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http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html The blog of a born again vegan who insists humans are "naturally" vegan.  I will quote him in italics.

 

Looking at the evidence fairly

The meat-eating reader already has half a dozen objections to this before s/he's even read the rest of the article, and I will address those objections specifically, but first let me address them generally: It's human nature to want to feel that what we're doing is right, proper, and logical. When we're confronted with something that suggests that our long-held belief might actually be wrong, it's uncomfortable. We can either consider the new evidence fairly, adding to the discomfort about our possible error, or we can reject that premise without truly considering it, which allows us to sidestep any uncomfortable feelings.  And we do this by searching our minds for any possible arguments for why the challenge must be wrong, to justify our current beliefs. This practice is so common psychologists have a name for it: cognitive dissonance.

 

Response:  And you can switch the words "meat eater" for "Weed eater" and get exactly the same outcome. Vegtards will go into denial and ignore the fact that agriculture kills billions of animals, and that most plants are toxic, but animal flesh is natural and immediately digestible.

  

In graphical form, it goes like this:

Evidence that humans' anatomy favors a plant-based diet

Evidence to the contrary

 

Response:  Funny. He got the two bars backward.  I'm still waiting for him to provide the bounteous list of edible plants our ancestors consumed during the Glacial Maximum in Asia in December.  He hasn't, and he can't, because there wasn't.   You ate food (meat), or died.

The first thing the USAF teaches in survival school is, "You can always eat bugs or animals."  It's not even worth the time to learn which plants are edible, beyond a few very obvious ones.

  

He said: [Meat eater argument] "Humans have always eaten meat."

 

No, we haven't, and I'll provide evidence for that shortly.  More importantly, early humans, like modern humans, could have simply acted outside of instinct, and made interesting dietary choices contrary to their anatomy.  We really have to look at our digestive system to get the best evidence for what we're optimized for eating, not what some humans chose to eat.  Otherwise, thousands of years from now anthropologists might conclude that eating McDonald's is natural because humans circa 2012 used to eat a lot of it.

Also, of early humans who did eat meat, they might have eaten it as sparingly as modern chimps do.

 

Response:  Indeed. Effectively 100% of animals are edible, and effectively 100% of plants are not (we can eat a tiny fraction of a percent of weeds.  There is only a tiny fraction of percent of animals that are toxic).  Digestive system proves we are carnivores.  Thousands of years from now, anthropologists might conclude that eating plants is natural because humans circa 2012 ate a lot of them.

And what "Some" humans choose to eat? Every hunter gatherer society we know of (notice that first word), from the Inuit to the San and !Kung Bushmen, to the natives of the tropical Amazon jungle, to the proto-Europeans, to the plains Indians, eats or ate meat. Every. Single. One.

Because statistically, all animals are edible, and almost no plants are. Meat also provides much higher nutritional density, and can be preserved easily.  And, meat is available all year round.

What would cause people to act "out of [their] instinct"? The unavailability of meat (our natural food).  When food was not available, we ate weeds.

Really, I've done this experiment. Even if you know which plants are edible, A: It's a bitch of a time gathering enough for a meal, 2) they are very seasonal with short shelf lives, and III] they taste like grass.  They're revolting.  Most people make vegetables palatable by cooking them with oil and salt.

Seriously, you want me to believe people picked up rocks and spears and hunted down animals that would gore, stomp or bite back because it was an "interesting dietary choice"?

And "Might have"?  What kind of argument is that? Especially when we have proof that most primitive peoples seek meat first, even if they have other options, and during most of the Paleolithic we were more carnivorous than wolves.

And of course, all those cave paintings that show people throwing spears at cabbages.  Definitely vegetarians.

Argument fails of logic and rhetoric.

 

He says: [meat eater argument] "We're capable of eating meat, therefore we're omnivores. Case closed."

Okay, fine, then cats are omnivores, too. ("Case closed.")  Commercial cat foods, both wet and dry, contain things like rice, corn, and wheat.  In fact, some people feed their cats a pure vegan diet with no meat at all.

But of course, cats are true carnivores.  We don't call them omnivores just because they'll eat things contrary to what nature intended.  That would be silly.  No one makes that argument for cats.  But they make it for humans, enthusiastically.  However, they can't have it both ways: Either we don't assume humans are omnivores just because we can eat meat, or we apply the same standard to other animals and conclude that cats are omnivores, too.  Which is it?

