On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 09:31:32 +0000, Chris Hogg wrote:

On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 08:35:37 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

On 29/10/2020 21:54, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 29/10/2020 18:23, T i m wrote:
And 'as hunters' we aren't very well equipped are we? We can't easily
digest raw meat and we certainly can't easily consume fur, feathers,
skin or bone and we can't catch much without traps or tools. So we
aren't 'natural' carnivore / hunters (like most other obligate
carnivores are) but we might be gatherers in that we could get the
stuff you could forage for (like shellfish) or be opportunist re
finding the remains of other animal kills when we learned how to cook
meat.

Our closest relatives the Bonobos and Chimpanzees have raw meat in their
diets.

Andy
and in fact we can easily digest raw meat, eggs and fish.
The piles of feathers on my lawn show that other carnivores do not eat
feathers either, and cat fur balls show they can digest fur, either

In short T i m is, as usual, constructing a fairy story to suit his
prejudices.

'cat fur balls show they *can't* digest fur'. There, corrected it for
you.

It's very easy to cite example of things that don't fit a particular
statement when the statement is generally true. A dog (for example)
*can* eat a whole rabbit, all of it and simply pass the bits it can't
digest in time through.

Just because the animals that are killing things and leaving some of
their remains on TNP's lawn goes no way to contradict my statement.

We can probably digest bone, given time.

Except that time isn't under our control is it so in general we can't.
We can't because our digestive systems aren't strong enough to do so,
unlike obligate carnivores and opportunist meat eating omnivores like
dogs.

Kodak used to make the
gelatin for their photographic plates etc. by digesting cattle bone
chips in fairly dilute HCl, about pH 3.5 IIRC, when the calcium
phosphate dissolves leaving rubbery lumps of gelatin that are filtered
off, and the calcium phosphate re-precipitated by raising the pH of
the filtrate.

Yum. ;-)

Whether that process is still used, I don't know; I
visited a plant somewhere in the Eastern US many years ago and saw it,
but that plant is closed now.

For good reason by the sound of it. ;-)

Stomach acid is significantly stronger than used there, although the
process took several days, and I doubt bone would remain in your
stomach for long enough unless it was very finely ground, but in
principle it could happen.

Sure ... but doesn't, because we *certainly aren't* obligate
carnivores and aren't even equipped to catch, dispatch, butcher and
consume most meats without the aid of tools (that aren't part of our
bodies as they are with those animals that are able to consume raw
meat, like claws and *real* canine teeth and short but strong
digestive systems[1]).

Cheers, T i m

[1] Designed to be short to avoid the meat 'going off' in the
digestive system, makes sense given many predator animals often won't
eat very dead prey (unless they are very hungry), unless it's obvious
that it's a recent kill of another predator or accident.

p.s. I saw a thing on TV the other day where a lizard, about to be
predated by a snake, flipped itself on its back and pretended it was
dead and the snake slithered on past. ;-)