Many of the animals which from part of our diet are herbivores rather then carnivores! Dose anyone know why???

Answer 1

Carnivores always eat mostly herbivores, because there are more of them. The prey species has to outnumber the predator species many times, in order to keep a healthy balance. If you wanted to raise cats to eat, you would have to raise herbivores for the cats to eat. It's more practical to eat the herbivores and keep the cats as pest exterminators and pets.

Answer 2

Herbivores are much easier, safer and economical to breed in captivity. You can simply allow them to wander and graze. If you wanted to breed carnivores for consumption, you would be forced stuck with raising other animals, slaughtering them and then feeding them to the carnivores. If you had the carnivores you are raising hung and kill the other animals that they are eating they would be extremely dangerous and difficult to handle. The short answer is that it would require much more work and money to raise a carnivore from birth to dinnerplate verse raising an herbivore which can just feed off the land.

Answer 3

The meat of herbivores tends to be more tender, fatty (therefore juicy), and has a better taste. It also provides nutients not found in quantity in carnivore meat (the same reason almost all carnivores eat herbivores).

It is also much easier to hunt and kill (for primative man) herbivores than carnivores (would you ruther hunt down a lion or a buffalo?).

Answer 4

There are much more Herbivores then Carnivores. As you move up the food chain the #'s of organisms decrease.

Answer 5

Also, the further you move up the food chain, the less energy you obtain by eating a certain organism. For example, a plant obtains energy from the sun, and a herbivore eats that plant. That herbivore only gets a portion of the energy that the plant originally produced (10 % I believe). The next organism that eats the herbivore only gets a fraction of the energy that it obtained from eating the plant, and so on. Because energy transformations are inefficient, it makes sense to pick something lower on the food chain to eat.

Answer 6

It's cheaper because in order to raise carnivores, you ALSO have to raise herbivores so the carnivores have something to eat. They're higher up the "energy pyramid" in ecology.

Herbivores also tend to live in bigger groups (herds, flocks) than carnivores (smaller packs, or solitary) so it's easy and efficient to raise a lot of them together.

E.g. fish - salmon are carnivores but tilapia are omnivores that mostly eat plants. That's one reason salmon is more expensive.

Answer 7

Could it be that they are slow moving?
Carnivores need to be fast movers to catch their prey,so perhaps nature has evolved the slower ones into herbivores or they would have starved to extinction.
Then because of their lack of speed,humans are able to catch,kill and eat them?

Answer 8

Population size. The number of herbavores greatly outnumbers carnivores, which is essential if both are to survive. Too few herbavores and both the herbavores and carnivores will die off.

Answer 9

There are more herbivores and they are more docile and have been bred for meat.

Also some carnivore meat is dangerous (even when dead) eating a lion's liver can kill you with vitamin A poisoning.

Answer 10

Carnivores have a pretty nasty taste. They not only absorb toxins from their environment, but also from the animals they eat.