 

Response: Cats can digest almost no vegetables. We can digest a very few vegetables, and, here's the important part:  We've selectively bred and engineered those plants to be more edible, or edible at all.  There's no breeding necessary to make a bovine or ungulate edible.

And some people feed their children a pure vegan diet. You know what happens?

 https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1GIWA_enUS625US625&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=baby%20died%20vegan%20diet

The children DIE.  They even sometimes die because the mother insists on being a vegtard and can't provide enough nutrition for the baby.

You know what you've never heard of happening and never will? An Inuit baby dying because his parents fed him too much whale and caribou, and not enough lichen and grass seed.

We're carnivores.

 

He says: [people complain] "You're not a credible source."

You don't have to believe me, you can look at the evidence I cite.  My critics talk as though I claim this article to be original research, but really, I'm just reporting on what the science says, citing credible sources along the way.

 

Response:  No, it's original speculation, unsupported by fact, citing lots of out of context and fringe statements that are not credible sources.  To find one, you'd have to first know what one was.

 

He says: [meat eater argument] "Vitamin B12. End of story."

I'm not joking when I tack on "End of story" to the sample counter-arguments. People actually make them that way, literally.  Here again, they think one point invalidates all other evidence.  Amazing.

The argument here is that since B12 isn't found in plant foods and modern vegans must supplement, a vegan diet can't be natural.  Here's what's wrong with that argument:

1.B12 isn't made by animals, it's made by bacteria. (source)  It's found in animal foods because they're a hotbed of bacterial activity. It's also found in feces of most species.  Historically it was easier for vegans to get B12 because their environment was so dirty. Plants pulled from the ground and not washed scrupulously could have bacterial contamination, and thus B12. (source)

2.B12 is also found in lakes, before the water is sanitized. (source)

3.Remember that "plant-eaters" aren't exclusively plant-eaters; they eat some small amounts of non-plant foods.  For example, of the 1-5% of chimps' diets that aren't plants, most is generally termites, which happen to be loaded with B12. (source)

4.We saw that fecal matter contaminating the environment can provide B12.  But not taking any chances, many plant-eating animals actually eat their own feces.  Prehistoric humans might have done the same. (Human feces is loaded with B12.) (source)

5.Because the ability to absorb B12 decreases with age, the Food and Nutrition board says that all people over 50 should eat B12-fortified food or take B12 supplements, not just vegans. (source)

 

Response:  Well, I wonder how much shit this guy eats to get his B12.  This almost sounds like a TMI about his personal fetishes.

But, using his logic--just because we CAN get B12 from eating shit, doesn't mean we SHOULD. And again:  "Might have."  No evidence provided for his coprophilic fetish.  Nor is it common--most grazers avoid contaminated grass. Browsers don't risk it.  Few carnivores do it.  There's no evidence of any healthy human doing so. Shit smells like shit for a reason.

I'm starting to think this guy is fucking insane.

 

He said:

So the best evidence isn't historical diets, best evidence is our own bodies.  If we'd really been eating a lot of meat for a long time, that would be reflected in our anatomy, but it's not. 

 

Response:  Like the fact that almost 100% of animals are edible and digestible and almost 100% of plants are not? That anatomy?

My original offer was to send him 100 unlabeled plants. Using his natural senses, he should determine which ones were edible, which not, and which were toxic.

 

He said:

Then there's this research:

Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology, [spoke at] the American Association for the Advancement of the Science's Annual Meeting....[E]arly man was not an aggressive killer, Sussman argues. He poses a new theory, based on the fossil record and living primate species, that primates have been prey for millions of years, a fact that greatly influenced the evolution of early man.

"Our intelligence, cooperation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator," says Sussman.... The idea of "Man the Hunter" is the generally accepted paradigm of human evolution, says Sussman, "It developed from a basic Judeo-Christian ideology of man being inherently evil, aggressive and a natural killer. In fact, when you really examine the fossil and living non-human primate evidence, that is just not the case."

 

Sussman's research is based on studying the fossil evidence dating back nearly seven million years. "Most theories on Man the Hunter fail to incorporate this key fossil evidence," Sussman says. "We wanted evidence, not just theory. We thoroughly examined literature available on the skulls, bones, footprints and on environmental evidence, both of our hominid ancestors and the predators that coexisted with them." ...

