The redneck strike again.

[Confused Ape]

Are we STILL playing prod the looney?

I'm interested in the Ananda Marga philosophy because I've always been interested in comparative religion and belief systems etc. I'm trying to have a discussion about it with him. I find his writing style very difficult to follow but he explained that English isn't his native language.

I don't think he's a loony because he's a vegetarian because I'm a vegetarian myself. Where I disagree with him is about humans not being omnivores.

The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees

In the early 1960's, when Dr. Jane Goodall began her now famous study of the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park, Tanzania, it was thought that chimpanzees were strictly vegetarian. In fact, when Goodall first reported this behavior, many people were skeptical and claimed that meat was not a natural part of the chimpanzee diet. Today, hunting by chimpanzees at Gombe has been well documented (Teleki 1973; Goodall 1986), and hunting has also been observed at most other sites in Africa where chimpanzees have been studied, including Mahale Mountains National Park (Uehara et al. 1992) (also in Tanzania) and Tai National Park in Ivory Coast in West Africa (Boesch and Boesch 1989). At Gombe, we now know that chimpanzees may kill and eat more than 150 small and medium sized animals such as monkeys, wild pigs and small antelopes each year.

Did early hominids hunt and eat meat in a pattern similar to one described above for wild chimpanzees ? It is quite probable that they did. Recent discoveries in Ethiopia by Tim White, Gen Suwa and Berhane Asfaw of the fossil remains of very early autralopithecines (Australopithecus ramidus) show that 4.4 million yearolobus monkeys and small antelope. A. ramidus was different from chimpanzees in two prominent anatomical features: they had much smaller canine teeth, and a lower body adapted for walking on the ground rather than swinging though trees.

Large canine teeth are not necessarily important for carnivory; chimpanzees do not use their canine teeth to capture adult colobus; rather, they grab the prey and flail it to death on the ground or against a tree limb.

When Sarkar was alive, the commonly accepted knowledge of the day was that chimps and all other apes are strictly vegetarian. It's now been discovered that they aren't - even gorillas eat insects. Sarkar died in 1990 and he was a philosopher, not an archaeologist or a primatologist who spent decades studying the behaviour of wild chimpanzees.

What I do find baffling is why so many 21st Century vegans and vegetarians insist that humans aren't omnivores in order to justify their choice of diet. After all, there are other vegans and vegetarians who accept that humans are omnivores but we still choose not to eat meat.