that we choose to feed grain to instead of a mixed diet. Pigs, birds, and fish all will opt for bugs or small living things when given the chance. Often animals with a more varied diet have more nutrients and taste better, hence why “free range” is something often sought after. We might not be eating wolves and big cats, but we eat plenty of smaller predatory animals that are also happy to eat plants and grains if they are offered or available.