But what Sussman and Hart discovered is that Australopithecus afarensis was not dentally pre-adapted to eat meat. "It didn't have the sharp shearing blades necessary to retain and cut such foods," Sussman says. "These early humans simply couldn't eat meat. If they couldn't eat meat, why would they hunt?"

It was not possible for early humans to consume a large amount of meat until fire was controlled and cooking was possible. Sussman points out that the first tools didn't appear until two million years ago. And there wasn't good evidence of fire until after 800,000 years ago.

 

Response:  "Evil"?  The researcher seems to have a bias for his hypothesis.  Why is killing inherently evil, if it advances your genetic survival?  Sounds like he's the one with Christian guilt.  And his hypothesis (not theory) is unsupported by evidence. We have cutting tools going back three and a half million years. They weren't used for peeling fruit. They were used for breaking bones.  We almost certainly used unworked rocks and sticks before that.

Also, Australopothecines are another species.  That's like looking at pandas and concluding grizzly bears naturally eat maple leaves, but have made an "interesting choice" to seek out salmon and deer. 

But, Australopithecines DID have tools and DID eat meat. 3.4 million years ago.

And it's perfectly possible to eat raw meat without "Shearing tools."

So, the idiot cites another idiot, who, despite an advanced degree, isn't aware of a lot of basic facts.  But I bet his vegetarian buddies love him. This is like "Professor" Bellesiles, who insisted colonial Americans didn't have weapons and somehow won a revolution with harsh letters of protest.

Also, 800K years ago predates modern Homo Sapiens. So, once again, he's saying that some other species MIGHT have been a vegetarian because it hadn't developed the brains to bang the rocks together. I think the professor isn't even clear on the difference between tool using omnivorous Australopithecenes and weed-munching ape Paranthropus boisei.

They also lived in a very tropical environment where they MIGHT have found edible plants all year, but WOULD find animals all year, especially kills made by bigger predators. And of course, P Boisei effectlively was a panda, sitting in the weeds munching grass stalks.  Try that. You'll starve in a week. It had a different metabolism because it was a different species.

He said: In any event, the idea that our ancestors might have decided to mimic other animals and eat more meat isn't a particularly compelling argument that it's natural for us to do so.  Given that humans act outside of instinct, looking at historical behavior isn't as convincing as looking at anatomy and health effects—as we'll do in a moment.

 

Response:  In any event, that certain people have DECIDED to mimic other animals and eat weeds isn't a particularly compelling argument that it's natural for us…

When most animals are edible and most plants are not.

Note again, the "might" word.  His entire site is "we MIGHT not be carnivores, we MIGHT have eaten plants, we MIGHT have eaten feces, we MIGHT…."

We eat meat.  We're a carnivore. Sadly, we live in a world where moral and genetic defectives (look at his picture) have the CHOICE to eat weeds and convince themselves they're somehow more moral and healthy…if they can buy enough supplements and highly processed plants to gain the nutrition they'd get from eating a cow.

From another page on his site:

As to this:
Saying we're omnivores because we're capable of eating meat is just silly. 
 
Incorrect. Again:  Almost EVERY animal is edible, the exception being some ugly fish and ugly reptiles we had no access to until quite recently.
Almost EVERY plant is either non-edible or toxic, and we have no sensory way to tell which is which, how are we possibly "naturally" herbivorous?  Using his own rhetoric, just because we CAN eat (a fraction of a percentage of) plants, doesn't mean we should.
 
Again, I will send him 100 unlabeled plants or plant parts.  He can prepare and eat the ones you believe are edible.  We'll see how well he does.
 
In fact, the reverse is true for all humans--if they have the enzymes for starch digestion, they still can't effect full processing. We CAN eat starch, but it's not natural.  It also destroys our metabolism in other than trace amounts.  Feed a Bushman or Inuit wheat and they get very ill.
 
He lists:
 
Brown Rice                  
Tomatoes                  
Potatoes                  
Green Peppers                  
Corn                   
Lettuce (iceberg)                   
Celery                   
Cucumbers                   
Oats                   
Carrots                   
Broccoli                  
Pinto Beans                  
 
 
Did you notice that NONE of those edible plants existed in their present form 10K years ago? Every single one is a cultivar.  The grains are seasonal and require agriculture to store in any usable quantity.  Half of them are New World.  Most require extensive processing. They are not "natural" foods. Hell, broccoli is less than 3000 years old, and you'd need 3.5 lbs a day to get enough protein, and you'd still be short some essential amino acids. (He claims this is a myth. That's yet another part of his site where you can point, laugh, and get something strong to drink.)
 
And, all of them require killing animals in the agricultural production process, so any moralizing argument is ridiculous.

 

Our early ancestors from at least four million years ago were almost exclusively vegetarian. 
 
So, completely different species were vegetarian?  And? A few million years before that, you find carnivorous chickens.

I can't think of any reason to read more. His "compelling" arguments are complete bullshit, he's scientifically illiterate, he's cherry-picking out of context soundbites and his arguments devolve to "might have."

Look, if you like weeds and want to eat them, knock yourself out.  I actually like broccoli and tomatoes, I love cucumber, and onions and garlic are a staple here.  But beans, besides being dreadfully unhealthy, taste like cardboard.

But don't pretend to be especially moral or enlightened from your choice of diet.  And don't try to persuade people that's a post-agricultural revolution LUXURY that a few people with defective senses can afford to eat is "natural."  

A weed-based diet requires about 12X the volume than meat (he even admits, offhandedly, that one has to eat "enough" weeds to get protein, which he says you don't really need to survive. Again, look at his picture.  He's certainly proof of that, but I wouldn't brag about it), and if you allow for the shorter shelf life, it works out to about 15X.  Then, grains especially require lots of arable acreage, lots of water, generate a lot of methane (Rice alone is about 1/3 of human methane production, equalling all meat production by itself), and all the animals who had that as a habitat are killed, or displaced and killed.  There's nothing green about it.

And I have to go kill some animals directly, like a man, not indirectly and passive-aggressively, like a whiny bitch, because they're delicious and nutritious.  

ADDENDUM:  Tard's response to my request for a list of edible plants available in the Paleolithic in winter, and in regard to the MODERN vegetables he listed was, "Sorry, you lose. Better luck next time."

In other words, he's unable to list said plants, which I predicted, because they didn't exist. 

But he's never wanted a debate. He wants to feel special and enlightened.

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With thanks to my fans for many additions:

A man is drowning 50 feet from shore.
 
A Republican throws a 25 foot rope and tells the man to swim to it.
 
A Democrat throws a 50 foot rope, then drops his end and goes off to help someone else.
 
A Libertarian tells the man he'll throw a rope for $20.
 
A Socialist complains that the government should have rope throwers stationed around the lake against such an emergency, and America is a third world country for not providing this service.
 
A Green laments that the man will die and deserves it since he's polluting the water.  Then the Green will demand the lake be off limits so further drownings don't hurt aquatic animals.
 
The EPA will agree with the Greens and fine the man's family, then declare the lake a wetland and refuse to allow removal of anything, including his remains.
 
A Wahhabist will wait to find out the man's national origin and religion before either cheering his death, or blaming America for failing to save drowning Muslims.
 
If the man is black, Al Sharpton will fake a bunch of statistics showing blacks are more likely to drown and this is proof of white dominance and repression.
 
A white nationalist will wait to see if the man can get out alone. If not, he'll claim the man's death is due to inferior genes from other races weakening him.
 
A feminist will cheer that a future rape has been prevented.
 
A CEO will demand to know why the man wasn't at work and fire him posthumously.
 
His insurance company will insist it was a self-inflicted injury and not covered.
 
A marijuana activist will insist that if the man had smoked a couple of joints, he wouldn't have been in the lake and would have been fine. Also, pot cures drowning and is better than any medication the government medical conspiracy has devised.
 
A homeopath will grab a tube of the water, dilute it 1:10,000 and sell it as a cure for drowning.
 
The conspiracy groups will insist the man was killed by the Jewish Banker/Royal Family/FEMA/Bush-0bama conspiracy to keep him from talking.
 
Greenpeace will insist the man has "Water privilege" and he should be grateful to live in a nation where it's possible to drown.
 
Hashatag activists will share photos of the incident 6 miliion times with #Icantbreathewater and #yesallponds to draw attention to his plight.
 
Livestreamers and Youtubers will take video of him drowning, with selfie content to prove they were present.  20% will make duckfaces.
 
Crowdsourcers will each send in 4" of some sort of twine, string or rope, and wonder why it wasn't successful with a total of 300 feet.
 
Brian Williams will claim to have been present, under fire, while hauling the man in himself.
 
Dan Rather will insist that Brian Williams' reports are "fake, but accurate."
 
Fox News and Breitbart will report that 0bama's immigration policies led to the man drowning due to the resources being used by illegals.
 
A Former Green Beret Seal Marine will explain the proper way to avoid drowning and offer to sell the video for $24.95
 
Anti-Vaxxers wil claim the man was in shock induced by the combination of cold water on a metabolism weakened by the MMR vaccine, and not immunizing your kids will let them develop natural immunity to drowning.

The local police will claim they suspected him of cooking meth, which is why they didn't try to save him but did shoot his dog, and congratulate themselves on going home safe at the end of the shift.
 
The Bloc Quebecois and La Raza, supported by Occupy, will demand to know why the lake didn't have multilingual warning signs.

Bernie Sanders will Facebook meme that if the man had been at a job paying a $15/hr living wage, he wouldn't have been at the park drowning.
 
If the man is a cismale heteronormative straight white Christian male, SJWs will complain about the attention paid to him when thousands of POCGLBTQXYZs drown every day without media coverage.
 
An atheist will claim the man's drowning proved the non-existence of a loving god.
 
NPR will do a lengthy story interviewing a Georgetown professor about drowning in great works of literature.
 
Some asshole will insist it's 15.4 meters and Americans should standardize on 15 meters, not 50 feet.
 
History Channel 2 will insist that aliens were behind the drowning.
 
MSNBC will insist Republican obstructionism made it impossible for lifeguards to be present, but no one will watch the show anyway.
 
Eventually some decent person who will strip off, dive in and rescue the guy. Once ashore, they'll find their wallet, watch, and cellphone stolen, and get arrested for indecent exposure.  Then the state will sue them for not being licensed for water rescue.
 
His Congressman will introduce "The Safe Parks and Ponds Act" which will cost $5 billion, result in three agencies writing five different safety standards that are resolved after 7 lawsuits reach the Federal courts, but the rider ban on home-farming of turnips will remain.
 
A Christian homeschooler will blame secular public education, and make their children study the story of Noah's Ark.

China would issue a statement that the drowned man was violating waters that were their traditional maritime territory.

North Korea issues a statement condemning the drowning as a Capitalist propaganda ploy and claims that every year, a thousand thousand North Koreans drown far more skillfully.

ADDED:

The Charlie Hedbo magazine will print an issue mocking the drowned man in the front page.

Putin would jump into the lake, pose shirtless for pictures, then walk out and order his troops to invade Ukraine.

Hillary would deny that there was such a lake, until confronted about the physical existence of said lake, and then say that drowning in lakes was legal years ago.

Trump would say that there is a drowning man in a lake, and yes, there are a lot of lakes, and let me tell you, the people have spoken and said that we have great lakes, and all over the place, those lakes are the greatest lakes in all of the, let me tell you, everyone has said that they're the best, unlike those people, you know which people, who don't like lakes and are always, of course, you know that we're going to make America great again!

Cheney would shoot the drowning man with a shotgun, and then blame the man for entering a lake during duck hunting season.

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My daughter's boyfriend's dog Halo is at the house for a few days due to some weather issues.  She's a Jack Russell/Chihuahua mix, small and lithe.

The first day over, he put her in the garage to keep her away from the cats and the allergic person (me). He took a nap before work.

A couple of hours later, she scratched at the garage door, and I let her in. He hadn't turned the lights on, and I expect she was bored.

She trotted down the hall, came back to the kitchen, and spoke to me in body language.

"Hello.  I can't find my boy."

I pointed down the hall and said, "First door on the left."  She raised haunches and lowered her head, "Thank you," and sure enough, she went right there, walked into the room, and looked up to see him sleeping on the bed.

"Yes, I see my boy.  But this is your house."

I said, "Yes, you can get on the bed," and pointed.

Again the thank you nod, and she jumped up and curled up at his side. She didn't move for four hours, and leaves the cats completely alone. She'll stay in whichever room she's told to stay in, patiently awaiting human companionship or instruction.

You can tell a lot about a man by his dog.

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Actually, I have been, but was still updating software.

  1. When Religion Goes Hilariously Wrong and Right At the Same Time
  2. Debit Your Privilege!

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